After walking around the Old Quarter for a while in search of a premium outfit for Gina to wear to our fancy dinner at TUNG and for that ever-elusive bia hoi spot with the truly skilled bia hoi girl par excellence, we decided it was time to hit up Beer Corner for a little foxy beer girl yelling and pointing action.

It was still pretty early and Beer Corner wasn’t set up yet, so we decided to just head down that street and stop for beer at the first place whose foxy beer girl whose job it is to entice you to stop and drink beer seemed to promise that the place held a lot of potential for a good time to be had. This method of picking a place based on the foxiness of the foxy girl whose job it is to be foxy and entice you in works for all sorts of situations. Need to find a pharmacy so you can get your Imodium AD or codeine fix? Pick the pharmacy with the most attractive pharmacist. Looking for a really good pho ga, which is chicken soup for the Vietnamese soul? Find one where the pot’s being stirred by a total fox. She didn’t get that way by eating subpar pho ga. Want to find a premium Vietnamese-style outfit for your wife who still loves you to wear on fancy date night? Go to the shop with the most premium and stylishly dressed clerk. She will help.

The strategy works every time. And that’s how we met Min.

When you’re in the area of the Old Quarter by where Beer Corner is, you’re pretty much in tourist central. And when you walk down that one street—which is between street and alley, width-wise—you will be gently accosted by lots of skinny guys whose job it is to entice you to sit down at their place and enjoy beer. This is weird because, let’s be honest, skinny Vietnamese guys don’t have the same appeal as, say, foxy Vietnamese chickies in short jean skirts and modest belly shirts, which is what Min was wearing. Min also exudes a charming and fun sort of boppy energy that the skinny guys lack entirely.

So we sit down at Blues Bar and, because we’re up for a good time, we order two large glasses of Tiger beer. There’s an Irish bloke on holiday by himself drinking a bottled Tiger beer cuz there ain’t no Guinness in country, Jack, but that’s pretty much it clientele-wise. You can tell it was a quiet Monday afternoon in Beer Corner Alley. The tourists weren’t even making it down that way for Min to even have a chance to coax them into Blues bar with her foxy boppy charm that promised a good time to be had if you just gave Blues Bar a shot. And it looked like the lady who sells the fans and hats and bracelets was in for a slow night, indeed.

So we got to work helping Min coax patrons in. And by we, I mean me, mostly, because I have some pretty good coaxing skills myself and when you put Min and me together you have a coaxing force to be reckoned with. Gina contributed by making sure I didn’t go too overboard, which can happen sometimes when I get excited. So when a group of tourists did wander down Beer Corner Alley, Gina and I gave lots of thumbs ups and clinked our glasses and took selfies in such a manner that it would be obvious that Blues Bar delivered on the promise of the good time hinted at by Min’s foxy and charming and boppy coaxing maneuvers.

And that’s how we learned that pretty much every tourist who is not enticed or coaxed by Min’s foxy and charming and boppy maneuvers says the same thing: “Maybe next time.” Because when the tourists are just past Blues Bar, Min turns to us and says, “Maybe next time,” and you just know she hears this all the time in Beer Corner Alley. It’s like a touristic mantra of sadness and missed opportunity.

And so I know that I have to step up my coaxing game and so I get up off of my stool and head out to the front tables with Min to make my pitch to the passing tourists:

“Blues Bar! Cold beer! Good for too much hot! Plus premium beer girl! Very cheap! You will love it!”

And Min very much appreciates my efforts even though there’s still a lot of maybe-next-time action from the tourists who wouldn’t know good-time potential if it slapped ’em in their faces. And so she gave me a magnetic pin to wear that digitally advertised Blues Bar in a sort of scrolling-across-the-pin sort of way, which is hard to describe, actually, but which is like a miniature version of the electronic signage we’ve all seen and so you know what I’m talking about. And now that I officially worked at Blues Bar, I felt especially committed to enticing some tourists in to enjoy cold beer good for too much hot and premium foxy beer girl. And it became pretty clear that Min and I had the kind of vibe that transcends age and cultural differences and has everything to do with two obviously premium people in the world connecting despite all odds because vibe triumphs over everything and the universe is funny like that.

And with our combined coaxing and enticing powers we succeed in inspiring two Italian guys to, why not-a? give Blues Bar a chance-a. And these guys turn out to be really cool and inspire a new twist to my pitch:

“Blues Bar! Cold beer! Good for too much hot! Plus premium beer girl! Very cheap! Plus sexy Italian men! You will love it!”

And these guys are great cuz while Min and I are working the streets they’re shouting “Ciao bella! Ciao bello!” And we’ve really got a great international scene going and so these two younger Australian blokes sit down and order large Tiger beers and it turns out they’re fun and easy-going fellows. And Gina’s chatting up the Irish bloke who tells us that Dublin is now more expensive than London and a Guinness there costs upwards of seven or eight euro—”Can you fooking believe it, mate?” “Nay, I can’t”—except this doesn’t at all capture his accent because he’s Irish and not Scottish. And an older Australian couple join the younger Australian fellow and also order large glasses of Tiger beer. And a group of Vietnamese kids sit down because they’re celebrating the last days of their cousin’s summer break before he who goes back to college in Dallas, Texas, of all places, for the fall semester, and their little cousin who I can call Peggy’s with them and she’s cool and collected and adorable and is 11 years old, which is way older than the 9 that I’d guessed, but she wasn’t at mad at me at all about that. And now there’s a party going on and a French chick sits down with her Chinese boyfriend and they’re both really cool and having a good time. And a wildly attractive young couple who are German and Australian and who met while the guy who’s German was traveling in Australia and they fell in love and are now star-crossed lovers who decided to meet halfway in Vietnam and who said “Guten Tag,” to us, except that it was pretty clearly Abend and so we said, “Guten Abend,” which they really got a kick out of and appreciated, they sit down and hold hands and gaze dreamily at each other across the table and so their cold beers get warm after a while but this doesn’t bother them at all. And the party was so poppin’ by this point Min had to call in a reinforcement premium beer girl named Jenny, who was just great too, and even the lady who sells hats and fans and bracelets was having a good time, and so my work at Blues Bar was clearly done.

After a hard Abend‘s work and about four large glasses of Tiger beer it was time to order some food. I’m unsure if Blues Bar serves food, but we got food delivered that Min ordered for us. This was a nice touch because our dinners came with rice, which is surprisingly uncommon given that rice is so common in country that they don’t say, “We eat food,” they say, “We eat rice,” except in Vietnamese, obviously. When we asked our native informant Miracle why all the rice in country was in the form of rice noodles and rice flour crepes, etc., she explained that nobody wants to eat plain rice when they go out to dinner because they eat it so much at home. And so I take it that the dinner Min procured for us was more like what she would eat herself during a shift because it wasn’t fancy and came with plain rice and was super delicious and just what was needed. I was able to confirm this theory when I saw her eating the same thing at the server’s station later on as I made my way to the restroom, and so I really felt like part of the team.

Pre-Prozac and going monk and the Escape Plan, I would have said, “Maybe next time,” to Min and walked right on by the Blues Bar in search of something more authentic, whatever that means. Because too touristy. I was a fool then. A fool. There is a lot of fun to be had at Blues Bar in Beer Corner Alley if you just give it a shot.

“Cold beer! Good for too much hot! Plus premium beer girl! Very cheap! Plus sexy Italian men! You will love it!”

“Ciao bella! Ciao bello!”