Matt keeps his backpack company in the lobby of his hostel waiting for the bus, gently rocking to the slow cadence of the oscillating air-con unit. He looks back to the elevator further inside, the one that leads to his now-former residence. It’s much too early for other travelers to be awake. The only reason he’s even up is to catch a bus. He’s going to Halong Bay today, a four hour drive east of Hanoi, Vietnam, the city he’s in, but this next step in his journey is bittersweet.

With this bus, he leaves his most recent backpacker group. Though he’s been traveling for weeks through Thailand and now Vietnam, this had been the first group of people that he’s had the opportunity to adventure with on a repeated and sustained basis. They’ve shared the same hostel dorm, waited out the mid-afternoon heat on the same balcony, and explored the largest fraction of the city’s culture that they could in their brief time together. It’s been awesome.

It will not, however, be the attractions they visited together that will stick in his memory, but the (sometimes terrifying, sometimes frustrating, always interesting) experiences that they’ve shared. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of his time at all in the city that didn’t feature one or more of these crazy Brits.

* * *

Matt rubs his thighs as he steps onto Vietnamese soil for the first time (technically it’s just cheap linoleum flooring in the Arrivals section of the Hanoi airport, but let’s roll with ‘soil’). He was able to get a few sets of squats done while waiting in line at immigration to fill out the same forms three times. Flight 7126… departing from Bangkok, Thailand… October 1, 2014– Careful! The date is written day then month and year in this part of the world.

“Hey,” Matt smiles at the man behind the information desk once the forms have been signed and verified, “do you have a map of Hanoi?”

“Hello! Yes!” He hands over a pamphlet-map of the area. “You need taxi?”

Matt starts scanning the document. “I’m sure I do. I’m going to The Old Quarter district.”

“Thirty dollar, is the best price.”

“Thirty dollars for a cab into the city?!” Matt’s rip-off radar goes off. “Come on, you can do twenty.”

Any time someone says ‘best price’, ‘discount’, ‘promotion offer’, ‘just for you’, and the like, that’s when you know you’re being ripped off. Every time, without exception.

The man shakes his head and keeps smiling.

Matt turns to the attractive young woman having a similar conversation at the counter to his left. “You wanna split a cab to the city?”

She’s a dark brunette with straight hair to somewhere around the neckline. She has a paleness about her that implies British heritage rather than any actual aversion to the sun. She’s dressed like every backpacker girl he’s met in his travels so far: khaki shorts to the upper thigh and a loose tanktop under a bulging, buckled backpack. “Should we? Where are you going?” Her accent confirms Matt’s guess.

“Somewhere in the… Old Quarter? Old Quarter, yeah. It’s bound to be cheaper if we split the fare.”

“Oh yeah? My hostel’s in The Old Quarter too. I’m going to… ” she consults a folded print-out from one of her tiny girl-clothes pockets, “Hanoi Blue Sky 2?”

“Woah,” Matt pulls up Gmail on his phone to double-check, “I’m staying at Hanoi Blue Sky 2, too!”

“No!”

Yes! He shows her his reservation. The young woman’s eyes go wide in surprise. Her blue-green eyes dazzle.

He recomposes his thoughts. “Yeah, what’re the odds? Come on, we’ve gotta split a cab to the hostel now.” He turns to the smiling man behind the desk. “We’ll be back if we can’t find a better price.”

They ditch the desk to take some money out of the ATM. Vietnamese currency is known as ‘dong’ and in addition to being comedically named, it is frightfully devalued compared to the dollar (approximately 21,000 dong to 1 US dollar).

Several hundreds of thousand dong later, they’re ready to venture out of the air-conditioned bliss of the airport.

He sticks his right hand out. “By the way, my name’s Matt.”

“Kelly,” she returns the handshake.

“Awesome. For the next few hours, you’re gonna be my backpacker wife.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Kelly chuckles politely. “Should we go back to get the taxi though?”

“What, at the desk? Hell no. Look around.” He points at the arrival rotunda. “This is the first place any traveler sees when they get off the plane. I’m sure there are cheaper options further outside the doors. How long’ve you been traveling?”

“Oh?” she nods. “This is just my first day, so I don’t know any of this.”

“First day? Wow, alright, well, it’s my third week, you’ll pick it up pretty fast.”

No sooner do they step outside and are baptized by the humid north Vietnam air, than they’re accosted by a cabbie.

“Hey! Hey! Taxi! Taxi! Where you going?” a man calls out to them, hustling out of his cab.

“Hanoi, The Old Quarter,” Matt tells him.

“Sure, sure. Twenty-five dollar each.”

The backpacker-wife turns to her backpacker-husband and purses her lips and raises her slim eyebrows. Her expression says ‘not bad’.

The American, however, has played this game before. “No flat fare. You use the meter. The meter.”

The man, who has been herding the travelers towards his taxi looks pained, but agrees. “Yes, meter, yes, okay.”

Only when they start to offload their packs into the trunk does the man balk. “No meter, please, no meter. Twenty-two dollar.”

“Oh, no meter now, huh? Fine, twenty dollars.”

“Twenty-two!”

Matt goes to lift his bag. “No thanks.”

“Fine! Twenty!”

The ride isn’t bad. Until like, five minutes in.

The driver stops the car on the highway. “I go, I come back,” he gestures emphatically to the other side of the oncoming traffic, brandishing a walkie-talkie of some kind. “I come back!”

“You what?” Matt’s appalled.

They’re not parked on the shoulder, just stopped in the left-lane. Cars speed past and the wind that rushes behind them gently rocks their taxi. The backpacker newlyweds make alarmed eye contact.

“No, you can’t–”

The cabbie’s door slams. He’s jogging across highway traffic, dodging cars going easily forty-five, fifty-five miles an hour (1.6 times that in kilometers per hour). He’s waiting for only a minute or two before a car peels off the main throughway and rolls to a stop on the shoulder. Seconds later, the cabbie is back, plugging his radio into the dash.

“Good, good. We go!”

The backpacker couple look at each other again, then gently nod.

Shortly thereafter the driver wants to build some rapport. “So where you stay? You have reservation?”

“Yes, Hanoi Blue Sky 2?” Kelly tells him.

“Hmmm, okay,” he considers. Soon he’s slowing down the car, then coming to a stop, this time in the right line. Oh, variety.

Matt leans forward, straining against his double-checked seatbelt. “What’re we doing? Why are we stopping?”

“Accident ahead,” the man points vaguely, playing with his phone.

“Accident? I don’t see anything, let’s go.”

“No, no go.” the man barks back. After a short pause, however, he starts back up the car.

Kelly shrugs, frowning as well. Quickly enough, though, they’re merging back into traffic. And then they start to slow down again not even a minute later.

“What’re we doing?” Matt asks.

“U-turn!” the cabbie says, describing the vehicle’s current course through the break in the lefthand median and back up the highway towards the airport. At least Vietnam drives in the right lane.

“No! No U-turn! Take us to our hotel!” Matt’s almost shouting.

“Better hotel! I know better hotel.”

“I don’t care. Hanoi Blue Sky 2. U-turn again!”

“Hotel is better!”

Matt starts punching the back of the seat in front of his. “Fuck no! You’re taking us to our hotel.”

The man grumbles and protests, but soon turns them back around, going the correct way on the highway once more. And then they reach the spot where they had stopped just prior to the first U-turn.

“What’re we doing now? Why are we stopping again?”

“My friend call me!” He holds up his phone as a shield between him and the scowling American.

“I don’t care if your friend called you, call him back after you drop us off. Let’s go!”

“No go! My friend call! My… my wife call!”

“Your wife?”

“She want know where I am!”

“Are you serious? You’re a taxi driver; you’re out driving a taxi!”

“You can call her back.” Kelly sounds much gentler than her companion. She turns to Matt. “He can call her back?”

“Fine,” Matt sulks. “I don’t think his wife really called though…”

Dozens more cars whiz by as the taxi is filled with half a Vietnamese conversation. The passengers’ awkwardly stare out their windows until the car is finally moving.

They drive in silence for the remainder of their journey.

“Tip?” the driver asks of the Westerners once they’ve arrived, paid, and wrenched their luggage free from the hell-car.

Both passengers scoff.

* * *

“This is the one!” Hannah declares, planting herself in front of an open storefront restaurant (of a kind).

The definition of ‘restaurant’ in this part of the world is anywhere that will sell you warm food. With three tables spilling onto the sidewalk (one of which is being used to display sections of raw chicken) and a dozen child-sized stools, this technically fits the bill for dinner tonight.

Alphabetically speaking, the first member of Hannah’s posse is Alex Joseph, a young man from Britain. Alex has just finished uni (this is British for what Americans would simply call ‘college’) and has a job working for a big petrol company starting in a few months. In the interim, he’s traveling Vietnam and is now in Hanoi after coming up from the south. He’d met Matt and the group in the dorm that they all shared and agreed to come out to dinner with them while Kelly stayed in and recovered from jet-lag.

Next are a pair of Colombians (categorized thusly because their names have been lost to the ether), cousins in their early twenties. The older cousin is a guy, who says little, but is affable enough. Although they share the same South American complexion and demeanor, the younger Colombian, a woman, has a pair of eyes that stop Matt in his tracks. Aquamarine and perfectly clear, like the ocean, the waiter can’t help but return her smile while they order dinner.

“We’ll do the barbecue,” Hannah points at the menu and then circling her group, “chicken, beef, pork and veg.”

Hannah is almost as tall as Matt which combined with her long, thin limbs ensures that both her body and personality take up space. Also from Britain (though unknown to Alex or Kelly until Hanoi), she possesses an air of indifference, as though the problems of the world are items of junk mail to be cursorily inspected and then tossed aside. Or better, for someone else to cursorily inspect and toss aside without bothering her. She’s been traveling for the better part of a year now, with more than that planned in the future, hoping to support herself with her freelance artwork. She’s the kind of person that probably starts greetings with an enveloping hug and a ‘Darling! How are you?’

“How many? Five people?” the waiter asks.

“Yes.” Hannah holds up her hand, limp-wristed, at about face level to waggle her long, slender fingers as she says this. It only adds to her aura of aristocracy. The accent helps a lot too.

“Wait,” the stunning Colombian cuts in, “I don’t want to eat. We had a big lunch.”

Hannah doesn’t even turn to look back at the waiter. “Four,” she corrects.

The other cousin is totally in, eager for this must-try Vietnamese cuisine (Hannah has hyped it up a bit). By the menu, the usual price per person for BBQ should be 70,000 dong, so 280k for all four. Thus it is a surprise when they’re quoted 300k by the waiter (~$14).

“For 300k we should at least get something more,” Alex adds calmly, his own accent soothing where Hannah’s is merely pleasing. “Maybe some rice and bread?”

“No rice and bread 300,” the waiter refuses. “Only rice, 300, okay.”

“What about just bread?” Hannah asks, putting down the laminated menu flier. “I fancy some bread right now.” The bread in Vietnam is almost exclusively French-style baguettes.

“So BBQ chicken, beef, pork, veg, and bread, four people, 300k,” Matt summarizes.

“No,” the increasingly frustrated server counters, “BBQ chicken, beef, pork, veg, rice, four people, 300k.”

“But bread’s cheaper on the menu!”

It’s true. Rice is listed as 10k dong while bread is only 5k.

The waiter will not budge either way, and after both parties repeat slight variations of the increasingly urgent-sounding litany of ‘BBQ chicken, beef, pork, veg…’ the patrons finally agree on the rice package and conspire to order one-off breads once the food arrives.

First the short tables are cleared to make room for a small burner draped with aluminum foil. Next comes a plate piled high with thinly sliced meat sitting on a mound of onions, carrots, and other assorted savory vegetables. Their attendant lights the lump of gel in the burner and takes their order of additional bread with a huff. This is Vietnamese BBQ.

No sooner are the diners experimenting with squirting oil and shuffling morsels around on the hot foil and confusing their ‘raw meat chopsticks’ and ‘cooked meat chopsticks’ when the tell-tale diesel sputtering of a motorbike roars up. It’s not coming from the hustle and bustle of the main street, though, it’s coming from the stone wall to Hannah’s left and Matt’s right. The wall is split by a narrow alley. Waiting in the alleyway barely wide enough to accommodate him is a young man on his bike, arching his eyebrows and looking half-bored at the American in front of him in the universal sign of expectation.

Their server rushes from the kitchen-home-restaurant out to their side. “Please you move. Let him out?”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

Matt and the two Colombians who are sitting on his side of the table get up, scoot their stools over and the bike rumbles past.

They reseat, resume eating, and request a second burner to allow Hannah and Matt, sitting across from each other, their own. Having just one six-inch diameter circle of foil cooking the food is far too slow for all four to have any semblance of a reasonably paced meal. Hannah and Matt crank up their saute operations and Colombian Girl sips her Coca-Cola while Alex and the older Colombian flinch and moan about the splattering oil from their burner.

Hannah sits with the regality of the Queen herself, impervious to the splattering of the masses. “Here, you eat these pieces of beef,” she commands her burner-mate. She is nothing if not courteous to her subjects.

Though his country fought for independence from such monarchy, Matt nevertheless complies. Meat is meat. It is delicious. It is devoured to make room for another batch of raw beef and pork and veggies.

The waiter brings out a wide, aluminum cylinder, big enough to encircle the burner ensemble and ward against any stray drops. He doesn’t immediately leave their side. He’s asking the diners to move again, pointing at the alley.

There is another young man on a scooter coming out of the too-narrow roadway.

“Where the hell are you guys even coming from?!” Matt complains before once again doing the Hanoi Hustle to let the bike out into the street that’s already quite saturated with the vehicles.

They’re cooking and eating and eating and cooking.

“This thing kind of looks like a tin-can…” the American casually notes of the splash guards.

“You and your ridiculous tin cans!” Alex laughs. “I’m telling you, mate, you’re making that up!”

Earlier in the afternoon they group had had an argument where no one had believed that in American cartoons and pop culture, there was a moderately widespread belief/joke that goats would eat tin cans.

“I’m telling you, it’s a real thing!”

“Whatever. You still sound like you’re in a movie or TV show or something.” Alex’s primary source of American accents had come from their culture of entertainment.

“And you still sound like you’re in Game of Thrones.”

“Right. And you probably eat at, what’s it called? Chik-A-Fil?”

“One, it’s Chik-Fil-A, like ‘filet’. And two, why is everyone all about that place? It’s like a fried chicken cult back in The South.”

Alex’s retort is swallowed up by more internal combustion erupting from the alley.

“Nope! Not gonna move this time!” Matt refuses and plants himself on his kiddie stool like an irritated toddler.

“Last one! Last one!” the waiter promises.

Fine. Fine. The brash American consents to let the biker through. He tells himself he’s doing it because the driver is wearing a Superman shirt.

They settle back down and Matt barely asks if he can add some spicy oil into the remaining onions before doing so. Alex wants to caramelize them and Hannah wants nothing to do with more food, having dismissed their effort with a different hand gesture (though similar finger waggling). The Colombians look bored. They ponder how they can escape back to the hostel and its heavenly air-con.

Alex isn’t pleased with the spoonful of oil and sliced chilies that’ve been added to the sizzling onions. “Ahhhh,” he groans, “I don’t much care for spicy food.”

“What? But you’re Indian!”

Alex is, in spite of his incredibly Western name, one-hundred percent Indian. He sighs. “Yes, my parents are Indian, but I’ve lived my entire life in Britain. My heritage doesn’t just automatically confer special powers.”

“But…”

“I’m completely British; my parents even named me Alex Joseph. That’s about as British as you can get. What’re the names of the other Indian kids you’ve met?”

“Ummm, Puneet, Chandra, Aniq, Akhil, Rahul…”

“Zero Alex Josephs.”

Matt is uncharacteristically at a loss for words, though he’s saved by the startling beep from the street-side. The Superman-embossed driver has returned to go back into the mystery alley. Their waiter rushes over to have them move, but Matt doesn’t budge.

“You said it would be the last time! Thirty-thousand dong to move!”

“No no no!” the waiter balks.

“Fine. Twenty-thousand!”

They stare at each other. They break out into smiles. Matt moves.

The bill arrives and the table is aghast at the bill. Well, mostly Alex and Matt. Hannah leaves it to the boys to handle and the Colombians are distracted amongst themselves.

“They charged us eight thousand for the bread!” Matt points at the line in the menu. “It’s listed as five here.”

“We should argue it.” Alex pauses to consider. “Now that’s a pretty Indian thing to do.”

“What, haggle to save money? I think it’s a Jewish stereotype too. Is it really that Indian?”

“Oh yes. Getting the bill is the most exciting part of an Indian dinner.”

This is a discrepancy of 3k dong per person, or ~14 cents. Back at home the travelers might not have even stopped to pick this pocket change off the street, but out here, in this restaurant, this was The Battle at Thermopylae. This is the last stand of civilization in the face of utter annihilation. They will not back down. They will not compromise. They will fight for all that is just and true in this world. In the end, the poor waiter is battered down by the combined efforts of ethnic stinginess and accepts the 5k price.

With the bill paid, the Colombians retire to the hostel and the remaining three backpackers put the saved money to good use. Out in the winding, cobbled streets of The Old Quarter, clusters of bars sell half-pint glasses of bia hoi [loosely: ‘fresh beer’] for 3-5k dong. The beer is brewed daily and fermented over incredibly brief periods of time before being served en masse on the same child-sized stools in use throughout the city. It’s not the best beer and it’s almost impossible for a Westerner to get drunk from it, but it’s cold, fizzy, and refreshing. More like beer-flavored soda than anything else, it’s not bad at all.

The English-speakers wind down the night sipping beer with a rotating cast of characters. They meet a Frenchman named Gallad. Is that a typical French name? No, he admits, his mother was just very into the legend of King Arthur. Ron teaches English in Hanoi, committed to never returning to England. He won’t explain why. A pair of Filipino men delight in the origami Matt folds for the wandering beggars and the old women running the unofficial beer halls. The men accept paper models and stories in exchange for buying the group several more rounds late into the night.

Sometime before eleven o’clock there’s a commotion from the main corner. The old woman who runs the shop quickly indicates everyone should finish or hide their drinks. She wordlessly enlists them to help stack the small stools and deposit them in her closet-sized shop. Other shop owners follow suit and in fifteen seconds the streets are appreciably more open. Stone-faced men in jungle green uniforms mill about in the void.

Hanoi, the seat of communist Vietnam, is under a curfew and these men seek to enforce it. They bark indecipherable commands at the store owners and firmly shove the drunker patrons off the main roads. The old woman serving the Filipinos and their backpacker friends look on. Conversation is hushed.

There is that feeling you get when you’re about two-thirds of the way through a movie and everything is going just perfectly: you know something bad is about to happen. That’s just the way this works.

But the police disperse without major incident. The volume returns to a normal level. The tension is soothed away with cold bia hoi.

“They’ll be back at actual curfew,” Hannah notes.

Matt suggests this be their last beer of the night. Only the entertained Filipinos object to this and they’re quickly overruled.

Hannah leads her two wards home, being far more familiar with the locale than the boys. The night is comfortable, though the streets are only partially lit. Pools of light reflect and sluice down and around the thin, oddly-angled streets. That herald of Vietnamese life, the motorbike, is scarcely seen and cars are even sparser.

It’s a shock when an unlit pickup truck blows through an intersection a couple feet in front of them.

“Hey, use your lights, asshole!” Matt calls after the darkened vehicle, shaking his fist.

“Shhhh!” Hannah’s eyes show alarm for the first time today. “Those are police trucks!”

“Police trucks?”

“Yeah, you don’t want to mess with police out here,” Alex cautions.

Sheesh, Hanoi certainly is different. First a curfew and now covert policing? Looking more closely, the once-revelers can just make out the twin rows of never-ending Vietnamese flags that line the streets. They’re hung to drape just above street traffic and are posted every fifteen feet or so. Everywhere.

The endless flags are plain to see up and down the length of Phố Hàng Gà [‘Chicken Market Street’], one of the main roads. It also happens to be the street on which their hostel is located. Such a main drag is popular enough that it’s seldom as abandoned as the back alleys.

But full of BBQ and bia hoi as they are, the group has no trouble falling asleep over the sounds of racing motorbikes on the streets below.

Alex, sitting on a tree overlooking a lake in The Old District