I get to practicing more or my rusty Vietnamese today. Thuy in the hostel is a good teacher. In exchange I offer her English practice. A good trade I think! I see one of the shoe shine boys in the street outside the hostel today and I decide that I am going to get my shoes cleaned because they are pretty dirty, they have also developed some holes during my travels, these boys ate always telling me how they can fix them up for me, so today, one gets the chance. The lucky boy is only about 12 he say he'll get me stitched up an cleaned no problem. I tell him I'll pay 30k he wants 40k, but I'm not budging. To be fair to the lad he does a good job, even stitches up my shoes with a similar colour. All in all a good job for £1.
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I meet a local girl Hoang, who speaks very good English. We go for some dinner and she takes me around old quarter and we pull up the good old plastic seats and I get her to order me something. I get some type of chicken noodle soup thing. She gets some other soup thing, she lets me try, it tastes like gravy, I miss gravy. After dinner she shows me a couple of good places to go out partying, and some places where I can get, "Less dirty kebab" then we get a drink. After Hoang leaves I head out to meet the guys for some of the good bia hoi.
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All the bia hoi places are shutting up early tonight, or have run out of beer, both situations have their problems. The police are being aggressive tonight, even taking away some of the stools from the bars to get them to close up. We end up heading to a pub, not normally something I do because it is so expensive but we go to Tet bar. Jessie has bought a Vietnamese phrase book and so we show it to the bar man. He gets no shortage of amusement out of it, especially the sex and relationship sections. we get talking to the barman Duke, he is a crazy man, really good English. Turns out he is a racist, not a fan of Chinese, Koreans or anyone black. He is remarkably open about it. Charting away to us. He tells us how even though the police operate a strict curfew he stays open all night. Good to know. It's quite late and he has the music down low, and the shutters down. The suddenly we hear the shutters being hit from the outside. Everyone grabs all their stuff and we shuffle up the spiral staircase in the corner, then through a couple of rooms and out the back in to a corridor with no lights. There are about 20 of us. Out come the phones as we work out way and down some fire escape stairs. Quick check for police, and we scupper our way back down the street! I decide to head to bed and some of the other guys stay out.