Bui Vien

Bui Vien is the street on which my hostel in Saigon was located. It is also apparently backpacker central. There were positives and negatives to this. On the downside, there are people everywhere very aggressively trying to sell you things. But the upsides were that this area caters to people who have no idea what they are doing, and there are plenty of westerners around to talk to. On my walk into town I didn't see a single westerner until I got within a couple blocks of here.

Every night of the week this street packs full of people. Every inch of sidewalk is covered with plastic chairs and tables, nearly all of them filled, and every single storefront seems to open up to sell beers for fifty cents to a dollar. Vendors walk down the streets selling peanuts, hard-boiled quail eggs, unripe mango with some kind of spicy salt, and lots of dried squid (though I never actually saw anyone buy one of those).

My last night in Saigon I was having dinner in an alley off Bui Vien and a few westerners sat down right next to me. Their names were Scott, Simon, and Hubert. Scott was a sort of a dorky, chubby, middle-aged guy with the haircut of a mid-nineties pop-punk singer. He's a Californian, whose profession I never learned, but he is married to a Vietnamese woman. Hubert was a Dutch gardener. He was also about the friendliest person I've ever met--just full of joy and kindness. Simon was an aging punk rocker with a deep love of the Dead Kennedys, and was really fucked up at the beginning of the night. He was mostly silent save for bursts of out-of-tune singing and a deep, round, cartoonish laugh. He and Scott left for a while and he was more sober on their return--still prone to out-of-tune bursts of song, but it was interspersed with dialogue, and I could understand now the connection between his singing and the conversation.

Scott and Simon didn't stay out too long, but Hubert and I ended up hanging out late enough to give both of us a solid hangover for our respective bus trips the next day. The picture below is of Hubert and a boy that we bought some gum from.

Well, I suppose I shouldn't say that we bought gum from him. He came over to sell us some gum, and when we gave him the money he took off, only to come back a few minutes later and sit with us a while. But still no exchange of gum. He was very fond of pouring our beers and then trying to get us to drink for as long as he counted. After I took the picture of him he borrowed my camera and took literally six hundred photos, some of them quite nice. The other two photos in this post are his. He took about thirty photos of that guy's Irving jersey, most of them from about one inch away.