Matt sits in the Eco Hostel lounge in Ho Chi Minh City, staring at the Vietnamese-translated Korean soap opera playing on the small LCD bolted to the wall. He’s waiting for one of his dorm mates, Carlijn, to come back downstairs so they can head out. Next to him, his newfound British friend sits as well, both hungry for dinner (though the Brit waits for ‘tea’, since his ‘dinner’ would be what Americans call ‘lunch’). They’re going to going to Ốc Tre Một, a local seafood restaurant that Matt’s sleeper car friend Thắng had invited them to.

Complicating matters of narrative, the Brit’s name is also Matt.

“And you’re sure there’ll be something I can eat there?” British Matt asks. “I can do some fish filets, but you know I’m none too keen on seafood like squid and mussels and such.” He makes tentacles of his fingers and a grimace of his face.

“Yeah man,” American Matt reassures him. “What sort of seafood place wouldn’t have regular fish and other stuff too?” Though, truth be told, he’s still wondering why Thắng had made a point about asking if they were okay with seafood in his Facebook messages. Twice.

“You know,” American Matt continues, “if I’m going to write about you–when I’m going to write about you–it’s gonna get confusing or annoying if I keep having to write ‘British Matt’ and then ‘American Matt’ or something every time.” He’d already explained his blog in the days that they’ve known each other and has even let his temporary roommate read a bit of the next draft he’s been working on.

“You could just use my last name or something?” the other Matt suggests.

“Nah, I’m trying not to do that, trying to keep it just a bit more anonymous.” He thinks for a second. “Maybe I’ll just call you ‘Other Matt’?”

Other Matt shrugs. “Whatever you want. It’s your blog.”

“But that could get annoying too, though, because it’s still ‘Matt’ and ‘Other Matt’, still a lot of ‘Matt’s over and over.” Matt thinks a bit more. “You ever wonder if maybe we could get a different nickname out of ‘Matthew’?”

“Like what?”

“Like the whole other half of our name! Take away the first part, ‘Matt’, and what are you left with?”

“…’Thew’?”

“‘Hew’, man! It’s just ‘Hugh’! That’s a whole other name right there! But every time I try and use it, nobody believes me. I always get a ‘you don’t look like a Hugh’ or something.” Matt lowers his voice. “You know what I think it is? I think it’s that all the other Hughs out there are British. Hugh Grant? Hugh Laurie? I just don’t have the accent to pull it off.” He leans back into the battered leather sofa.

“What… about Hugh Jackman?”

“Good point, but he’s Australian, which is kind of the same thing.”

“And Hugh Hefner?”

“American, alright, but the guy’s like eighty. Contemporary Hughs are all foreigners.”

Matt-Hugh chuckles. “Sure, whatever you want.” He’s been affable from the second they’d met three days ago.

* * *

Matt looks up from his laptop where he’s sending off some Facebook messages on his hostel bed. He meets the eyes of a just-arrived backpacker talking to his bunkmate Carljin, whom he had met yesterday upon getting into the southern city.

“Hey there, I’m Matt,” the new arrival says in a Northern English accent and extending a hand forward.

“Oh hey, that’s my line,” an American accent replies. “I’m also Matt.”

They shake hands from across his hostel bed.

The other side of the handshake belongs to a twenty-six year old, backpacking through Southeast Asia from Leeds, England. A lanky and pale (though tanning!) young man with a head of short-ish brown-blonde hair, he fits the bill as a Brit. And in a faded cotton tank top and shorts with a face textured with sandy stubble that gets a bit patchy in the cheeks, he certainly embodies the description of an English traveler in this part of the world.

He’s been traveling with his friend Becca from home (“Really, just a friend”) and a young man named Jack they’d met a few weeks back. Becca and Jack had instant chemistry and she, only just out of a serious relationship, seems all too eager to move on to someone new. The new-found couple has since taken to spending most of their time with only each other, however, even going so far as to check into a different hostel at the other end of the neighborhood. So the excluded Matt is on the prowl for some new travel partners for the time being, maybe for the rest of his trip. He shrugs knobby shoulders. Such is customary for life on the road: you’re with someone for as long as you share common itineraries and interests and when those dwindle, there’s no other choice but to move on.

This morning’s seen the cotton-clad Englishman’s introduction to Carlijn, with whom he finds conversation flows easily. An athletic young woman with a pale and delicate face ringed with heavy brown curls, Carlijn is from the Amsterdam area. She does marketing writing back home, though her true passion is in real writing, writing things she cares about. She wants to start a nutrition and fitness blog, but would prefer almost anything other than the insistent and lifeless copywriting for business websites and ad spots. She’s taking some time off for a few months to travel for a bit before heading back home to her boyfriend Rob.

About an hour later, the Matts find themselves alone, standing in the bathroom getting ready for the day.

Matt from Yorkshire is having some slight reservations about his new acquaintance. “Is that water brown?” he asks around the toothbrush and foam jutting from his mouth.

Matt from New York doesn’t look up. He just lifts his shirt out and begins wringing it dry. “Yeap,” he says and finally pulls his gaze from the murky porcelain of the plugged up sink he’s using to do his laundry. “Don’t you do your laundry in the sink?”

“Nah, I do regular laundry when I need it. Or,” he plucks at his Chang-emblazoned sleeveless shirt, “I just buy a new one of these every so often. They’re like eighty pence each.”

Laundry Matt shrugs. “When you’re traveling as long as I am, and are as sweaty as I tend to get, you gotta do your wash in the sink. I quit my job in back in July and have been backpacking Asia since September.”

“Nice one, I’ve been traveling since July, too!” He spits into the other, empty sink and rinses his mouth and brush. “Quit my job handling banking complaints,” the sandy blonde hides a minor cringe, “and hopped a flight two weeks later. Been in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia so far, and now going north through Vietnam.”

“Just like that? No planning or anything?”

“Just like that, no planning or anything.” English Matt grins.

* * *

“We should’ve planned better, maybe?” Carljin suggests. “Maybe the taxi wasn’t the faster choice?” It’s taken them fifteen minutes in a crooked cab and then another forty-five minutes of marching through the snarl of the city, constantly asking for directions or a lick of WiFi.

“Wow, this place is huge,” Hugh breathes. He’s looking up at the neon signage above them that reads Ốc Tre Một, insane accent marks and all. They’ve found it.

“Now, to find Thắng,” Matt says, rubbings his hands together and taking steps with renewed vigor into the sprawling, open air restaurant.

Tables upon tables cover the distance between pillars, and half-walls are the only things between the invariably Vietnamese diners and the streetside. Thắng is sitting at none of them.

After fruitless searching, the weary travelers resign themselves to ordering/pantomiming a couple of semi-random dishes from the broken-English menus and non-English-speaking waitstaff. Matt connects to the WiFi and shoots off a picture of them under the restaurant’s sign in a last desperate attempt to meet up with his local host.

The bottles of Beer Saigon (Saigon being the original name for Ho Chi Minh City) taste empty and flat without their hosts in a way that is only half to do with the fact that it’s Southern Vietnam’s cheapest brew. The green logo’d bottles leave plenty of room for a plate of sauteed beef that slides onto their table. It looks as drab and disappointed as the Westerners.

Suddenly, “Hello!” comes from the side. “Matt?!” calls a clearly Vietnamese accent. But it’s not the man he’d met on the train, it’s someone new. This man has glasses, the thick black rims framing his face well. They match his straight black hair, full and hanging just over the tips of his ears. When he smiles, which he does often (or more appropriately, bursts into uproarious laughter), his teeth gleam and the laughter becomes infectious.

The young man introduces himself as ‘Bach’, like the composer though he has nothing to do with music. He’s Thắng’s friend. After a quick chat with the serving staff (who’d quickly picked up his communicable laughter), he leads the foreigners over to another of the restaurant’s massive table warehouse-like seating areas, one they’d assumed belonged to a neighboring establishment.

“Thắng!” Matt exclaims, finally recognizing a face among the sea of strangers.

“Matt!” he calls back, no less excited or relieved.

It’s 7:30pm, an hour and a half later than their originally scheduled dinner time.

When his guests have taken a seat at the table scattered with half-eaten plates of food and a few green-labeled cans, Thắng bids them to eat. “Eat,” he says, displaying some monstrously large baked oysters covered in melted cheese and basil leaves. His vocabulary hasn’t improved much in the last few days.

This isn’t a problem, since Bach’s English is top notch. “These are oyster,” he points. “These are prawn,” and he hands over skewers of equally overgrown prawns, at least seven inches long.

“Thank you,” Hugh looks around for the waiters that Bach had promised would be bringing the beef dish. “I don’t want any oysters or prawns though.”

“Come on!” Matt urges, accepting the stony half-shell. “When are you ever going to be able to try some authentic Vietnamese seafood like this again?”

“Hopefully never.” He’s firm.

But Carlijn eggs him on, along with the rest of the table, and the squeamish Englishman relents and eats the oysters. A bit briny, a bit cheesy, they taste quite good, though Hugh only gets through half of his before pushing it aside.

The hosts raise their glass mugs and their guests find that servers have put mugs of their own before them. Each one has a large cylinder of ice in it, a necessity in this area of the world (as much for keeping the beer cold as to water it down for nightly stints of binge drinking).

“Twenty-five percent!” Thắng belts out in unusually pristine pronunciation after waiting for the guest’s glasses to be topped up with beer. He looks at his friend expectantly.

Bach explains. “Person who raises glass, he say ten, twenty-five, fifty percent and everybody drink that much.” Another grin. “Twenty-five percent!”

Carlijn laughs and takes her time as the men race to be the first one done drinking a quarter of their beer.

Bach introduces himself a little better to the group by showing off one of his talents. “You like magic?” he asks, reaching into his pockets.

“Magic?” The Dutch woman is intrigued.

“Yes!” he beams. “Two regular elastic bands, yes?” He demonstrates the normalcy of the rubber bands by pulling them between his fingers. They’re the kind that might be used to keep a small styrofoam takeout container closed.

“Yeah, sure, normal,” Hugh confirms.

“Okay. One.” The magician flexes them against each other, one band between the thumb and index finger of each of his hands. “Two.” Another flex. His hands move away from each other, the bands unchanged. “Three!” and on this flex when he pulls his hands away, the bands stretch, as they’re now intertwined, seemingly moved right through each other to do so.

“Brilliant!” Hugh bursts, the others just as loudly amused.

Bach proceeds to delight his guests with more tricks with rubber bands, coins, and other demonstrations of sleight of hand. He even teaches them that first trick of linking the bands, though none of his new apprentices can pull it off deftly enough to make it look convincing.

Matt and Hugh thank Thắng for not only inviting them here, but for bringing such a great co-host.

“Guys,” Carlijn gets gets their attention not looking up from Bach’s smart phone. She’s discovered Bach’s perhaps greatest ‘trick’ of them all, “he’s got forty-six thousand followers on Facebook!”

They all confirm it on the screen and Bach’s face splits into another huge smile. More laughing. More congratulating and thanking.

And then come the prawns.

Matt is beginning to peel his when Thắng starts talking to him in Vietnamese and Bach nods and translates. “No, no peel. Just bite.”

“This whole thing? Like, legs and all?” Matt’s incredulous. He usually doesn’t even like it when their tails are still attached, let alone the rest.

“Yes,” Bach nods, grinning.

“Like, even this head part?”

“Yes!” Bach takes a toothy bite out of an imagined prawn in his hands.

Matt freezes, eyeing the roasted orange creature before him. The legs look sharp, the dull black eyes soggy, but hey, when will he have an opportunity to try some authentic Vietnamese food like this?

Crunch.

“‘Ey, tha’s pre’y goo’” Matt admits through a mouthful of crackling and oozing crustacean.

Bach and Thắng beam. Carlijn looks on, somewhere between shocked and impressed.

Hugh’s lips, nose, and eyebrows pull back in unison. “You’re crazy, mate.” He sets about peeling his prawn, shaking his head.

The more adventurous eater swallows. “You just gotta watch out for the legs, because they’re kind of pointy. Otherwise, it’s fine. Like a… shrimpy potato chip.” He leans over for another bite, but pauses momentarily. “With legs and a brain and stuff inside.” Another crunch.

A local man staggers over, his face as red as if he’d been slapped for hours out in the sun. He drapes one arm over Carlijn’s chair, the other over Bach’s. He slurs something, overjoyed to be sharing this with them.

“He say,” Bach the nexus between the two cultures interprets, “he happy to see foreigners here. He say he never see them here. Here is his favorite place!” He turns back to the man, they exchange some words and laughs and the stranger stumbles off back to his table.

From the kitchen yet another waitress bustles out over to them, a steaming plate held before her. For all his distaste with the prawns, when the roasted sea snails arrive, Hugh lets himself be goaded into take a small, two-tined fork and spool out the slug, longer than any of the Westerners had imagined it’d be.

He pauses with the grey-green creature suspended in front of him. “We eat this?”

Matt isn’t listening, already dipping his in some chili sauce (no need to go full-snail-connoisseur) and eats the entire squishy, somewhat dry “morsel”. “It tastes kind of metallic…” He chews slowly.

Carlijn takes a bite, but soon pulls back her head and scrunches her nose. No, she doesn’t like sea-snails. After a few chews of his own Hugh drops his fork and grabs his beer.

Their Vietnamese hosts reach for their beers as well, toasting the effort. “Twenty-five percent!”

“Sod that,” Hugh gags. “Fifty percent!”

The locals take it as a challenge. “One hundred percent!” They make no move on their glasses, eyeing the Westerners.

“We can do a hundred percent?” Hugh realizes the potential for abuse immediately. “One hundred percent!” and he begins chugging.

As does everyone. Again and again around more plates of seafood, even a poached whole fish heated at the table with small burners lit for the special dish. Soon another bucket of cans floating in ice water is brought out. Matt and Hugh, eyeing the flushed cheeks of their hosts stop toasting and merely sit and drink in the backdrop of the evening.

Hugh gets up to find the bathroom while Matt cracks open another can, one of more than a half-dozen littered on their side of the table. Thắng leans over, grinning and hoping to catch them in the act of drinking bravado, but his expression freezes when he picks up the first can. It’s empty. He lifts a second, also empty. A third, a fourth, a fifth, checked in quick succession, but all of them are empty. His eyes go wide. Matt shrugs.

“You won’t believe these kids over there,” Hugh says when he returns, gesturing at a nearby table of teenagers. “They flagged me down, gave me a glass of beer and toasted twenty-five percent. I gave them a look and said a hundred percent.” He laughs at the recent memory. “The look they gave me while I stared them down, just downing it!”

Thắng, too, is simply staring, his cheeks flushed and a smile wobbling on his face. He might not have understood the entire story, but he’s certainly able to understand the periodic attention of the restaurant’s staff having to come to clear empty cans from their plastic picnic-clothed table.

At the end of the night (approximately 5,000 percent of Beer Saigon and many dishes of assorted seafood later), the travelers have to bid farewell and return to the hostel and their beds. Thắng has given up matching his guests on drinks, content and swaying in his chair. He starts for a second when he sees the bill, yet quickly pulls out his wallet and thumbs through some notes.

“Oh, yeah, how much do we owe?” Hugh asks, reaching into his own shorts.

“No, no,” Bach waves them off, leaning over the bill with his friend. “It is our job to pay.”

Matt eyes the bucket that now only holds a gallon or two of melted ice. He surveys the table of scattered plates, sauces, and crumpled napkins. He inches over to get a better look at the bill: 1.4 million dong (~$70). “There’s no way we’re letting you pay for everything!”

Thắng looks upset and Bach explains. “In Vietnam custom, it is rude for us to invite you and not pay for dinner.”

“In our culture,” Hugh counters, “it’s rude for us to come out and rack up a bill and not pay for dinner.”

“No, please, let us pay.”

Carlijn touches the magician lightly on the arm. “Please, let us give you something,” she begs.

Bach and Thắng have a heated discussion, but in the end the Westerners are allowed to contribute 500,000 dong to offset what was likely a week’s wages for the two locals. In return, the pair refuse to let them pay for their ride to their dorm, and hail and pay their driver before they can even got inside.

In the cab, Hugh shakes his head. The edges of his face dance with the tail lights of the never-ending motorbikes whizzing by. “The customs out here are crazy sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” Matt asks, watching the city stream past his window.

The baked oysters (and ice-filled mugs on the left)

Yes, you eat 100% of this

The dinner crew: (from left) Hugh, Carlijn, Bach, Thắng, Matt
So much for anonymity!