Drinking with Da Bears

Is there anyone who doesn’t like sitting in a room full of men. I, for one, love it; particularly a room full of old men. For, whatever I happen to be wearing at the time, I know that I will appear overdressed and able to cling (like a barnacle on the side of a ship) to some semblance of youth. This, alone, is worth paying for, but this wasn’t the reason for my visit to the local bia hoi place on my way home on Saturday; it was really all about the beer. And, for those of you who have been living in Vietnam for longer than two months, and, are right now, saying to yourselves, “Oh, Glenn, bia hoi, really, you are so last week”, you are right, I really am so last week.

I only really wanted a little, just to try, but little, was not what the Tupperware container it came in, was. What it was, was big; perhaps two litres big, and, if Ms Tupperware (may she rest in peace) was ever given a brief to design a vessel that is both elegant, but won’t quite sit flat on the table, something that would be as comfortable under a car catching sump oil, as it would be in a restaurant which has, on its walls, commemorative posters of the opening of a newly constructed bridge and a Winnie The Pooh calendar, then this would be that container.

The beer itself was nutty, smooth, frothy (without being ‘over-the-top’) and, well, almost caramel-tasting…certainly refreshing. At one point I thought I detected undertones of cinnamon, but I was mistaken. I was probably at about the halfway mark, when, looking up into the big, yellow, furry, smiley – possibly whacked out of his tree – face of Winnie, I had, what, I guess, could be referred to as a small epiphany; important pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. The most impressive of these sudden insights, was, that it suddenly occurred to me, that I could get two litres of beer for a dollar (an Australian dollar, not a US dollar), and this new knowledge has…I don’t know…changed me…in profound ways that I don’t yet fully understand, in ways that may only really become apparent two years from now. I mean, it isn’t so much about the beer, certainly not the taste of the beer; it’s really more about being able to get that whacked, for that amount money.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow fallen down a rabbit hole (or, a bear hole, in this case), that I was sitting at some kind of fairy tale tea party, complete with miniature plastic table settings; that this two-litres-of-beer-for-a-dollar business, had bequeathed me some kind of key, a way of prising open the space-time continuum, if you will. Who knows? All’s I know, is, that at some point in the evening, Winnie and his cohorts joined me at my table, and, together, we clinked glasses of this beer, and we said things like, “1, 2, 3, drink”, and, while I didn’t fully understand everything they were saying to me, or, for that matter, anything of the conversations of the old men around me, even now, I get the feeling, that some large – dare I say, ‘global’ – issues were solved that night, though, out of respect for Piglet, we spoke nothing of the H1N1 situation.

Glenn Wyatt

My blog: http://glennn2000.wordpress.com/