Sunday 18 January 2015

A love letter to RAY QUAN: The restaurant on the Railway.

In Hanoi, there exists a place that couldn't be conceived of in the West. It's a restaurant which involves one walking over functioning railway tracks to enter. And that's the only entrance.

My favourite of all nights to go there is a Sunday night. There exists a kind of reckless abandon of the upcoming week: "to HELL with Monday!" we say, gulping another shot of artichoke rice wine while a train bellows past us.

Tonight was special. It was a friend's birthday. I was late. I arrived into a cacophony of girls gyrating to female pop stars, while the young Vietnamese male waiters wore an expression of utter befuddlement, filming the whole thing in disbelief on their phones.

We danced for the next couple of hours, on tables, waving, clapping. More girls joined us. Boys sat on the sidelines. Two small kids stood nervously near, we invited them to join in, and they proceeded to out do us all with their dance skills, with knee-dives on the floor, swirls and shimmying galore.

I left and the party was still continuing, and as I looked across at Ray Quan from the other side of the tracks, I took a photo to remember this night forever.


Tuesday 6 January 2015

riding through electro-village in hanoi

today myself and Brett went on a mission to buy some new cables in Hanoi.

this task involved finding electronics street, which we knew the vague area of.

what we didn't anticipate was that nearby electronics street is electro-village (motorbikes and bicycles can pass through here - only).

as we blazed through electro-village I became overwhelmed with the feeling that I was trapped inside a computer game motorbike race where my task was to find cable shop.

we whizzed past other shops selling LEDs, disco balls, feather-lights, electronic buddhas, battery stalls... each selling endlessly similar products and being overwhelmed with very few customers.

I was thinking - if you landed in Hanoi, on this street, from a spacecraft, you would think that Hanoi was a techno-party-city-central capital of Asia. what I'd really like to know is, when do people go to these crazy parties in this city which calls for the purchasing of all this neon gear?

anyway we eventually made it to the other side of the cramped village, and scored 10 points for our team. WINWIN.

Sunday 4 January 2015

2015

so after a huge hiatus of not ever writing or blogging, i've come back to the world of online self-revelation.

this is because:
a) i'm inspired by zenhabits.com - it's such a good blog, and he always talks about how much he's learnt and how opportunities have come to him just through starting a blog.

b) i want to get better at writing.

c) i want to remember my time in hanoi better - it's been 2 years already which have slipped by without much reflection.

d) i like my old budapest-blog, and that was just 6 months of time! it has helped a lot for me to describe experiences of living there just because i kept a record of it through the blog.

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so Hanoi. I can't explain what has happened in 2 years, and with the adaptation to living here, it's hard to even remember what things I felt when I first came, so I will just talk about things that are happening now and in the present.