Strange, I've Seen That Face Before

Normal sleeping hours were never usually my strong point, and after four days here, it's been more erratic than normal. Maybe it's the loud clanging of tin bowls down the street from me at six in the morning, but I've been getting an average of about three and a half hours of sleep a night. I'm not Donald Trump or Martha Stewart, so that's just not going to do. A couple of days ago I went to get some pho, then next door to get some tea, where I was slurring my words, asking for hot che (a dessert) instead of hot tra (tea). The girl at the counter asked me if I meant tra, knowing full well that I did, as the name of the cafe was 'Tra'. She said it cost 17,000 dongs, wherein I gave her a 100,000 dong bill and was awaiting my change. It was actually a 10,000 dong bill in my hands, so she just looked at me, waiting for me to catch my gaffe. She probably waited a lot longer than she had wanted to, because she ended up correcting me.


"Go have a seat, I'll give you the tea at your table," the clerk explained to me.


About half the Vietnamese cafes here are outdoor affairs, where you drink on those little plastic chairs you find at Asian Flea Markets, and the other half are typical cafes we'd see in the West. I purposely chose a Western style cafe because I wanted the coziness and comfort of the indoors, as it was very nippy and in the low 50's. I found my table next to the entrance door, and by the time she came with my tea (a sad little cup with a Lipton brand teabag steeping amber colored bitterness), my head was leaned up against the wood paneling, eyes in a daze and the woodgrain forming an imprint on my cheeks.


I went back to the hotel for a nap.


That four hour nap I had was one of those incredible ones where you know you're having a nap all the while enjoying the physical benefits of napping. Meaning, I'm basically two people during this nap. One, I'm the person napping, and I don't know what in the world is going on other than sleep. The other person is this separate entity you become, this guardian angel of napping, where your sole duty is to watch over yourself sleeping, where you are awake just enough to revel in the fact that you are having the sleep of ages. If that wasn't articulated in a satisfactory manner, I feel bad for you, as you've never had one of those naps and you must think you're the shit for owning the Miss Universe pageant.


One of the drawbacks of such decadence is major disorientation upon waking up. In the past, for me, I always woke up right at sunset, had the nastiest taste on my mouth, and most inconveniently, a Phil Collins song would find its way to my ears somehow, some way. Two days ago, it was already dark, I immediately chewed a piece of gum upon awakening, and Grace Jones was humming in my ears when I stepped out onto the streets, so things had improved from the past. Nevertheless, this night felt different from previous nights in Hanoi.

Northwest of Hoan Kiem Lake

Usually a popular photo taking location north of Hoan Kiem

At Non Son, a chain hat and moto-helmet store

Nguyen Thien Thuat, hub for street food

High ceilings at Pho Gia Truyen

The old gates of Cua o Quan Chuong

Couldn't tell what fruits these were

Knowing that I would be in Hanoi for a lot longer than my initial week here before Sapa, I am trying to keep a lot of its attractions and mysteries undone and unsolved until I get back for the longer haul. I know I'm going to miss the winter weather and I hope nights like these do not disappear along with it. Each little step you took were the streets whispering a story. Every which way you turned and everything in your line of sight was fit for a Christopher Doyle or Robby Muller-shot film. Coincidences would be the norm, not the exception.

As it was both cold and starting to drizzle heavily, I was thinking to myself some scotch would do. I had only been to a place for a drink the night before, had liked it, and wanted to go back. What can be nice about being in a new place is the lack of options floating inside your head - if you liked a place, why mess with a good thing? You go back. I'm walking up Ta Hien to get to Mao's Red Lounge, one of those bars that will always make it into Rough Guide and Lonely Planet as it attracts both locals and tourists equally. 

Mao's Red Lounge patrons can bring their own music! Obviously, there is a dark side to this. I heard Heart's "These Dreams", or whatever it's called, the first night I came here.

Unfortunately, there was not a single customer inside, and I didn't want to be that guy in the bar drinking alone, so I decided against going in. I continued walking north on Ta Hien to look for some of the other notable bars on the street. Alas, the Cheeky Quarter, Tet, and the Funky Monkey were also empty, so I walked back down south on Ta Hien to retrace my steps back from the way I came, since some prankster in the Hanoi Civic Planning Authority thought it would be funny to arbitrarily change the name of the streets every few blocks, making it very easy to get lost in the Old Quarter. Walking halfway between the Cheeky Quarter and Mao's Red Lounge, I notice a bright building, the only one painted white on the street, advertising Fresh Juices and Coffee at Low Low prices. Juice also sounded nice at the time, so I walked in.

Pansy

Calling itself Pansy, with unabashedly proud superlatives stickered to its windows, I thought this would be some Japanese inspired, super-clean, super-cutesy little boutique-y dessert establishment aimed at little kids. I stepped through its glass doors and saw a small huddle of teens around a table, hoping to catch a glance at what they were drinking in order to get the same for myself. They weren't drinking anything, so I looked for the front desk or main menu on the wall with the list of drinks. That was nowhere to be found. I stood there for a very long ten seconds before the oldest girl of the group, probably 18, came to me with a menu in hand.

"You wanted to order something?" she sincerely asked me.

"Juice?" I asked in English. 

In the less than a minute that I was in there, a few things were painfully obvious to me. First off, I was their first customer of the day. It was 7:45 pm. Second, I could have been the first customer since Pansy's inception. Now, I don't know when exactly their grand opening was, but there was absolutely nothing about Pansy that would suggest it was even a business. 

"Hey!" the head teenager screamed up the staircase to the right of entrance. "Hey! We got a customer here, he's going to come up!"

She smiled and pointed the way, handing me the menu as I made my way up.

"Ooh! Take off your shoes!" she asked of me after I was already halfway.

I walked back down to take off my shoes, embarrassed that I didn't notice the pile at the foot of the staircase. I felt more naked than I should have with only my socks on. I couldn't know what to expect what was upstairs with how professional things were downstairs. For all I knew, some fat slob watching Paris By Night could be clipping his toenails on one of those little pink plastic chairs, angry that I interrupted his nightly routine.

Before catching sight of what was going on upstairs, I banged my head on the low-hung ceiling above the staircase. It was hard enough to make me wince, and though I don't know if anyone actually saw me smash it, a huge gathering of teens, about eight of them, saw me grimacing as I made my entrance. They were playing cards around a small plastic table, all sitting Indian style, all looking at me in exactly the way you'd expect them to if some stranger interlopes on your nightly fun with a mean look on his face.

"Please, sit on the balcony," the head teen asked of me.

She didn't have to ask me twice. I am just about to be completely in the balcony when I take a closer look at these kids and notice that they look awfully familiar.  Just the day before, on Valentine's Day in KFC, a scenester-ish looking clique of girls, one with Paul McCartney hair circa Shea Stadium dyed lime green and about 4'6" tall, sat next to me giggling, making jokes, crunching on fried chicken. In fact, that entire group of girls, upon closer inspection, were all there, along with their respective boyfriends, slapping down the cards in defiant fashion as they razzed their opponents across the table. They saw me looking at them long enough to realize that I was the guy eating by himself at the fancily decorated KFC the day before. They looked at each other for a brief second, but wasted little time in going back to playing cards.

The empty seat next to me

I understand this story would be a lot more impressive if I had actually described these girls the day that I had initially seen them  in order to accentuate the fortuitous accident, but alas, you're just going to have to take my word for it. Hanoi is a city of 6 million + people, and here I have, by nothing short of a miraculous coincidence, stumbled upon their little social hall. 

I knew then I had hit the jackpot. Yes, my cousin Chinh showed me around the city that second day I was here, but he is 29 with a three year old boy and another girl on the way, so he wasn't a part of the youth culture anymore. Of course I often think about what my other self in Vietnam would be like had we not emigrated from here. I also think the existence of youth culture, no matter how derivative or insipid it may be, is indicative of a nation's vitality. If kids are allowed to be kids, then the adults are doing their job.

I settled myself out on the balcony, watching the kids through a slit of the gossamer thin purple curtains which obstructed my full view of the card game ensuing behind me. The balcony was carpeted with artificial turf you'd find on a miniature golf course, and despite the cold and misty night, the ground felt soft on my socks. I felt comfortable, like I was in the home of some friends from work for the first time, not exactly knowing all that much about them in the beginning, but having all of that change by the end of the night. 

I ordered a dragonfruit juice drink with the head teen out on the balcony, where she then closed the sliding glass door behind her. It was a pretty cold night, I would want to stay warm, too. One of the girls closest to the sliding door, with her back to me, closed the already mostly closed curtains a bit. Maybe this one wanted to symbolically keep herself warm from the outside.

View from the balcony

There was a lot of good people watching to do from the balcony looking down at Ta Hien. It was fun playing Guess the European from far away, where I would mentally hypothesize what nation the oncoming couple was from, only to find my answer when they got close enough to hear their conversation. That actually only worked for about half the people; the other half, I had no clue as to where the accent derived from. I kept peeking behind myself to see what the kids were doing, if they were talking about their first customer of all time, sitting outside all alone on the balcony. I could see one of the girl's hands splayed out in plain sight of my eyes- 3 Aces, a Queen, two 6's, a 3, and a 2. 8 cards. I didn't recognize the game they were playing. If I had, I would have asked to join in.

My juice came and it was definitely fresh, handmade, and pretty tasty. The head teen gave it to me by sliding open the door and sticking her hand out, not wanting to catch a cold, of course. And the kids inside, they just couldn't get the right amount of closure on that purple curtain, which was pretty sheer to begin with. They were constantly fiddling with it, as if they were vampires in reverse, wanting to keep out the darkness beyond the glass doors.

My juice was done, but I wasn't ready to leave. I ordered a Heineken, which, as in Europe, was way better than it tastes in the States. I watched the kids play cards through the inevitable slits in the curtains. Some would do celebratory dances that looked just like the ones I see my nieces and nephews do back at home. I heard them cuss, yet it sounded way scarier than any American teen could ever attempt in English. And I was watching them not give a damn about the old timer out on the balcony, all so oblivious to his curiosity on such an un-extraordinary night for them.

The face of a man dejected?

Beer done and contemplating another, I stopped myself as the thought occurred to me that I might actually be keeping one of these kids up past their bedtime by staying here too long, so I got up to go. I did want to try one more attempt at a connection with them before I left, but as I was walking down the stairs, I just couldn't think of anything. One of the kids at the far end of the room, I saw, at the corner of my eye, looked a lot like Stan Cullimore of The Housemartins, or Graham Coxon of Blur, or basically any boy with thick glasses and asymmetrical hair.

"Is there anywhere in Hanoi where I can hear some punk music?" I asked.

"Pung?" one of the boys responded, a friendly looking lad who would be considered the leader by way of his gregariousness.

"Yeah, punk music." I strummed a guitar as a way of assisting my definition. 

He nodded his head and looked around at his mates, who were now all staring at me, enraptured. I had their full attention, but none of them knew what pung music was.

"What about just live music, could you tell me where to go?" I asked, still strumming that guitar.

"Oh, nhac song? There aren't too many, but you can find some (sentence still spoken fully in Vietnamese)," he happily told me. Nhac song literally translates to 'living' music, or 'alive' music, so I thought that would actually sound like an incorrect usage of the word in this case, which made me laugh. He hurried downstairs in order to give me directions and to take my payment, which looked like it ended up going directly into his pocket anyhow. On my way down, the kids were still staring at me, up until the point where I couldn't see them anymore. Still not saying a word.