that's culturally insensitive

Shopping for gangsta clothing in Viet Nam is quite the trip. Not only is "hip hop" synonymous to "skater" here, but b-girls (the closest thing I've found so far to the image I was going for in my mind) generally either dress 1) exactly like boys, 2) super clubby (which I cannot appear on national television wearing), 3) super cutesy, 4) like Avril Lavigne, or 5) like a warped version of Euro gone 80's. Furthermore, the concept of baggy does not seem to exist for the majority of men.

Needless to say, my 3-hour long search to find something that'd make me look like I could bust a cap in your ass was a total failure.

But I did learn one great lesson: apparently, illegal parking in Viet Nam does exist. Who knew?

Dave and I sure didn't.

We were just coming back from wandering the Old Quarter (after purchasing a fabulous red doo-rag for him), when we realized that his motorbike was no longer where we had parked it. We walked down the street, thinking that maybe somebody had moved it, but soon came back to ask a shopkeeper if he had seen what had happened to the motorbike. The man spoke no English, and, after we had mimed "motorbike" to him, only said, "Police!" a bunch of times. We didn't know if he was trying to tell us to report the missing motorbike to the police or that the police had taken it.

We decided to walk down an adjacent street when we saw it: Dave's motorbike, parked in front of a yellow building. We figured we'd found the police station.

There was one desk inside with two men in green uniforms who, true to our luck, did not know any English except to say, "You sit. You wait." We didn't know what we were waiting for and our efforts to ask "Who?" and "Why?" were futile, so we got some water and then hung around as the two police officers laughed with each other, speaking rapid Vietnamese and grinning at us.

About five minutes later, a big van pulls up and about 5 more policemen came inside. They asked a few questions to the two sitting policemen and, after hearing whatever the answer was, started laughing and talking to themselves. Dave and I decided at this point that they had to be messing with us because they looked too happy not to be. The policemen all started asking us, "Where you from?" and, after hearing we were from America, one of them showed us a tattoo he had on his chest of the Statue of Liberty.

Then, all of a sudden, one of the policemen turned serious, said something in Vietnamese really quickly, reached over to Dave, lifted up his shirt, and then lifted up his pants, which had been sagging (though he was wearing a belt).

"Vietnam. Up! Good," he said, as he gave us the thumbs up sign and indicated that Dave should tighten his belt.

I can only imagine what they would have said to us if Dave had been wearing his doo-rag.