After leaving quiet little Laos, we got right into it in Hanoi on our first night. It turned out that John and Jeff, our friends we met in Luang Prabang, happened to be on our same flight to Hanoi. We made a plan to meet up at this one corner in the Old Quarter, which like many corners in the city, are filled with short little plastic stools and people drinking "Bia Hoi" (draft beer) for 5,000 Dong (25 cents). John and Jeff had a friend who runs some sort of Adventure Tourism business, and happened to be a 6 ft 5 giant hilarious dude from Estonia. He didnt get my reference to the movie Encino Man, but we still had a great time listening to his stories of travelling the world and doing crazy shit.
The weird thing is that despite the flurry of people on the streets during the day, the police come around and shut everything down around 1130 pm. Many of the locals just dispersed when the cops came by, but the crowd of backpackers from the nearby giant hostel rose from their plastic stools looking for the next bar. We sort of followed the crowd from one bar to the next, getting rushed inside while the bartenders closed the shutters behind us to hide from the Police. It felt like high school. Over the net two hours, we moved from bar to bar, each one a little bit more shady than the next. We finally walked to the other side of the main road, to a place that looked more like a auto-mechanics shop in the front, but was packed to the gills with twenty-something backpackers dancing their faces off in the back (I can call them that now that I am 30). Our motley crew of one English and one Australian professor, an Estonian dude, and two honeymooning Americans were not the typical clientele for this establishment, but we had a great time, arriving home at about 2 am. A perfect, romantic honeymoon evening... and a really fun night.
Thanks to John, Jeff, and Mart for a fun night. More posts from Hanoi very soon.
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| 25 cent bia hoi on the corner, those stools not made for big people |
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| Bri and our new friends |
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| The stools work as seats AND tables |
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| Time to find the next bar. You can see the cop under the sign making everyone clear out. |
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| Wandering the streets of Hanoi at Midnight |
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| Cops outside one of the bars, not sure what it says on the truck but I think it has to do with hauling off drunk Americans |
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| Entering the secret bar, yeah there were lasers but it still looked like a garage. |
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| On the dancefloor. I missed the memo that all white dudes in Vietnam wear tank tops |
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1 comment:
Of course you crazy kids made friends and ended up in an underground nightclub! Brando I am sorry you missed the chance to wear your tank top out that evening!
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