On to the Bietdien Hotel: A Peek Inside the Vietnamese Mind
By KorskiOne morning while passing through the lobby of a hotel in Hanoi, I saw two young European backpackers who were in a heated argument with the desk attendant. I stopped and listened to their story. It seemed that they had made it clear that they wanted to stay in the hotel for three or four days, but after the first day they were told they had to leave. The reason was that some people had come to the hotel and were willing to pay more than the going fare for the room occupied by the backpackers, and so they had to leave.
When I checked out of a nearby hotel, and was handed the bill, I saw that I had been charged for three nights rather than the two that I had stayed. I brought this to the attention of the clerk and after some hemming and hawing, the bill was adjusted. But then the matter of payment arose. I did a rough calculation and saw that because of the way the currency conversion had been made, I was being substantially overcharged. After several “recalculations,” it was finally and reluctantly agreed that, yes, a “small” mistake had been made.
In one hotel I stayed at in Saigon, whenever you took a shower, and no matter how careful you were with the shower curtain, the entire floor of the bathroom would be flooded with water. There would be standing water all over the floor until the room was cleaned for the next day. This was not a cheap hotel, and in fact among other things it had a Wi-Fi connection in the room.
Lonely Planet puts its strong two cents into the hotel issue, warning that tourists have to be careful when being picked up at the airport in Saigon. After you tell the taxi driver where you are staying he will claim that no rooms are available in the hotel you reserved a room in, or the hotel no longer existed, or that it has burned down. If you take issue with his claims, you may have opened a can of worms you wish you had never seen.
In talking with people who have traveled to Vietnam, I hear more complaints about hotel issues and scams that anything else. There are stories of arguments and shouting matches over prepaid hotel reservations for which there is no record; bills that are wildly out of line with what they should be; large mini-bar bills for drinks that were not consumed.
All of this in one way or another is a measure of the scamming and I’ll-never-see-you-again-so-get-all-you-can mentality of the voraciously money-minded Vietnamese. But there is another side to staying at hotels in Vietnam, and it reflects a larger and lingering legacy of the communist mentality to control people’s behavior. And to keep track of exactly where they are.
All foreigners, without exception to my knowledge, are required to surrender their passports on checking into a hotel, and the passports will not be returned until checking out. The purpose behind this is always a bit vague. One explanation is that the police need the information in your passport in case there is “any kind of trouble” in the hotel. Another explanation heard is that it allows the police to know exactly how many foreigners are in the hotel, and thereby how much to “tax” the hotel, i.e., how much protection money to demand on the next visit.
Many hotels have long lists of what people can and cannot do in a hotel, lists that invariably include a rule to the effect that no visitor can stay in a room beyond ten p.m. (This is because it is widely believed that dirty and immoral deeds only take place after ten p.m.) They may also have a rule that you cannot spend the night in a hotel room with someone you are not legally married to, because only people who are legally married in the eyes of the state will, when staying in hotels, behave in ways acceptable to the state.
Men who have traveled to Vietnam with the aim of spending a night with a hooker have often discovered that while they have not had that much trouble finding a Vietnamese woman to do all manner of dirty deeds for dong, if these deeds commence or continue beyond ten p.m., then two rooms must be booked. The man can bonk the hooker in his own room, the state says, but should he be doing so after ten p.m., and should the police show up at the front desk, the girl must be prepared, whether naked or properly clothed, to get to her room before the police do. The reasoning of the state is simple, and perfectly reasonable, of course: if a woman is in a room by herself when the police make an unannounced visit then it cannot possibly be the case that at any time during her stay in the hotel she was doing anything improper.
A couple of years ago I was talking with a Belgian who owned a restaurant in Nha Trang, and who had been legally married to a Vietnamese woman for some time. The Belgian and his wife left the country to spend several weeks in Europe, and on their return they entered Vietnam in a province different from the one in which they had been married and had their home and business. Under such circumstances, they were required to book separate rooms for the night. The reasoning here is that if you are married but spending the night together in a province where you do not live then you are obviously engaging in an immoral act. Fucking without license, I think it is called.
All of which brings me to a small story of a flight cancelled and the aftermath.
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I was scheduled to take a flight with Vietnamese Airlines from Buon Ma Thuot to Saigon at 9:50 in the evening. I arrived at the very small airport a couple of hours ahead of time, checked in, and then waited. And along with more than 100 other passengers scheduled on the same flight waited and waited, and there was no plane in sight. The only information that came to any of us as ten o’clock became eleven o’clock and then twelve o’clock was that the flight, according to the overhead monitor that conveyed almost no information, had “taken off.” From where it was not initially revealed, but it clearly was not from Buon Ma Thuot as more than 100 increasingly anxious and fidgety people could attest.
Finally, about two hours after the scheduled departure time, a brief announcement was made to the effect that the flight to Saigon had been cancelled. It seemed that the plane had left from Hanoi, but en route to Buon Ma Thuot the pilot decided that the weather didn’t look good in Buon Ma Thuot—it was in fact neither raining nor foggy, and an earlier flight to Hanoi had no problem leaving—and so flew directly to Saigon. I gathered we were informed when the pilot was not far from what is also known as Ho Chi Minh City.
The Vietnamese passengers quickly got up and left and retrieved their checked luggage and were soon in taxis and on their way to homes or hotels. But this left two travel tour groups of middle-aged French people (contrary to all myths and media misinformation, middle-aged French women look as worn and saggy and overweight as middle-aged American women), and me.
We were told that the flight had been rescheduled for the following day at 8 p.m. (which was bad news for all the French people on their tight tour schedules; they wouldn’t be able to see the tunnels south of Saigon that the Viet Cong so effectively used in their fight against the Americans during the war). But no one was to worry. Vietnam Airlines owned or controlled a couple of hotels near the airport and everyone would be put up for the night, at no expense or inconvenience, of course.
It took over an hour for the airline to find a bus and get from the city to the airport, a mere ten kilometers away. Once at the Bietdien Hotel--the hotel drop-off for one of the French groups and me--there ensured a series of discussions, arguments, and strong words between the young representative from the airport in charge of seeing that we got rooms and those at the desk of the hotel. While several French people were slouching on chairs and falling asleep, a young and quite small Vietnamese woman in a comely pink top, initially alone, tried to deal with a problem she had not the slightest idea how to handle. She ran to the phone and made a call. She then scurried to a large log book and thumbed through it, looking for nothing that was obvious to my nearby eyes. Then she walked over to a calendar atop the desk and peered at it and ran her figures over the days of the month. And then she went to her cell phone to make another call. In between all this running and shuffling back and forth behind the desk, she was telling the airline representative that all of us could not stay at the hotel; or she wasn’t sure if we could stay there because she didn’t know what was happening; or she would have to check first with one person who would have to check with another person and...then she would have to go back to her big log books, and small notebooks stacked in a drawer, and the computer. And then make another three or four phone calls to find out what she was supposed to do because she did not have the foggiest idea what to do and therefore would do nothing at all, even though the hotel was allegedly available for emergencies with Vietnam Airlines of just this sort.
After about fifteen minutes of words with the young and increasingly impatient airline representative, another young woman appeared. Now she began going through more large log books and small notebooks and staring at the desk calendar and making telephone calls, and exchanging words and arguing with the airline representative. It was clear she was without authority, did not know what to do and therefore wanted to do exactly nothing at all. More shouting ensued, and now the airline representative was on his cell phone for the ninth or tenth time and he was, to judge by the tone of his voice and the way he looked at me, standing nearby, not just exasperated but clearly pissed off.
Then two more young women appeared, both wearing motorcycle helmets and pink masks to cover their noses and mouths from all the foreign pollution around them. They had come, apparently, to resolve what could not be resolved by the first two young women, and the airline representative present, and ten or twelve different people who had been called by this time and also didn’t have anything remotely like a clue what to do with nearly a dozen foreigners who at this point wanted nothing more than something that resembled a bed.
About forty minutes into this mess that seemed to have no resolution in sight, all the time standing at the desk and finding myself amused by a kind of indecisiveness that I don’t even find among impotent and incompetent university administrators, I pulled out my wallet and put 240,000 dong (about fifteen dollars) in front of two of the young women and said I would pay for a room. This was the amount listed on the wall for a standard, i.e., small, room. Initially, I was ignored, as was the money sitting on top of the calendar and in full view of everyone involved in the issue.
But the money in fact finally seemed to have triggered a reaction. For less than two minutes after I had put the four bills on the counter, the young woman in pretty pink who was yet to smile and was still confused beyond anything resembling true confusion, asked for my passport. I got it out and gave it to her and she pushed it into a hole beneath the counter. I picked up the bills and put them in my wallet as a young porter took a room key from the young woman in pink and grabbed one of my bags and headed for the elevator.
Those French tourists who were still awake looked at me as if I had started yet another American imperial war. And Christ knows what they thought as I smiled and waved at the lot of them and headed toward the elevator.
And that’s the last I saw of these typically haughty French people who would only speak to me in French, even after my telling them that I don’t speak their superior language. I have no idea whether they spent another five minutes or two hours in the lobby waiting for a room. Or whether they eventually were forced to find another hotel at three or four or whenever in the morning.
The dong notes I had put on display and then stuffed back in my wallet got me more than I could have hoped for. I didn’t just get a mere basic standard room, but rather a sprawling suite with a sitting area and a separate little room with a single bed and another large room with a double bed and TV and easy chairs and refrigerator and a writing table big enough for a desktop computer, printer and several piles of notes and books. The bathroom, tastefully tiled on floor and walls, had a separate bathtub and shower, and was almost large enough to put another bed in. There was a window onto the street below.
In the morning, at about six a.m., the phone rang. I ignored it. It rang again about fifteen minutes later, and then again at about 6:45. Finally when it startled me at about seven I answered it and the woman at the desk said she wanted me to come down right away and register. I put on enough clothes to not be accused of indecent exposure and headed downstairs via an elevator that, I would discover and later reconfirm, always ran to the top or seventh floor, and then came down to your floor; I was on the fifth in room 503. (I am unsure of the rationale for this communist elevator always going to the top floor when the up button is pushed, but I will return to my collection of papers from the Stalinist era archives when I get home, the same place I got all the information before leaving about the communist ten p.m. and separate room rules that I noted above.)
When I got to the desk, the first question that came at me was: Did you drink anything from the mini-bar?
I was awake, believe me.
The next question was: Do you want to register and how long are you staying. It was the girl in pink, now smiling and looking happy and genuinely pretty, who asked the question.
No, I said. I’m staying compliments of Vietnam Airlines and won’t check out until late this afternoon when I go to the airport. I came last night, remember? You took my passport.
Oh, I see, she said. She looked around for my passport and couldn’t find it; then it mysteriously appeared beneath a British passport in her hand. Or rather I brought it to her attention, which I was only able to do because my passport is genuinely obese, a result of too many Cambodian and Indonesian visa inserts and stamps from all my travels.
The young woman in pink now went to a sheet of paper with names on it and wrote something on it and said, Sign here. I did, and then grabbed my passport and furtively put it in my pocket, which I wasn’t supposed to do. She didn’t take notice then, or call me on it later.
She said, You can now have breakfast. She pointed across the large marble-floored stadium wide entrance to several dining tables.
Which, despite my need for sleep, and half naked as dressed, I repaired to for a breakfast of coffee in a glass too hot to handle and without a handle; orange juice that the waitress understood was to be orange juice and turned out to be something akin to sugary grapefruit juice, and two forearm length loaves of fresh French bread so insubstantial that when I tore a piece off to put jam on that was in fact as thin as water the crusts collapsed, and it was only crust to which I tried, unsuccessfully, to apply a raspberry jam as thin as water.
I now figured I needed a little more sleep, and a return to imaging a story only half-imagined when that damn phone rang for the fourth time at seven a.m.
Stickman's thoughts:
I think it would be safe to say that StickmanVietnam.com won't be coming any time soon...
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
