I have five minutes to finish this article and catch a motorcycle ride to the train station. Eddie Murphy and I have been drinking for five hours and eating God-knows-what for pennies on the pound. I have to be brief. But I’ll say that Nha Trang has been good to me.
Eddie Murphy was unable to reconcile with his wife after several days of prolonged arguments. So he cancelled the homestead heart-to-heart and took me drinking. On schedule he picked me up at my hotel and we went cruising for some fun. We landed at another sidewalk restaurant for a large container of beer hoi and more stories explaining our cultural differences.
People that that haven’t seen Vietnam’s sidewalk cafes might have trouble understanding what the scene is like. Food is being cooked off an open-air charcoal grill and all kinds of squirming sea live is dropped into boiling oil in steaming woks. The remnants of the meal are thrown on the ground and there is no running water; we urinate on the fence behind our table.
Local beer–bia hoi–is served for $0.50 a gallon and we drink with the rain crashing down around us. Eddie Murphy tells me that the locals at an adjacent table want our company and we enter a dialogue, with Eddie Murphy translating. These men are fisherman that collect their sleeping prey with spear guns in the darkest hours of night. They gaze in wide wonder at my stories of America and I gaze in muted horror of the stories of their friends losing limbs when bomb fishing.
We rushed out to make my train into the stinging rain as Eddie Murphy brought his Honday motorcycle to 50 MPH through these crowded streets. We hit half-a-dozen ATMs before I found the cash to give him a generous tip. I left him my dose of Azithromicin for any ills that may befall his daughters and made him promise to look that drug up on the internet before doing anything with it.
At the local bar we saw other strangeness: brutal aggression from the drunken men to the female waitresses; uncounted animal servings that give “strong penis”; weird leg-stroking locals that, while not gay, trip out on the hair on my legs.
Too much to say, but too little time to say it. I might miss my train.