Just after sunset during our second week in Vietnam, my husband and I found ourselves wandering through the side streets behind the battle-scarred emperor's palace in Hue, the former imperial capital in the center of the country. Everything about the setting intrigued us: the pockmarked stone walls that encircled the old fortress, the candlelit shrines displayed along the sidewalks, the cries of street food vendors wheeling carts of savory steamed buns. But we would get to those later.
At that moment, we were focused on finding a moped to rent. We thought riding through the city as the locals do would give us the most comprehensive sense of the place we could manage in our short time there – we had only a day and a half on this the shortest stop of our three-week journey through Vietnam and Cambodia. As was the case almost everywhere we went, we would end up with a much deeper experience than we expected. Every inquiry we made ended in hilarity as people on the street ― most unable to speak English and unfamiliar with the sight of tourists away from the city center ― tried to guess what we might want. Taxi? No. Food? No. Beer? No. Moped. And we would gesture as if we were holding handlebars. "Vroom! Vroom!"
We were in the middle of one such absurd pantomime when a slight, smiling woman appeared from a store. "You are American?" she said in practiced English. "I will help you. Wait. I have to buy candy for my children." Before we knew it, we were in the woman's living room, a modest, tiled box that, like most Vietnamese homes, opened like a storefront to a side street. We sat, dazed, at a diminutive table as she and her husband, who spoke only Vietnamese, served us cold cans of light Vietnamese beer, plates of rice with stir-fried cabbage, and one of the buns we had seen earlier – she flagged down the vendor from her living room window.
Soon her father, a mostly toothless man in his 80s, appeared and began regaling us in broken English with stories of his time serving as a driver for American generals during the Vietnam War, when Hue was not far from the no man's land known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Her sister arrived with a moped for us to borrow and an invitation to dinner and a dance club the following night. Her 9-year-old son curled up next to my husband and showed off his boyish biceps, then giggled as my husband flexed his own. As the street grew darker, our host changed the plan: She and her father would give us a guided tour that evening. And so we went, still astonished at the turn of events. I rode on the back of her bike as my husband rode with her father – who grew increasingly jovial with each beer he had taken for the road.
At that moment, we were focused on finding a moped to rent. We thought riding through the city as the locals do would give us the most comprehensive sense of the place we could manage in our short time there – we had only a day and a half on this the shortest stop of our three-week journey through Vietnam and Cambodia. As was the case almost everywhere we went, we would end up with a much deeper experience than we expected. Every inquiry we made ended in hilarity as people on the street ― most unable to speak English and unfamiliar with the sight of tourists away from the city center ― tried to guess what we might want. Taxi? No. Food? No. Beer? No. Moped. And we would gesture as if we were holding handlebars. "Vroom! Vroom!"
We were in the middle of one such absurd pantomime when a slight, smiling woman appeared from a store. "You are American?" she said in practiced English. "I will help you. Wait. I have to buy candy for my children." Before we knew it, we were in the woman's living room, a modest, tiled box that, like most Vietnamese homes, opened like a storefront to a side street. We sat, dazed, at a diminutive table as she and her husband, who spoke only Vietnamese, served us cold cans of light Vietnamese beer, plates of rice with stir-fried cabbage, and one of the buns we had seen earlier – she flagged down the vendor from her living room window.
Soon her father, a mostly toothless man in his 80s, appeared and began regaling us in broken English with stories of his time serving as a driver for American generals during the Vietnam War, when Hue was not far from the no man's land known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Her sister arrived with a moped for us to borrow and an invitation to dinner and a dance club the following night. Her 9-year-old son curled up next to my husband and showed off his boyish biceps, then giggled as my husband flexed his own. As the street grew darker, our host changed the plan: She and her father would give us a guided tour that evening. And so we went, still astonished at the turn of events. I rode on the back of her bike as my husband rode with her father – who grew increasingly jovial with each beer he had taken for the road.
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