my encounter with a gang overseas (just for pizza)

ok so hiii!! i’m in vietnam right now (im from melbourne australia and this is my first time overseas!!) and i’m currently in saigon or ho chi min city for our last stop. if you don’t know just to put in perspective, saigon is the most populated city in vietnam (9.2 million!) so it’s extremely busy. it’s so different from australia—for example, pickpockets are crazy here, and earlier a tiny little girl (like 7) came up to us asking for money and we knew it was a scam so we said no (i felt so bad until this >>) and this little girl flicked her hat on and did fucking ballet on the extremely busy road to get across .ToT. 

but anyways, the gang. so the entire day was busyyyy and we wanted dinner and of course, my younger brother (10) got to choose. he wanted pizza and my dad choose this random place and got google maps to direct him. we walked down backstreets and dark ally’s, my mum and i were sceptical but still followed him. we were walking down a particularly out of the way little road that, apparently this pizza place was at however when we walked into this opening into a little court this large group of people were sitting in tables with food from the food trucks around. let me set the scene for you—a group of women with a whole fucking PILE of silver jewellery in the centre of a plastic table surrounded by chairs while they were playing some game, early teens were sparing playfully off to the side, most of the men had earrings with the same kind of design but what stood out were two things, a man sitting in a bright red chair in a dark ally way at the front of the street/court and the fact that they all had matching pins on their shirts and jackets.

 we had been spotted by this young man who was dressed in jeans and a red teeshirt with the yellow star in the centre (the vietnamese flag) adorned with the matching pin and some other one with the same logo on it. he walked over to my dad (who is actually insane sometimes, for instance now, when he was about to sit down with these people and try and hang out with them) and tried to speak to him but the man didn’t speak any english so i have no idea what he meant. the man in the flag shirt walked over to what seemed to be a host? he had a microphone and a jacket with the pin but also a matching patch on his jacket, he said something about us on the microphone—how do i know that? well everyone turned and looked and laughed at us and the man down the ally stood up. my mum, brother and i wanted to get the fuck out of there but my dad was like “haha yes i’m never in danger, hahaha, im a man!” then my mum said to him she was going to leave him here if he didn’t come with us.  to leave the court/street we had to pass by the ally way with the man in the red chair who was coming closer to us. as we moved past him we say his face—he had completely buzzed hair, he was insanely jacked and sweaty but most notably, he had what i’d estimate about 1 million dollars of thick, gold chains around his neck (first of all how the fuck did this guy have these chains??) so we just speed walked out of there.

as we were leaving we got a grab (the equivalent of an uber in vietnam) to drive us to another pizza place—because while my mum and i were still processing the millions of dollars of chains my brother could only think of pizza. we got there and we sat. it was probably not my choice of place to go but it was ok, i only ordered a cola while my dad and brother got pizzas. the owner of the place had two dogs and a daughter. one of the dogs was lovely but the other was quite nippy. i mean they both looked kinda rough but you know…and her daughter was dancing to the top 50 2016 on the side of the road so the atmosphere was interesting. i’m so tired right now so im going to go. i don’t know if anyone will read this but if you did—mwah mwah mwah!!

hope you never have to run into a gang for less then mediocre pizza,

—Zoe xoxo

(ps. i ordered room service instead of pizza so garlic bread 4life)