A Stripper and His Rhinestone Face Mask
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are for working. I am, after all, here for work, and Matthias has been gratefully able to come along. I didn’t mention it, but upon our arrival and meeting up at the airport, our business partners in Vietnam gifted each of us with detailed personal itineraries, inclusive of not only dinner plans each night but also office pick-ups, which are at 8AM. I’d complain, but our partner’s first shift starts at 7.
(No, we didn’t drink the overpriced Hennessy from our hotel room bar, but we sure did take stupid pictures with it.)
The breakfast that comes with our stay is our saving grace. There are stations set up for both hot and cold western breakfasts, Vietnamese breakfasts, Korean breakfasts (Lotte is a Korean chain), and some other common East Asian morning fare. We try a bit of everything, but by the third day or so have settled into our own individual breakfast routine. Apparently there is an even fancier club breakfast that Victoria offers us—the logistics of which never end up working out—but I’m happy with my latte, fruit, and a fairly decent vegetarian full Irish each morning, and Matthias is happy with his three rounds of food (European, Korean, dessert…all with plenty of fresh juice and no-never-ever any coffee).
Our work week starts early: on Sunday night. After our Halong Bay excursion and Sunday in-town adventure, we return to our hotel to shower and dress for dinner. (Naturally, our ride will arrive promptly at 6PM to take us to pre-dinner drinks at a pub with magnificent lake views, Standing Bar.)
We arrive at the pub and I heave a heavy sigh of relief, starting to breathe. There is something that I find so comforting about the smell of a pub, of stale ale and worn wood. Any of these places—anywhere in the world—is as welcoming to me, inviting me to take a sip, take a seat, slow down.
We meet up with Mark, the CEO of our business partners over here. Victoria knows him better than I, where I have only met him in passing between meetings on his most recent trip to Boston. Mark is refined; Mark has stories to tell. One of these stories he will tell you is of being on the same Vietnamese refugee boat that carried the founder of Sriracha sauce. We end up really enjoying our evenings with Mark on this trip, and we hope that he isn’t being facetious when he says that he’ll take us up on our offer to return the host favour the next time that he’s in Boston.
Mark is one of those people who can make anyone feel at ease. He invites us to order a drink; he is picking up the tab. Matthias and I order our drinks, and I worry less about navigating the etiquette of the fact that Matthias is not part of our business team. Victoria had already texted Mark about this, and he assured us not to worry about Matthias and James. He has it covered.
Standing Bar is one of those unique places. There’s almost no room downstairs, just an open frontage and a bar, as the name would imply. But it stretches up a few levels, and it’s right on the edge of Trúc Bạch Lake, so there are views from the upper levels—when you can glimpse them between the trees that shelter the upper decks. Mark tells us that Vietnamese property taxes are assessed on the square footage footprint, so many places here are small but tall. Mark tells us to join him upstairs once we’ve got our drinks.
Once we do, we walk up a couple flights of stairs, following the sounds of voices. I’m walking behind Drew, and I almost crash into him as he stops short before stepping out onto a deck on the upmost level.
I peer around him, planning to make my own way, before I, too stop short.
One of the other Wayfair teams is here in Vietnam—a team who’s been causing Victoria and her team much strife over the past few months: not communicating well, and reneging on promises made. We have to spend our time here with them!?
And that’s about as good of an introduction to our ‘free’ time here in Vietnam as you’ll get. It evaporated along with days that start with S.
That evening at Standing Bar, Victoria and I try to hide inside while everyone else is out on the deck, but are coaxed back outside by Tim, the COO. We sit as far away as possible from any other Wayfarians, and shrug and mouth, ‘Sorry!’ to Tessa and Drew when they look over from the other table mouthing, ‘Save us!’ They’re adults; they can handle this on their own.
Our evenings the rest of the week are much the same. We finish work, and by the time we get back to our hotel we barely have time to shower, change, and breathe before navigating the two elevator towers and 65 floors back down to the lobby for our ride to pre-dinner drinks.
We do have some entertaining evenings of it, though.
Our first night, Mark wants to impress us and takes us out to the one main club-type place in town: Sparta. To enter the club, you go into a small entryway, and then into an elevator. You ride up the elevator a few floors with a beefy bouncer/elevator conductor and enter into the club.
There we had the distinct pleasure of watching exclusively male dancers in this wrestling-wring-like pen slowly undress, although not too much. One in the middle had a great glittering bedazzled rhinestone face mask so common here in Vietnam because of the sometimes poorer air quality and polite social customs.
It’s also the place that we learn that no one in Vietnam can pour a beer: they just pour the beer straight into your glass—no angled pour or anything—and straight foam by the time they’re done. So awkward to have to stop people from pouring your drink.
There are other good evenings, at least. This one pizza place, 4Ps, is not only a play on words, but also has the best hot chili oil we’ve ever tasted. I even email them for their recipe, but can’t quite replicate the slow burn of the oil with the Thai red chili peppers we get back at home. Will have to try with habaneros or Scotch bonnets sometime.
Another night we go to hot pot, thankfully in our hotel complex but also somehow a ten-minute walk through a mall that is also attached to our hotel complex. We arrive late and make things awkward by bringing an extra chair to one of the six-person tables that are definitely designed to serve only six people.
Here we get to witness some fantastic whitesplaining. After having been subjected to banal conversation for the majority of dinner—all while awkwardly navigating the fact that people had cooked meat in all the pots so we couldn’t eat anything—Mark comes over. He’s taken a liking to Matthias and me—almost certainly to Matthias specifically—so we get to chat and hang with him throughout our stay. He says to one of the women sitting next to us, ‘OK, time to switch places. I’m taking your seat,’ and chats us up.
He talks of his past, of being a refugee and of growing up in a neighbourhood of LA devoid of public resources: Monterey.
One of the women at our table says, ‘OOH! Monterey! That’s so cute! I’m watching a show about it!’
Mark turns to her and says, ‘No, not Monterey Bay—Monterey. L.A. It’s a ghetto.’
‘No, it’s like…a cute suburb!’ she argues.
Mark looks at us. We look back at him. We can’t save him from this conversation. Eventually we move on.
Don’t be this person, fair reader.
Lunch Wednesday ends up being at my favourite place of all our lunch spots: Quán Món Huế, a little hole-in-the-wall with neither English menus nor English-speaking staff, and the food is fantastic. We’re served spring rolls that we fill and dip ourselves. There are vegetarian appetisers and entrées that I’ll never be able to recreate— or order—again, or even describe accurately. I’ve been wanting to try something closer to street food, but with colleagues who won’t eat in alleyways and hosts who are trying to impress us, I don’t get any opportunities to do so (and I’m jealous that Matthias does while out on his own). I enjoy it so much I forget to take pictures, and only snap one at the start of the hot peppers and pickled garlic condiments on the table, and one at the end of my gelatinous dessert served with ice on the side that you scoop into your bowl to cool down as you like it.
The only other night worth noting we have is at an upscale traditional place, Home Hanoi. We’ve been here this week—and others even longer—and still people have not and refuse to learn chopstick etiquette. Not only how to eat properly with them, but also even the tiny social niceties of how to fold your chopstick wrapper to create a rest when one isn’t provided. Such a complete lack of picking up on social cues I wish I could say I’ve never seen.
Alas. We’ll always have awkward stares across the table at Victoria, James, Ama, Tessa, and Drew. We’ll have shared flashes of incredulous eyes at racist comments, at hip-hop references missed, at white peoples’ complete lacks of etiquette.
We cancel dinner plans our last night because Mark has to leave town, and we have absolutely no interest in eating together alone with the other Wayfarians.
Unfortunately we mention this during the day to our Vietnamese counterparts, who turn to us with glee and declare, ‘Great! Karaoke!’
Poor Matthias is the only one concerned about the music here, and unfortunately for him he’s recently heard an instrumental version of Boogie Man recently, which he selects as one of his songs. (I say ‘one of’ because he selects a lot of songs, because no one else is carrying their weight.) As he’s singling along to this song, he realises that it’s vaguely inappropriate. He defends himself later by adding, ‘Everything I do here is inappropriate—I’M inappropriate here!’ which is indeed true: he is a 6’4″ Black man visiting a country of Vietnamese men who are on average a foot shorter than he is.
