Dirrrty South. . . . Mekong Style

On Dec. 28th, Vietnam beat Thailand in soccer to win the AFF Suzuki Championship..

This bit of information may have slipped past you, but for me walking down the streets of HCMC, it was pretty impossible not to know:

At 1:09 there’s partial nudity.

Last week was my organization’s conference, where all the volunteers in Vietnam reunite, shoot the shit, and do some consensus decision-making (I thought I left hippie granola anarchist biznizz back in the bay!) about the future of the org. Every year the conference is held somewhere that has no volunteers, so everyone gets a chance to see somewhere new. This year we had it in Quy Nhon, a sleepy beach between Nha Trang and Hue. 

To get to Quy Nhon, I took a soft sleeper train with Thi-Bay (Can Tho vol), Connie, and Mary (Long My vols). A soft sleeper is a room with two bunks (four beds total). It’s a pretty sweet set up. You get to lie on a soft mattress, check out the scenery. There’s a lot of storage space, a place to plug in electronics, and a nifty shelf for glasses, cell phones, etc. near your bed. If you’re sharing it with three other people, it’s especially sweet. It’s a traveling slumber party.

If you’re especially fortunate, you may even be on a party train aka a train with karaoke in the cantine. By the time we got there, only a few customers were left, and it was mostly the staff singing. Here is the three step process to how three foreign girls like us ended up winning their hearts.

1) Ruou. Nothing warms hearts like a group of foreign girls who, when asked if they want to order beer, ask for ruou instead. Everyone seemed impressed that we had opted to down shots of Hanoi Vodka during our karaoke train adventure.

2) Sing a Vietnamese song. ‘Nuff said. We busted out My Tam’s “Uoc Gi”, and everyone sang along. 

3) Dance! Dance! Dance!

The staff was really fun and were quite the performers. One guy started freaking with Connie (though when questioned at a later time, she did admit to starting it). That same guy positioned me in one area, then Thi-Bay next to me, and then Connie between us so we made a circle, then he hopped in the middle and starting shaking it! Such craziness. The ladies were singing, the fellas dancing, just rambunctiousness all around. Perhaps the creme de la creme of the shaking was this:

Towards the end of the night, they turned off the karaoke and turned on loud house music. I was pretty frightened about where the night was going to lead to, but it turned out just to be their cleaning up and getting ready to sleep music. Phew! I’m not as young as I used to be, and wasn’t sure if I would be able to handle a post dance party rave on a train. 

When Thi-Bay, Connie and I walked through the many cars of sleeping people to get to our sleeper, it felt like we were doing the walk of shame. The next morning, we kept on bumping into the staff and we’d all smile knowingly. Some of them were pushing food carts and would come sit in our room and hang out, and I imagined it might have been weird for Mary to have these strange men in our room. Oh well. Welcome to Vietnam.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Ho Ho Ho!!!!!!