Sunday

Saturday we attended another farewell party for a friend who's leaving next week. We had a nice dinner at an Italian place in District One, La Hostaria (black ink pasta, prawns the size of my fist), before wandering over to a little Irish pub called Sheridan's, located conveniently next door. Inside Sheridan's, it was dark and packed with a heavily western crowd. We were adding at least another dozen-plus westerners ourselves. A very loud two-person karaoke band was also smooshed in there. As I walked past, part of the single-file conga line of our party crowd, those in front of me were already heading back out. They'd explored around and found no room to sit. A helpful waitress made her way to the head of the line and started leading it behind the bar. I was still dutifully following the snake into the recesses of a place I thought I'd be walking right back out of again. That's just the way we were all parading around the place; there was certainly no room to turn around and walk back out without first following the whole winding route. Eventually I noticed we weren't leaving at all, but heading to the back, to the bathrooms. For a moment this was pretty surreal: "well, we’ve got room to sit in here." But of course the stairs to the next floor were back there too, and there was plenty of room for our parade up there. I liked it. It was the sort of brightly-lit clapboard dive all too rare on Hồ Chí Minh City's expatriate landscape--full of water damaged surfaces, sports television, and dart boards. We had a great night, and I even managed to get a small potted Zebrina pendula out of the guy who was moving away. Score. [Cavin]