Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
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Stories
I had been briefed on what to do in this situation and it played out more or less how it had been described to me. The policeman asked for my registration and license. I obviously don’t have an international driver’s license so he’s got me there. He sat me down in their police station and scolded me as a shook a small booklet full of prices and descriptions of various fines in my face.
There was a huge, black SUV stopped in the middle of the street. There was a mysterious white powder all over the shattered windshield. The rest of the vehicle was already very badly dented, as if a crowd of people had attacked it. There was an angry mob gathered around around the drivers seat door. Something was happening there.
That’s when it happened. I was broadsided by a taxi that took a sudden, unexpected turn. And I hit the pavement hard. You’d think that in an event like this there would some sort of adrenaline rush that would kick in and help with the pain, at least initially, but there was nothing. In the second or two between my impact with the taxi and my impact with the ground I think my emotions are best expressed this way: “Really? Again? REALLY?”
After about a week and a half of making my way on foot I knew that I needed to get my ass on a motorbike, ASAP. That is the mode of transportation this city is made for. Getting chauffeured around town on the back of other people’s motorbikes was getting old and I was feeling like a big, white burden. And the Vietnamese bus system… no thank you. Not that the 3 hours per day that I had been spending on it feeling like Gandalf in a Hobbit hole weren’t fun… I’m just a free spirit and no cage (nor bus) can contain me.
This is a minor event I suppose… but it's Halloween and there is an interesting video to accompany this story so I felt that it merited its own post. One night I came home to find my two female housemates sitting in the kitchen together. I asked them what was going on and they told me that there was a cockroach and a giant spider in the bathroom. Their plan was to keep the door closed forever. To their credit, this was actually a feasible plan because our downstairs bathroom serves primarily as a storage room and to enclose the smell of our cat's liter box.
I know that I said that my next post would be about my new motorbike… but something came up, so I thought we could take a little break from our scheduled programming for some live reporting. It was another Tuesday night in Hanoi. I was having drinks with a few friends at a nearby place that we like to go to. And that's when I saw the smoke...
The city had an interesting dynamic. It was at least 1/3rd beautiful British people, presumably all working in the financial sector. Walking through the streets it felt like New York City crossed with the rainforest exhibit at the zoo. Also, the city is sort of at the bottom of a small mountain so everything is either up or down a steep hill. Trollies ran through some of the more flat streets like San Francisco. Interestingly, in many parts of the city there were two layers of sidewalks. The first layer was street level. It was hot, dirty and full of small Asian shops, markets and hair salons. The second level was elevated and climate controlled, unfolding like and everlasting shopping mall of jewelry stores and high-end fashion retailers. To facilitate crossing the street, these sidewalks included bridges that would arc over the busy city life immediately below. I did my best to stray from the ‘main’ roads and hiked up a series of steep winding streets with narrow sidewalks.
