I'm in the lobby of my hotel in Bangkok readying myself to head back to SFO and I remembered a story that I didn't write an entry about...how I was daggone close to getting myself arrested in Hanoi. Here it goes...
A couple of nights ago, I was in Hanoi with Travis and Jon and we decided to meet up with a friend of Jon's and some of her peoples. We started off with dinner at a nice restaurant and decided to hit a local bar for some drinks. Everyone in the gruop was anxious to jump on some of the super low priced beer at the bar, but I don't mess with beer at all, so I ordered a screwdriver, which is ridiculously easy to make (just vodka and orange juice). When my first screwdriver came, I immediately noticed that something was wrong with it...as I was drinking, I smelled the faint scent of pine-trees in the drink. Now, I know my liquors and could tell that they'd put gin in my drink instead of orange juice. I was halfway done with that drink when i noticed it, so I decided not to make a fuss about it. When i ordered my next drink, I noticed the same thing, gin instead of vodka and this got me annoyed. I tried explaining it to the waitress, but her command of English wasn't strong enough to understand me, so I went down to the bar myself to handle it...this is where things get dicey.
When I hit the bar, I went to the closest bartender and told her that they had gotten my drink wrong. She called over the girl who made my drink and this chick just started screaming over and over about how she had put vodka in it and even brought over the bottle of Stoli's to prove it to me. I didn't let down on my argument, so she took the drink out of my hands and sniffed it and took a sip.Then, she passed it around the the other 3 bartenders with her and they did the same thing. Once the last one put it down, a random woman who was sitting at the bar sniffed my drink, sipped it, and then took a swig out of the bottle of Stoli to compare. Then, this random woman took a bottle of Gin that had been brought over and took a swig of that too in order to compare...the result of her comparison was that she agreed with me that they'd put gin in my drink. I argued a little more and they agreed to make me another drink, except with vodka instead of gin. I watched them make it and everything looked good, so I thought I was home free.
As the bartender brought my drink over, one of the other bartenders shocked the hell out of me by grabbing it from her, sniffing it, and sipping it. I couldn't even get out a "WTF?!?!?!?!" before the random woman at the bar took my drink from her and did the same thing. After she was done, she handed the drink back to me and the bartender told me to go back upstairs. I don't know abuot y'all, but there is no way that I was going to drink something that two random Vietnamese women had snotted and slobbered over, so I refused to take it and demanded another drink. This is when the knock-down, drag-out battle of words began. They told me that the drink was OK even though they'd drank out of it and I told them that I wasn't going to pay for it because it wasn't clean. Teh random woman tried to calm be down by clicking her glass with mine as if in a toast, but all that did was make me want to pour my joint on her head. I soon realized that the bartenders were not understanding a word that I was saying, so I had to hit them with my "broken English" game..."I not take drink. You drink it. It not clean and I not pay". I felt bad breaking it down like that, but that seemed to be the only way they could follow what i was saying. After about 5 minutes, I saw the bouncer (who was actually smaller than me) stand up and I thought I was about to have to throw down with him. The situation was finally settled when one of the other bartenders took the drink back and made me a brand new one, which was made correctly. Once I got that joint, I went back upstairs but decided that I wasn't going to order anything else for the rest of the night because they would have spit in it or tried to slip me something to get me sick.
Thank goodness I was calm enough not to snap on those chicks because they had me pissed to the limits of "pissivity". One thing that I definitely won't miss about being out here is the language barrier. Some folks out here speakgreat English, but others are abrely functional with it. Next time I come out to Asia, I'm going to have to put in work to make my "broken English" game as sharp as possible.
Posted by marquis930 at September 18, 2005 01:57 AM