Coffee

Van asked me if I'd like to get coffee with him today after work. Based on the last two times I saw Tran, I have learned that “getting coffee” may actually mean “eating a massive dinner and then going to a coffee house,” so I didn't eat prior to seeing him. As suspected, he took me to a restaurant where we ordered a large meal consisting of spring rolls and his favorite food, Vietnamese pancakes. Vietnamese pancakes are nothing like American pancakes; they are a crispy fried mixture of flour and meat that you wrap up in lettuce and eat with fish sauce. I also had soda chanh (lime soda) which like so many things in Vietnam, seemed to come in far more pieces than necessary. This particular beverage arrived as a cup of sugar, five slices of lime, a can of seltzer water, a cup of ice, and an empty cup. Van was surprised that not all Americans are accustomed to ordering and receiving lime soda in this fashion.

By the time we were making our way to a coffee house, it was 9pm. I have found that Vietnamese people seem to enjoy caffeine far later than I would ever be able to tolerate. Tonight, I opted for a fresh papaya smoothie. Van said we could go upstairs to listen to some live music. When I agreed to this plan, I didn't realize we were going to be paying for tickets to a concert held in a large, intensely loud, smoky, dark room decorated with strings of neon lights. The first act was a group of three female singers scantily clad in shiny black sequins. Their music was something like 80s techno, and their dancing... well, their dancing looked like it had been choreographed by a drag queen. It was some combination of sideways headbanging, sudden dramatic arm gestures, sexy hip swaying, and the chicken dance. I would have called it “retro” except that I'm not sure anyone, anywhere has ever found that style of dance popular.

I was even more confused about what country and decade I was in when the second act came out, a Vietnamese man wearing very tight jeans and a black patent leather jacket. He was sporting a bleached blond spiked mullet with an inch-wide strip of short black hair around the hairline. He sang a few overly emotional rock songs in Vietnamese, the first of which was actually a cover of a slow traditional Chinese melody. Next was a comedy act that appeared to be making fun of a reality TV singing competition, followed by a female singer whose waist was about the same width as her head. She was wearing black parachute pants, a black strapless bra, and a backless mesh of gold links that was somewhere in between a necklace and a shirt. I was very tired after an hour of sensory overload, and as interesting as it was, I was thankful that Van was more than agreeable to leaving early before my eardrums exploded and I died of second-hand smoke.