Day 265: A night at the market

After breakfast, we sat in the air conditioned comfort of our room and the girls did some schoolwork while I transcribed my interviews from our time in Mongolia. We had lunch in our little alleyway and then Kate and Zoe walked back to the Laos embassy to pick up our passports while I finished transcribing the interviews and Sarah read her book. 

When they got back, we went out for beers, pork skewers and cards on the street corner and then walked up to the weekly night market (clothing not food, sadly). As we walked among the stalls, a pair of police officers walked up, one carrying some 'official documents', the other a large sack, and I watched as the first grabbed armfuls of clothes from one of the stalls and stuffed them into the sack. A bit further on, we came upon another contingent who were on pole duty. A new edict had obviously come down from on high that poles should protrude from the stall by no more than X centimetres and these guys were removing any offending bamboo poles and cutting the ends off the metal ones with a hacksaw. The amusing thing was that they were only walking down one side of the stalls, which were open on both sides, so the poles on the other side were left to protrude in peace (not to mention the fact that Hanoi's streets are just a collection of death traps – bumping your head on a market-stall pole is the least of our worries). We managed to find a few things to buy for Zoe - some new sunglasses (one of arms broke off her other pair a few days ago) and a red t-shirt (the one we bought in Pingyao was white when we bought it...). As we walked, we grazed on pork skewers in place of a proper meal.

On the way home, we stopped in to a shop near the hostel and Kate tried on some dresses. The utterly humourless staff were comically lethargic, just dripping with retail ennui and studied indifference. Attempts to haggle were met with an abrupt 'No discount', while queries about other sizes received an even more curt, 'No more'. Of course, nothing had a price on it and when asked how much things cost, the staff would hold the offending dress up for the woman at the counter, who would bark out a seemingly randomly arrived at price. No, we didn't buy anything.

When we got back to the hostel, the street had been closed off and a bit further down the road, a stage had been set up where there was some traditional singing and dancing going on.