young and wild and free

Holy shit, I'm 20.

it's my last day as a teenager

I love being a summer baby. But it kind of sucks that I rarely ever get a chance to celebrate my birthday with my college friends, since we're always out of school come August 7th.

This summer, therefore, is pretty special. Not only am I turning 20 (CUE FREAK OUT!!!), but it's my first birthday away from home in a really long time. Not going to lie, whenever I imagined what it'd be like to turn 20, I never pictured myself in Viet Nam.

Anyway, last night the VTV 6 director wanted to take us out to karaoke, so all of us and the Vietnamese roommates loaded into three cabs and went over to the Old Quarter for some good old-fashioned bonding over bad singing/screaming. When I walked through the door though, I heard somebody shout, "SURPRISE!" and then realized that the music the people in the room were singing along to wasn't some Vietnamese pop song I'd never heard before but actually this really upbeat "Happy Birthday to you" song that I've heard about three times already at Solace (and once at the Loo, but who's counting). In the middle of the room were three cakes for me and Caroline (her birthday was this past Monday, but she was in Bavi teaching English then, so we hadn't had a chance to celebrate it yet): one with the traditional "Happy birthday, Caroline and Lucie!"; one with a little Vietnamese smiley face wearing a conical rice hat; and this beauty:

Translation: "Very beautiful, how much?"

LOVES IT. It was all so unexpected that I had even left my camera in my room, not wanting to have to carry a purse around all night. I'm a fool. But a fool with cake.

viva brasil

Last Friday I experienced Brazil in Hanoi.

Although tickets sold out within the first two hours and were only available on the black market after that, somehow Dave got 2 tickets to the “friendly” football (soccer) game between the Brazil Olympic team and Viet Nam.

What a great way to kick off August (no pun intended).

The game didn’t start until 8 pm, but by 4:30 Dave and I were already on our way to the Sheraton hotel. He works out at the gym there and therefore had gotten word that the Brazilian team was staying there during their time in Hanoi. We hung around the lobby with maybe 15 other fans and saw the team come out and get onto their bus to go to the stadium.

Outside the conference room, we also ran into a crazy girl fan from Singapore who had actually snuck out of the country by telling her parents she was doing something for school and spent $600 to come to Hanoi and see the team. But she didn’t even have tickets to the game!

The team’s bus had backed up traffic on the street to a level of madness that I’d never seen before, so Dave and I barely had time to grab some pho bo (noodle soup with beef) on the street before it was time to get a cab to the stadium.

When we arrived, the roads were already completely filled by Vietnamese in red and white jerseys. Dave had changed into a Viet Nam jersey as well (he was wearing a Brazil one when we had been at the Sheraton earlier), so I was pretty outnumbered.

We got a lot of stares, probably also because I’m pretty sure most people think I’m Vietnamese here. (Possible explanation: our tour guide from the Central Region trip told me that I apparently look like some famous Vietnamese model/actress/singer.)

A little friendly rivalry.

Our seats were in the front row of the upper level – not too shabby for having paid less than $20 for them. I was the only girl in our row, and the Vietnamese team had an absolutely insane home court advantage, which is ironic since the Vietnamese also normally love Brazil, but I suppose national pride takes priority in this case.

All that was wasted, though, because Brazil ended up winning 2-0!

After the game, Dave and I had to walk for about an hour down the road to find a taxi that would take us back to his house for less than 200,000 dong (the cost was only 100,000 dong to get to the stadium, but since so many people needed cabs, the prices jacked up, of course – that’s Asia for you). By the time we got a cab, I had about six missed calls on my cell phone from people wanting to know how the game was live and where the hell we were.

First things first, though: we had to get Dave’s motorbike. Let me take this moment to talk about how fucking amazing riding a motorbike at night is.

For starters, riding around during the day is definitely still fun, but traffic can tend to get a bit insane, especially during the 5-6 pm time slot (aka the universal rush hour time). Hanoi as a city, though, shuts down rather early. Most people are home by 9 pm, almost all young women have the traditional 10 pm curfew, and all bars save maybe one or two that pay off the police are closed by midnight at the latest. So after 10 pm, you can be pretty much guaranteed that the streets are going to be more or less empty.

Could the conditions be any more perfect for completely gunning it down the highway?

Imagine: you’re on the back of a motorbike hitting maximum speed, the wind is singing around you, through you, tugging at the jersey you're wearing that's about two sizes too big, and whooshing by you is the city, the lake, the sky, the stars.

And you’re flying. There’s no other way to describe it.

Zooming around on a motorbike after hours is probably my favorite memory of the city. I actually feel myself regress to about age five, as I yell for Dave to go faster, faster, faster down the road, as we rip around the traffic circles, my feet almost brushing against the gravel as we turn.

As we leave Dave’s house, he tells me that we’re going to take a different route this time, and all of a sudden I’m overlooking the lake, the city sparkling in the distance. The street, which the locals call Lover’s Lane or Korea Street, is famous as a place where couples rendezvous for late night activities of the scandalous nature, and both the road and the sidewalks are covered with graffiti of the cutest variety from couples leaving their names and/or a message to their significant others.

After that detour (totally worth it), we finally met up with some of our friends at Nutz, a club inside the Sheraton, which was actually just about to close, so we all go up into the lobby area and hang around the conference room where the Brazil team is talking to the press, we hear.

We catch the team as they’re leaving and end up having about an hour long conversation with the Vietnamese team's coach in French, Portuguese, and English. He’s really nice and invited us all to his house in Portugal if we’re ever, you know, in town.

Oh. And:

RONALDINHO SIGNED MY JERSEY.

Just Ronaldinho signing my jersey and touching my waist.

No big deal.

The night ended with a stop at Solace for dancing and me getting shown “how they dance in Brazil” by a guy from Sao Paulo. Apparently, it involves a lot of twirling.

I got back to my room at around 4 am and found my roommate still awake, with a surprise for me on the table:

August is my birthday month.

have no fear, the camera's here

Filming on Wednesday for VTV6's "All Connect" went pretty smoothly, taking only a little over 2 hours. Television is television, so if any of us got really flustered or stuck on a question, all we had to do was pause, recollect ourselves, and start over, thanks to the beauty of editing.

Team G-Unit: me, Dave, and Zeo (from left to right).

Our opposing team, G-Not: Christopher (who actually always dresses like that), Bibi, and Phil.

As for tonight: I'm going to the Brazil v. Viet Nam football game!

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.