exercise, haircuts

Hanoi is unpretentious. It’s living. Exercise, haircuts, sleep, cooking, pissing, it all happens on the streets. Old guys who look like they just wandered out of bed to adjust a coat hanger hanging on a tree. Old ladies dancing to the same two Modern Talking songs every night like the Berlin Wall just fell wearing hats they bought just to dance in the park with. They know nobody else will ever care. They do it because they enjoy it. Chubby kids scoot around trying not to look at me. Teenagers sit in dark corners on their phones all gangly. I got briefly added then booted from the neighborhood Zalo group. I sneak into the better corner store so the mouthy lady at the other one doesn't rip me a new one. The bia hoi smells good but I can't go or they will drag me into a maelstrom of bad shots. And none of them know, or maybe some of them do, that a foreign guy lives in an apartment upstairs largely to be near them, to hear them out the window and feel their energy so even when he's lonely he still feels like he's a part of something out here.