04/07/19

From the hostel this morning I watched a guy deliver large sacks of ice on a scooter to a restaurant across the street. Anything and everything is transported and delivered by scooter here: potted and unpotted plants, jugs of water, bundles of sticks, chickens in cages, songbirds in cages, propane tanks, furniture, cats, dogs, children, mail, tools, crates (which may be filled with anything imaginable). For most of this stuff one would think a car would be necessary at a minimum, but a pick-up truck or delivery van much more appropriate, but here, no. Anything can be strapped or some other way anchored to a scooter, and nothing beats a scooter for maneuverability, and no one beats the Vietnamese for their industriousness and ingenuity. Anyway, this guy delivers his sack to the restaurant, dropping it in a large cooler out front while the proprietor looks on. After this skinny little Vietnamese guy, with not an inconsiderable amount of effort, drops off his ice the proprietor fellow comes to the decision that he would prefer the other sack of ice, so of course they had to be switched. For what earthly reason that is, besides feeling like swinging his big dick around and popping his “BIG EGO” pin onto his shirt and giving it a good polish with his sleeve, I don’t know.

But as well, this proprietor had a couple of these little bird cages hanging from the canopy out front. These much-too-small cages, in which the single bird leaps back and forth from cage to perch to cage again with not even enough space to open its wings, like a mad man in a nut house. He’s not the only one, and it’s mostly the older generation, but it just seems another example of his hubris, or ego.