The Club Scene, and other ramblings

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, so I'm emptying some of my thoughts here. Hope they're interesting.

I've never been much of a "clubber," for many reasons. First, my stamina for staying up late in smoky rooms has never been very strong. Second, being 21 in Chicago is generally expensive, if you want to go out, since drinks are pricey, as are cabs home when you can't or don't want to take public transportation. Here, however, things are usually pretty cheap, and there are lots of choices on where to go, so I've been trying to go out more often.

When I first got here and was talking about the social scene in Ho Chi Minh City, I was told that there was a curfew, which was usually around midnight. I immediately interpreted this as some sort of morality issue--the government doesn't want large groups of drunken people up late partying all over town, so they shut it down early. (In my head, I was leaving the rampant prostitution out of the equation, simply because I hadn't thought about it much.) However, there are a few clubs and bars that stay open much later, and the way I understood this was that it's easier for the police to keep an eye on people if they're only in a few places than if they're all over. This, to me, made some sense.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out (surprise surprise!) to be all about money. The club owners/managers who pay off the police get to stay open longer. Those that don't get shut down at midnight and have cops staked out outside the doors giving random drug tests to exiting patrons. So it's a bit frustrating when you get to a club at 11:30 (normal party-starting time in the States), and promptly at midnight the music stops and all the lights come up.

Ah, corruption.

More fascinating to observe are the gender roles here. They are still fairly strict, albeit in a more passive-aggressive way than some other societies. It becomes apparent, for example, when seeing people smoke. In Vietnam, women don't smoke. Well, some do, but those that do are usually either foreigners or hookers--essentially, women who don't really care what the rest of society thinks of them. Smoking is seen as a male thing, and almost all the men here do it, and seeing a woman smoke makes the Vietnamese uncomfortable. I was talking to a girl that I met who is here teaching English, and she told me that her boss asked her not to smoke in front of the building because he did not want the students to see her smoking. Now, I could see forbidding anyone to smoke near a school because of health reasons, but here it is obviously not like this. The men could smoke in front, but the students might lose their respect for their female teacher if they saw her smoking, because only "loose women" do it. One of my coworkers smokes, and she always tries to do it somewhere secluded, because she always gets stared at and it makes her slightly uncomfortable.

I'm not making any judgments on these observances--I don't think it makes this society "good" or "bad" that the police take pay-offs (which I'm sure happens everywhere, in varying degrees) or that women aren't supposed to smoke. I am simply interested in seeing this new culture, and how it works differently from those that I am used to. It's opening my eyes.

To close, a photo of Chilli:
She kind of looks like she's doing the Thriller dance, doesn't she? That or "Backstreet's Back" (Alright!). Not sure.