I've moved to a permanent site that's mine and mine alone. 

Please check it out:  sweetchuckyb.com

See you there.



Charlie

Amused To Death

If your children aren't wracked with fear and completely misinformed about historical events, you aren't doing your job.  Fortunately, there are places in Vietnam that do the heavy lifting for you.  Time is money and those precious hours you waste popping wheelies while your unhelmeted child does a soft shoe on the seat behind you (I'm talking to you, Vietnamese parents) could be spent drinking to forget your lies and actions (or drinking to forget the truth and your inaction; whichever sets your whiskey arm a-itchin' more).

Remember all those times you didn't reverse Earth's rotation to fix shit?  Keep drinking, Super-jerk.

Đầm Sen Adventure Park is a place to take your kids when the child's blood-drinking demons that live in the ceiling-cracks above your bed cease to be fooled by rodent's claret.  Between the rickety roller coasters, the haunted house that's a legit threat to life and limb and the whiplash-inducing bumper cars, you're sure to leave this joint light a kid or two.

As a favor to you, dear reader, I took one for the team and threw myself on the Đầm Sen funeral pyre (better me than you).  I took children who, not being blood relatives, were more or less expendable.  Our first stop was the haunted house.  I'll admit that the pitch-black rooms, spray-painted particle board and misshapen foam skeletons struck fear deep into the cholesterol-choked recesses of my heart, but it was purely from an ADA stand-point.  Once in the haunted house, there is no way to discern which way is forward.  Cold, sharp steel stairs leap at your shins from the darkness, broken broom sticks abandoned carelessly against non-functioning railings lunge at your testicles (or maybe your ovaries; I don't know how ladies organize their bits).  As you grope along the walls like some disgustingly crippled unsighted person,

Jodie Foster will never love you, mortal!

you find yourself confronted at regular intervals
by vignettes illuminated with strobe lights.  Each scene tells a "story."  For example: 'And then there was an old lady who was a skeleton who sat in a chair while lights flashed on her!' or 'And then a man sat in a chair in front of a skeleton having a seizure while lights flash on them both' or 'And then a skeleton laid upon a table while lights flashed everywhere!'.  Riveting stuff.  Mostly skeleton-based tales, admittedly, but still there's a lot of meat there.  Thinking about the brainstorming process for the haunted house is actually pretty depressing:

Đầm Sen's spokesman is a cockroach.  No joke.  

"So... what's scary?"  says the sweaty president of the theme park (who looks like a partially sentient meatloaf).

"Skeletons and strobe lights, sir?"  squeaks out the small, meal-sized assistant.

"Right you are.  Promotions for everybody," the fat man says, licking his chops/jowls as he heaves his corpulence within eating-distance of the smaller, weaker underling.  Wheezing, Tons-O'-Fun whispers,"...promotions for every... burger," and then there are only wet breathing noises and the sound meatloaf sweating.  

                              ~fin~

This is the CliffsNotes version of The Catcher In The Rye

Even if you don't hate your children enough to cripple or kill them, you certainly want them to be confused about well-known historical facts; the educational dinosaur ride in Đầm Sen seamlessly combines authoritative-looking charts, informative diagrams, dragons and cave men in a single place thus skull-fucking scientific progress back into the dark ages, because kids are total idiots, right?  They believe everything you say!  Bumbling poltroons!  

Pictured: moron

Why should you clean your room?  Well, idiot, because Jesus is magic and he will tear off your face while cooking Mr. Kitty with his heat vision if you don't.  Now go to the gas station and get daddy some menthols and a Mickey's Big Mouth.








Did you read about how Brontosauruses aren't dinosaurs anymore?  Yeah.  That shit's real.  It was a bone mix-up by some overzealous archaeologist somewhere.  I totally loved brontosauruses.  Maybe you did, too, but that train ride's over, junior.  They're all apatosauruses, now. 

I'm as real as Jesus and the brontosaurus behind me

 
The dinosaur ride is meant to be a thrilling, terrifying experience.  If you're 6, you'll scream and bury your head in your teacher's armpit.  Smell that, kid?  It's Old Spice, now stop huffing all my classy, expensive deodorant fumes.

If you're not 6, you'll herniate yourself laughing at the rubbery seizures of foam dinosaur after foam dinosaur.  Here's a conversation that the ride designers had: 

Guy 1: "Do you think- like, during the Jurassic period- that dinosaurs' eyes flashed red and blue while they head-banged to pre-recorded, digitally distorted screams of bats being crushed underneath, like, car tires or whatever?"

Dinosaurs were neon, yeah?

Guy 2: "They better have, otherwise people will totally not believe they're having sex with real dinosaurs."

Guy 1: "Well, yeah... wait.  Did you say 'having sex'?"

Guy 2: "Totally, dude.  The world's most extraordinary prehistoric sexual odyssey and we are right here in the epicenter crafting the fuck-dolls."

Guy 1:  "No, man.  This is a kids' ride."

Guy 2:  "..."

Guy 1:  "You mean, you thought..."

Guy 2:  "You will shut the fuck up.  I got this foam-rubber dick rash for nothing.  For nothing.  Get me those porcelain ducks.  I'm gonna make a wet, vengeful mess of those non-dinosaur-fucking, pre-pubescent shits' understanding of prehistory."

Excuse the quality of these pictures; I'm taller than intended for the ride and dinosaurs/gently vibrating dumps kept head-butting me:

Porcelain ducks.  The Jurassic period.  Together at last.

This dinosaur hit me in the face

Vibrating dentures

This foam turd also hit me in the face

Corky the Dinosaur

Here are some non-life threatening highlights:

Kind of like The Galleon, for those of you who know a thing about Adventureland

Exactly like The Galleon, for those of you who know a thing about Adventureland

The Udder Queen's dead eyes will follow you until you stop being a coward and kill yourself

Đầm Sen is quite pretty from the right angle

Check this mess out: there's an attraction called Ice Lantern (they may have meant "cavern," but we'll never know); it's a giant refrigerator for Vietnamese people to experience cold, because they think the mid 60s (F) is freezing.  It's a warehouse kept at a brisk -15 C (without any wind that's just long-sleeve shirt weather) and filled with ice sculptures of famous places.  There's a giant Buddha and an ice train and an Ice-fel Tower (I thought of that, France.  Me.  You're welcome).  It's all quite pretty.  I took pictures on my phone of everybody kickin' it.  Check't:

Fuckin' cool, right?

Science Discovers Trashcan Made From Pure Ice!

It's just like being in Paris, if Paris were inside a cold-storage unit and crowded with Wonders Of The World crafted from ice. 

This is supposed to be a princess.  She's cold, emotionless and utterly disinterested in my well-being and somewhere in the middle of this sentence I got an erection. What's wrong with me, Gob?

The kiddos praying to an ice Buddha.  Kids doing things is probably cute.

The kids were blown away by the Ice Lantern.  Nhi was like, "Mr. Charlie, I can't feel my nose and fingers!" and she started panicking.  It's weird to think that there are people who really do not know what it's like to be cold.  Coming from middle-America, that shit's older than the oldest of hat.  She went on to learn the words, "numb" and "circulation" that day.  Everybody wins! 

Somewhere towards the beginning of this blog, you probably asked yourself, "What do snail eggs look like?"  Well, wonder no more, friend:

Snails bone and they get a nice centerpiece for the dining room tables.  All I ever get are tears and tense drives to Planned Parenthood

There's a roller-rink buried deep within the bowels of Đầm Sen Park. This is the first evidence of roller-skating I've seen in Saigon and is precisely what one would expect from Vietnam.  The floors are cracked and uneven, there are suicidal "fun" features placed randomly around the rink and everyone rents skates in order to stand around and prevent others from moving freely or enjoying the fun, "skating" part of skating (it's a lot like the road situation in this country, really). 

These skates were as uncomfortable as they were broke-ass'd. 

The only people who knew how to skate were the three folks who ran the skating counter.  Every other person at the rink toddled around like a dog trying to hump an imaginary leg.  It was a bit surreal.  However, given the condition of the rink, I don't blame suckers for not knowing how to skate. 

Pictured: the rink closing for lunch.

Having experienced the well-upkept conditions at the roller-rink, I was ready to really spit in death's eye, so the kids and I moseyed on over to the roller coaster.

The lack of lines inspired confidence in the part of me that wants to die

I've ridden on some pretty funky-looking, carny-maintained rides, but god'am I've never seen anything so shoddy in my entire life.  

When, "Made In China," is meant to inspire confidence, it isn't a question of if you're going to die, but rather in what terrible, limb-rending fashion your death will occur

As you mount the ride platform, you're ushered into seats where you wait for the coaster to complete its previous run.  This gives you time to really feel the weight of life and death; you know, to roll it around and get a taste for the gravity of your decisions up to this point.  Aside from the fact that the term "Vietnamese Roller-Coaster" sounds like a euphamism for a sex act that ends in a quasi-planned strangling death, being at the precipice of one is a sure way to induce Existential Crisis. 

This is what a Dark Night Of The Soul looks like. 

In all fairness, the ride was pretty okay.  There were several times that the metal screamed as if its tensile strength was being pushed to the very edge of its tolerance.  There were several times that the cars clanked to the right and left as if they were getting ready to leap from rails.  There were several times that the two sizes too small restraints seemed ready to fail.  But, when the kids jumped out of the car at the end and screamed, "That was so flipping awesome, can we go again?!?!" I was more than willing.  I mean, them properly using "flipping" and "awesome" makes me prouder than almost anything I've ever done in my life.  You keep up that fluent English and I'll buy a bridge in New York from you, munchkins. 

After the coaster, we hit the bumper cars.  Unless your spine is made from adamantium, you might want to skip this one.  It's funner'n hell, but only because you can get enough momentum to really fuck up the life of that small Asian child who rear-ended you 30 seconds ago. 

"Why're you in a wheelchair?" has never had a funnier answer.

After the bumper cars, we hit three ice cream stands in a row (ice cream's a quarter, for fuck's sake!) and walked around until munchkins started whining. 

Despite not bearing the "Eat It All" instruction set that Americans cones have, Kev-o was able to work out what to do with his ice cream cone.

It's that peace sign thing that Asian people are genetically required to do.

Before leaving, we visited a merry-go-round and this weird ride-type thing for shorties.  It made frog noises and went up and down waaaaay too fast for children's fragile necks. 

I can't hear you over the snapping of juvenile vertebrae.

This young couple put their 4 year old on the ride and the kid didn't have sufficient neck-strength to support his head.  He head-banged harder than I have ever seen a living human head bang, and I remember the 90s.  His mom and dad laughed like a clown had just farted and then exploded in front of them.  I assume that they belong to some cult that finds brain-swelling funny. 

Here's a picture of the older munchkins on the way out:

We're out and done, yo. 

I'd definitely go to Đầm Sen again. It's like surviving a car crash.  It's like waking up as Raymond K. Hessel.  It's like punching Gob in the nuts and daring him to kill you.  If you like adventure and your life is cheap, I recommend you, too, take a trip to Đầm Sen.  Make sure you bring a spare change of diapers and your wits; you're gonna need 'em.



That's a blog!

Powerless In The Face Of Doughnuts

DOUGHNUTS!

Or "donuts".  Whatever.  If you want American doughnuts in Saigon, you should probably pull the blinds and dust off your Smiths records.  Your future's gonna involve some smeared mascara and disappointment. 

Unless... [80s record-scratch noise]

That pristine vinyl copy of Hall & Oates' H2O is ruined, but DonutMan's smile makes it worth it

There's this sweet joint up on 33 Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai in District 1 called, Fresh Donuts. I can't guarantee their freshness (though, I'll stake my reputation on their flyness), but they certainly taste potable-ish.  It's like being all up in a Donutland, which only means something to you if you're from Iowa.  If you're not, I pity you and you should probably take a second to go look in a mirror and shake your head back and forth while tsk-tsk'ing.  Donutland's Facebook page is as confusing as a convincing drag queen and only slightly more difficult to get straight answers from.  So, you can look 'em up and try to get a feel for what their doughnuts were like in those bygone days of redundant yore, but you're probably gonna end up disappointed and guilted into a sex-act that you'll only speak of later in the most abstract of terms. 

Fresh Donuts is fucking great.  I can't tell you how long it's been since I had a passable powder doughnut.  Vietnam is good at a lot of some things, but doughnuts traditionally aren't one of them.  Most doughnuts here have meat on them.  Like, they're rolled in bacon crunchies or smeared with fish glands or ensconced in spicy chicken nuts and then glazed with chocolate-ish sauce (if you consider muddy wax a sauce) and, if you're not diabetic yet, sprinkled with sprinkles. 

Comas are for people too lazy to die

But Fresh Donuts is different.  They get points upfront for having doughnut names that don't look like they were choked-out of Google translate with a turducken Double Down daisy-chain.  "Chocolate Do-nut" says one sign, "Bismarck with milk filling" says another.  I can wrap my brain around what they're spraying there.  They got them jelly-filled, they got them Boston Cremes, they got them Bear Claws, they got them Bismarcks, and they even got them Donut-Holes.  Shit's fire.  Powdered, sugary, creme-filled fire.

They ain't perfect, though.  Their coffee totally sucks; it tastes like a diarrhetic, battery-eating camel's taint-squeezings.  Their water is doughnut-flavored (what?), but they do right by the doughnuts and with a doughnut shop, that's all that matters.
I'm serious about the doughnut-flavored water, too.   That's a really good idea for getting fat kids to exercise.  Fat kids are an untapped market with all sorts of growth potential.  I firmly believe that every aspect of life and living should be turned into a commodity in order to generate profit because I'm an asshole who should kill himself. 

This kid's lunch is packed.

If I think too hard about how the doughnut-flavor got into the excessive-even-for-me amount of water I drank at Fresh Donuts that day, my gag reflex starts kicking-in, so I'm gonna stop.  Point being, if you're in the tri-county area, you should get your ass all up ins some Fresh Donuts.  Just don't drink the water (unless you like that sort of thing).  Here are some pictures of the Fresh Donuts and my tutoring kids:

60% of Children are happy with my tutelage

"Fresh delicious every day," is what that shit says.  You're welcome.

Anyway, Fresh Donuts.  33 Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai in District 1.  If you don't get a full-on robot chubby from their doughnutty gravitas, I'll have some evil robot usses go back in time and kill me before I write this blog entry.  Everybody wins! 

So, check it out. Fresh Donuts is definitely worth a visit if you've got a deep-fried yen for fat-soaked, sugar-dusted dough.  Word.

Paging Dr. Loggins

You wouldn't know this (unless you do), but whenever ex-pats in 'Nam get together they inevitably bitch about traffic.  Bitch, bitch, bitch.  Seriously, it's like idiots back home talking about the weather or football scores or some shit like this.  I'd never engage in that sort of mindless, bullshit chit-chat. 

I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake

Top 5 Stupidest Fucking Things About Saigon Traffic

5)  They'll Let Any Jawa Operate A Motor-Vehicle Out Here.

 Marketing has everybody chasing unachievable ideals.  You can't sell shit to people that are satisfied.  Light-skinned people gotta be darker and dark-skinned people gotta be lighter.  To work on that unachievable lightness of being, Vietnamese women don't let any skin show when they're out in the sun.  They also spend millions of Đồng every year on bleaching and whitening tinctures, salves, balms and poltices. 

Fortunately, Westerners are far too clever to fall prey to such primitive marketing schemes

They also swaddle themselves in some pretty heinous clothing.  If fashion were a religion, Veitnamese women's driving outfits would be hate crimes.  The rub is that most (if not all) skin-protecting clothing doubles on sax as blinders.  Seriously, they wear these embarassingly floppy hats, Jackie-O sunnies and these weird, Michael Jackson face mask/ear and neck-covering things.  When you strap a helmet down over that shit, the hat's floppitude creates this weird tunnel, effectively obliterating one's peripheral vision.
 

This dude knows what I'm jibber-jabbering about

 "So, what?" you might say.  "Other than being surrounded by half-blind Jawas, what's the big dealio?"  Well, when you're riding a motorbike and totally surrounded on all sides by- and I'm qualified to make this judgment- the world's worst fucking drivers, you try to control your fists of fury idignant rage when some self-handicapped, window-licking, mouth-breather runs into you and apologizes by way of accusing you of being a shitty driver.  I mean it.  Come out here and try it (some of you are more welcome than others). 

Just for fun, here's a list of things which may or may not be important in Saigon traffic.  You in the listening audience at home can try to rank the items in order of importance.  Do your best!


a) lily-white skin
b) complete anonymity by way of an outfit that'd get you commited in any Western nation
c) peripheral vision

Ootini!

"I can't see my hands, so I have no idea how stupid this looks!"

Stand-back, I'mma blast this cracker

While all three of these photos depict creatures that are particularly skilled at scavenging, there's only one of them whose outfit doesn't scream, "I'll crash into you and then gesture like a moron, non-verbally suggesting it's your fault."

So, there are the bad drivers by way of outfit choice, but there are also people who are completely ignorant of the driving rules.  Entire piles of country bumpkins move to the big city (not even bothering to strike oil while huntin' for some food first) and bring their driving-on-a-dirt-road ethos with them.  I imagine most fitness-to-drive inquries go like this:
"Do you know how to drive a motorbike?"
"I can hold a Honda Cub vertical while it moves forward."
"Yeah, but... jeez, I can't say 'no' to you, you little scamp!  Get out there and have a good time!  Hey, if you see any white people, stare at them and repeat anything that they say in Vietnamese to your friends while laughing.  Now, scoot ya little so-and-so!"

Not that I blame them, I guess.  Getting a license isn't easy or anything.  I mean, it involves more than reaching into a Crackerjack box, or whatever.  I got one.  That shit takes work, yo.  Most drivers don't have them out here, though.  Which is funny ("weird," not, "ha, ha") because penalties range from three years in jail on up to ten years in jail if you cause an accident and you aren't a licensed driver (20 years, if the accident results in a death) (Source: Australian Embassy in Vietnam's website, 2011).  The downfall of not having a license isn't so much the arrest-time as it is the fact that you actually don't know how to drive on a road filled with other people who also don't know how to drive.  It's like thousands of shaved, oiled, masturbating squirrels all trying to bust it on the same acorn.  The only reason I don't say, "Seriously?!?!?" thousands of times a day any more is because one can only see the stupidest motherfucking thing one's ever seen so many times before one loses one's capacity for astonishment (one).  So, to summarize, Vietnamese roads are to driving what Thunderdome was to Australia.  By which I mean a terrible time in their history which they will always look back on in shame.  (Wait, Mad Max was a documentary, right?)

In Communist Vietnam, squirrel roadkills you!

4)  If I Can't See You, You Can't See Me.

Vietnamese people are, apparently, in a Pre-Object Permanence stage of development.  You might ask how I know this.  Well, if I wanted to explain myself to someone like you, I'd have a blog.   

Now stop crying and don't make me do that again.  I love you.

There's one reason and one reason alone that babies are special: you can play peek-a-boo with one of those little shit factories for hours and they're so stupid that they'll be surprised every single god'am time.  Every.  God.  Am.  Time.  Special'er'n'hail.  What keeps them surprised is the fact that, developmentally-speaking, they are in the Pre Object-Permanence stage.  This means simply, if they can't see something, it doesn't exist.  When you peek and boo in a baby's face you are, literally to them, vanishing and reappearing.  Which explains why babies cry when I approach them; they fear my magicks.

Asian people play peek-a-boo all day long, they just call it "saving face."  It's this weird thing where, in order to avoid embarrassment, someone who is culturally Asian will either say something they know to not be true or they'll simply pretend you aren't there by not looking at you.  That is to say, most run of the mill people out here will lie or make you and your problem go away by not looking at or responding to you; because, if I can't see you, you no longer exist.  Behavior like one would expect from some sort of a sentient baby.  Crazy, right?  I mean, who would believe a baby could be sentient?  If I were a Blade Runner, I'd shoot the living hell out of a baby.  

Is this testing whether I'm a lesbian or an infant, Mr. Deckard?

I'm a confrontational asshole and I hate cowardice more than most things so I get along gangbusters out here.  Suffice to say, you can do the most awful, shitty and/or rude thing to another human on the road and, as long as you don't acknowledge their existence, you're as faultless as your theoretical behavior -which you may or may not have engaged in- is dick-nosed.  It's like being trapped on Gilligan's Island with the Bush cabinet for the duration of every trip you ever make. 

"How many coconut radios do you think we can fit into the economy's butt-hole?."

While most Westerners are a bit confrontation averse (some more than others), many Vietnamese folk take it to insane levels.  They'll talk shit like champs, mumbling about how stupid foreigners are right up until you stop next to them and speak while looking at them.  Then they morph into deer, front-and-center in those face-losing headlights that comprise your gaze.
You should see your average suckers on the road out here talking shit to each other, neither party looking at the other, just sitting on their bikes, eyes forward, mouthing-off to no one in particular.  It's pretty funny until some dipshit almost murders you by driving like he's a robot sent from the future to vehicularly manslaughter you.  Naturally, wanting to reinforce the illusion of cause and effect and wanting to present some sort of negative consequences for homicidal behavior, you call him on his bullshit.  But your words wash over him like water over a stone.  Something deep inside of him, under and behind all of his assumptions breaks, his eyes widen and he stares into the space just outside that which regular humans are capable of seeing.  He's been transported to a magical place beyond the grasp of your harsh words.  You cannot hurt him.  No.  No one will ever hurt him again.

3) The Three "G"s of Vietnamese Driving.

The depth and breadth of Vietnamese driving philosophy can be summed-up - utterly, thoroughly and completely - with three words: go, go and go.
It's like everybody is playing The Floor Is Lava and the road is HOLY SHIT!  IT'S MADE FROM LAVA!!  DON'T STEP ON IT, IDIOT!  KEEP MOVING OR YOU WILL FUCKING DIE!

THIS IS SERIOUS.

You could be getting raped by an entire sleuth of bears on the sidewalk downtown and Vietnam's leading bear-defence expert/ursine-mace salesman could be bogged down in a traffic-jam right next to you.  If he's moving- even a couple of inches a second- you're fucked.  Or bear-raped, or whatever.  He ain't stopping for shit.  And you're lower than shit, you non-go-ing bear-rape victim.

Motorbike drivers in this city will bust the stupidest, most unproductive moves in the known universe in the name of continuing to move without having to place their feet on the ground (don't get me started on the scum that drive 4+ wheeled vehicles).  Calling their actions counter-intuitive would be an insult to intuitive behavior on the grounds that it presumes that the opposite of said drivers' behavior is logical.  What's the opposite of slowly crashing into a bus so as to not have to put your feet on the ground?  Maybe, quickly crashing into a bus while dragging your feet on the road?  I've seen both of those things. Neither makes sense to me.

This may not sound particularly difficult to deal with, but, as a thinking human being, when I see a bus or car trying to cross perpendicular to traffic (in mind-bogglingly traffic-flow fucking fashion, mind you), I think to myself, "if I pass in front of them, they'll have to stop which will block the entire road, whereas, if I pause momentarily, they'll cross the road quickly and everyone will be able to go which will be of greatest benefit."  Your average driver in Vietnam, however, is upon that gap in front of the vehicle like they're a travelling salesman and the area in front of the car is one of three holes a farmer warned him not to slip the bone to. 

Drivers here will flood onto the sidewalks, occupy both sides of a two-way road (Yay! for grass-roots political movements!) and drive the wrong motherfucking way down a motherfucking one-way street all in the name of not having to stop.  Sometimes, I'll look at people driving and mutter, "go, go, go, go, go, go, go..." to myself.  It somehow seems to make their behavior make more sense.  It also increases their Oompa-Loompa factor by about 12, which I'm totally fine with.

Do the curtains match the drapes?  Willy don't kiss and tell, y'all.

2) Look, Ma, No Hands!

If one's knees are bent, most people- most average humans- have to extend their leg to reach into their pocket and get their phone.  Drivers here do that at about 30 miles an hour and then drive their bikes one-handed while screaming into their phones.  Often, after answering the phone and realizing that the discussion will take the lionshare of their attention, drivers will slow down to about 7 miles an hour and roll down the middle of the road, shrieking, "Huh?  What?  Huh?  Hello?" into their phone.  Sometimes, they'll be overwhelmed with some piece of news they've just possibly half-heard (I assume that's what's happened, anyway) and feel compelled to stop their bikes wherever they stand.  That's not an overstatement.  Wherever the fuck they happen to be in the road, they will stop.  They could be sitting in the middle of đường Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa at a green light and they'll engage in their conversation as if they're sitting in their living room on their uncomfortable solid-wood furniture, relaxing and drinking hot water (I think that's what Vietnamese people do in their free-time, anyway).  I know several people who, taken unawares by a bike parked in the middle of a heavily-trafficked street, have run into one of these peculiar specimens (Jackie is the only person, actually, but if you measure people by height, Jackie's worth at least two or three normal-sized shorties). 

Pictured: A giraffe tongue-kissing Jackie's leg

Even worse than some dude droning into his phone and endangering everyone's life around him is a dude doing this same thing with a child between him and his handlebars.  I understand the desire to have something to cushion the potentially rib-crushing blow that your handlebars could deliver in an accident, but a child makes a really shitty air-bag.  They're mostly bones, for fuck's sake. 
People also do this thing where they drive one-handed in an "I'm cool" sort of way.  It's hopelessly lame in a fashion that only a 16 year old Vietnamese kid with a really shitty hair-cut could pull off.  It's achieved by draping your wrist over your handlebar grip in such a way that, if you get into even a minor bump and grind with another bike, you're sure to break the holy-hell out of every bird-bone in your hand.  It's totally bad-assed looking, though.

Totally bad-assed

 
1) The Street Is My Living Room

I'll be brief with this one, though it's probably the main issue with traffic in Vietnam (or the main issue with everything, everywhere).  Drivers, pedestrians and food-sellers seem to be under the delusion that the streets belong to individuals as opposed to society as a whole.  Kids will laugh and play, pushing each other and badly riding their bikes on the busiest fucking roads you've ever seen (depending on where you've been, I guess).  Food sellers will set up their stalls on the most congested roads at the worst possible times of day and create bottlenecks that my children's children will sing songs about (I will die alone and childless).  Pedestrians will ignore cross-walks and leap out in front of bikes and cars where and whenever the mood strikes them.  The "this road is mine!" mentality permeates almost all on-the-street behaviors here.  Pedestrians will often walk in the busiest of roads when the sidewalk next to them is perfectly clear (though, to be fair to them, sidewalks are often filled with food stalls, parked bikes and smoldering corpses).  People merging never (NEVER) check the traffic they're joining; that goes for both riders starting from a dead-stop to join a 30MPH vehicle flow, and people turning into a green-lit intersection.  Why?  Because this road is here for me.  Me.  And I do whatever the fuck I want, whenever the fuck I want.
No one looks both ways.  Coming from a Western Nation and having the phrase "look both ways" beaten into my gourd from the earliest of ages this seems like some of the stupidest bullshit I've ever seen.

It only seems that way, though.  Because, the fact of the matter is this: people are the same everywhere.  There's no difference between me and anyone that lives here.  There's no difference between American politicians and Vietnamese ones.  American drivers and Vietnamese drivers.  Etcetera.  It's all just a matter of how rules are enforced.  People get away with exactly what they can.  Vietnam does a double-plus ungood job of enforcing traffic laws (which are identical to American traffic laws, by the way).  Vietnam does a double-plus ungood job of hiding corruption.  Rich Vietnamese people do a double-plus ungood job of hiding their self-entitled douchebaggery (though, American rich people are pretty shitty at this, too).  Deep down, we're all selfish assholes; in order for things to function smoothly we need everyone to be super bright and empathetic or we need soul-crushing rules to keep the populous from devolving into some Lord Of The Flies-esque cluster-fuck.  Don't hold your breath while shitting into the other hand waiting for.... sour grapes?  I've forgotten the idiom, but you know what I'm saying.  The former ain't happenin'. 

This isn't 'Nam, Donnie, there are... Wait.  This is 'Nam.
I'mma pop a couple off into that split.
(Mr. Shabbat-day Night Special)

I'm not alone when I feel chaffed by social constraints.  But they're necessary because there's one thing we can't escape: ourselves.  We are fucking monsters.  (Check out the free Googlebooks: Experiments With People: Revelations From Social Psychology; specifically the chapter entitled: Hooded Hoodlums: The Role Of Deindividuation in Antisocial Behavior, Eds: Robert P. Abelson, Kurt P. Frey, Aiden P. Gregg).  The world is our living room, and if one of us wants to shit in it, by gob, we all will, 'cause I'm not walking all the way to the bathroom if he isn't.  Which is why true social reform is impossible and token social reform is only done with the blessing of those in power/with money.  I'm not different from most Americans (well... I think abortion is murder and I'm totally fine with it, so there's that).  I think most people are totally pissed about how shit shakes down every day stateside.  I just did something about it.  There's a reason I got the fuck out of the states (it wasn't just student loan evasion).  And no matter how shitty things get out here (wherever "here" is), I can wake up each morning and know that I'm not encouraging the assholes in power by perpetuating the illusion of a Participatory Democracy by voting or otherwise engaging in their broke-ass'd system. 
Whoa.  I got a little off-track there.  Never matter.  No mind. 

Meanwhile, in Iowa...

That's a blog!


Citations:
 
Penalties for driving without license in Vietnam. Accessed December 18th, 2011, http://www.vietnam.embassy.gov.au/hnoi/Driving_in_Vietnam.html

Experiments With People: Revelations From Social Psychology, By Robert P. Abelson, Kurt P. Frey, Aiden P. Gregg. Pg.250 in Google Books, the chapter entitled: Hooded Hoodlums: The Role Of Deindividuation in Antisocial Behavior
 
Also, if you wanna get bummed (Am. slang for "depressed"), you can read this article about an American math professor who was discussing how to solve Vietnam's traffic problems with a colleague when he was hit and killed by a motorbike in Hanoi: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2006/12/17/2003340777

 A side note: I can't express to you my joy at simply writing a citation without giving a fuck about conforming to APA style.