Day 18: There are more white people than Vietnamese in Hanoi

I'm serious. There's people with backpacks and maps and cameras everywhere. (I'm aware that I'm one of them).

When last I wrote, I was in Guilin. After the boat trip and a pause in Yangshuo, I spent the evening there drinking weak but absurdly cheap (600ml, 60c) beer and playing pool. The next afternoon, train to Nanning. Nanning seems only to exist as a place to pause before going to Vietnam. There are very few hostels, and the one I stayed in was full of information on how to get visas and buses to Hanoi. Which was handy, considering that's where I was going.

Met a couple from Kerry getting the same bus as I was, we started out early to catch it at 7.30am. It was hard to sleep on the bus as they had the TV and speaker system playing crappy Chinese pop music and ads for the entire thing, but we got to the Vietnam border before noon anyway. Chinese customs, Vietnamese customs, a new country, a new bus.

When we got to Hanoi, there was a really pushy guy on the bus trying to get us (me and the other two Irish, the bus' caucasians) to stay at some specific hotel. We told him we had booked places, he said, ok, we'll take a taxi together to "Oakwater" and go from there, it's closer. I pointed out that we hadn't said where we had booked places but he was undeterred. He kept this up when we were outside getting our bags and it got to the point where I had to say to him "we're not going with you, seriously go away". He went away.

I had a walk around Hanoi's Old Quarter and around Hoan Kiem Lake. It's pretty cool, though every single person is trying to sell you something. Mainly books and drugs. It's nice to look at though, it seems less of a generic big city like Seoul and Shanghai, or anywhere that gets enough people.

In my walking, I had a map from the hostel, which noted a massage place not too far away. Seeing as my back is something of a mess, I thought, hm, sounds good. I walked to where the arrow on the map was, and sure enough there was a massage place, but I didn't see the name written anywhere to indicate it was the massage place. It was on hospital grounds though, how bad could it be? Worst case scenario, I have to politely turn down a handjob. I went in.

They asked for money up front. 80,000 dong, which is a little over 3 Euro. I forked it over and was brought around the corner into a room. The massage girl put something down on the table, gave me a hanger, said something in Vietnamese and left. Shit, what do I do? On the table was a towel and a pair of shorts that had a waist maybe twice as big as mine. It's like a Zelda game, you have items and a goal, you just have to figure out what to do. Any kind of wrong move would be pretty embarrassing. There was a shower cubicle adjoining the room, so I figured, towel, hanger, I must have to shower. Nudity was a big step though, if that was a mistake, weirdness would surely ensue. I showered quickly, and came out wearing only the giant shorts, with the waist drawstring tied up tight. I sat on the table.

The girl came back in, said something, and went for the string of the shorts and started to untie them and pull them down. Oh shit. I start to lower them confusedly. My ass is exposed now. As soon as it gets to this level, she says something that clearly means "oh god, stop there". So I end up lying there, face down on a table that has a hole cut in the cloth for your face, but no hole in the actual table, so you can't breathe, fan blowing on my bare ass. She climbs on the table and sits on me. The massage begins. It's pretty bad. She's kind of just randomly rubbing my back and grabbing handfuls of flesh and letting it go. I'd gone semi-regularly to the massage place next to the gym back in Toyohashi, so I got used to what it's supposed to be like when someone knows where muscles are and what to do with them.

Nonetheless, it continues. There's a pause, when you know something different is about to happen, and holy fuck she's kneeling on me. She walks up my back on her knees, and then back down. That part was pretty nice, actually. Then the legs, which felt a lot like someone grabbing bits of my legs for several minutes.

Then I have to roll over and lie on my back. If anything untoward is going to happen, it's going to happen soon. The shorts have been pulled up at this stage, thankfully. The leg "massage" continues, but due to the giant nature of the shorts, I'm sure there was a lot of visibility. So I'm lying there trying to ignore it, mentally writing this blog entry, when she tries to move her hand over and hits me in the balls on the way. Fucking hell. The worst of it is over with this, and as I'm leaving, someone with rudimentary English comes in and says I'm supposed to tip because "massage very good". I'm like, yeah, how much, and she pulls out a 100,000 note and points at it. This is, if you recall, more than I paid in the first place. I gave a 50,000, which I suppose is only 2 euro and got the hell out of there.

Going to Ha Long Bay tomorrow, expect many pretty pictures when I get back on Wednesday.