Send Good Vibes Now!

Sok Meng (a friend of a friend of a friend) met us at our hotel and after scoffing at the notion of eating so early (5pm) took Mike and me aboard his Chinese-made 100cc scooter into the depths of Hanoi.

The three of us, with a combined weight of somewhere around 450 pounds, or 400 if you don't count Sok Meng, bore down achingly on that little moped for about 20 minutes. We went to Sok Meng's dorm room first. He lives with all of the other scholarship students in the shabbiest 6 story dorm building. This building looks like the before picture you'd see after a devastating earthquake struck. Those who actually pay for school out of their pockets are next door in much nicer digs. But a dorm room is a dorm room and one certainly wouldn't be complete without a Nick Carter poster.

We borrowed a friend's scooter and the three of us raced off into the hectic Hanoi traffic with Sok Meng and me on one scoot and Mike, driving solo style, on the other. Props to Mike for not crashing into an errant cyclist or pedestrian as we zoomed through a market of smallish barbequed dogs cut into quarters. I could hear the Mike-is-grossed-out squawk from 40 feet behind.

We drove for some time into various ghetto neighborhoods with open sewers and bare-minimum accomodations but were too late to rendezvouz with Sok Meng's girlfriend. I should mention that after taking big thoroughfares, twisty side streets, narrow alleys, and driving through markets, we had no idea in hell where we were. We could have been 10 miles or 10 meters from our hotel for all we knew. We eventually landed at a bia hoi. Bia hoi, translated literaly, means factory beer. But I'd say a truer equivalent would be keg beer. It's just a place that has a few tables and a keg. They cooked us up a mean fried rice and some pea shoots and garlic and some goat soup. Damn we ate that food! Countless beers later and after stuffing four bellies (including a friend of Sok Meng's who usually sells mobile phones but was running the place because his sister had a bad back) we paid the 8-dollar tab and left.

We eventually made it to a bar in the Old Quarter and hooked up with yet another friend of Sok Meng's. This dude was a real card and he appeared to be both the court jester and a real pain in the ass to those working at the bar. He was cracking us up with his crack-addict meets Scott Moulton in-da-club dancing style. We took off to Apocalypse Now, a crappy bar slash hooker pick up joint and watched Sok Meng's friend dance crazy with the annoyed serpentine prostitutes and their johns. There were two 6-foot-8 white guys in suits and no-frame specs dancing the funky chicken with their lady friends and their stylings gave us a lot of enjoyment too.

I slept nervously last night, a bit anxious about our motorbiking trip today. Luckily it's raining. It just keeps getting better and better. Hopefully it'll be a typhoon so I have some real good stories to tell. Anyway, send good vibes, and if I never see any of you again, let me just say that I love all of you exactly the same.