The Vietnamese are expert at a lot of things. Motorbike driving. Clearly. The whole food situation. Obviously. Selecting premium party girl outfits. It goes without saying. But maybe the thing they are most expert in is taking selfies. It’s an art here. An entire culture. Seriously. Now that Gina’s started to assimilate and stopped planning so much annoying “cultural” stuff for us to do, we spend a lot of time going to different premium selfie spots with our Kindles to read and enjoy the selfie taking going on around us, which is the real-deal, street-level culture of Hanoi.

For example, right there next to our favorite bia hoi place, Bia Hoi Foxy Tiger Mom and Shockingly Young Daughter, is a wildly popular selfie station. I am not exaggerating. We can be there for an hour drinking bia hoi and watch like 15 groups of premiumly dressed party girls pull up on motorbikes to spend about four minutes taking selfies before taking off again to do whatever premiumly dressed party girls do after they hit up the wildly popular selfie station. So we were all like, “What’s the deal with this place?” And Gina was all like, “I think it’s a candle shop,” which actually isn’t a good explanation for its wild popularity as a selfie station. We determined today that, in fact, it’s a tea shop, but that isn’t much better explanation-wise than candle shop was. Regardless, the hot girls just keep coming and taking selfies like nonstop.

And because if there’s no selfie it didn’t happen and a major point of the Escape Plan is to be basically the cinéma vérité of the travel blogosphere, we decided to get on over there tonight to take some selfies of our own. We were, of course, drinking bia hoi at Bia Hoi Foxy Tiger Mom and Shockingly Young Daughter, so we decided to invite Shockingly Young Daughter to take a selfie with us, which she was clearly confused by and shy about at first, but when it came down to the actual taking of the selfie, she knew just what to do. Because selfie taking runs in the blood of the Vietnamese people. It runs deep.

By the way, I did ask Shockingly Young Daughter what her name is so I could include it here, but she really is pretty shy, and so she just covered her mouth and giggled and sort of ran away. But she’s cool. That’s her in the photo above, just crushing it with the selfie pose. We’re looking forward to coming back to Hanoi for Tet Holiday in February, by which time Shockingly Young Daughter will be Young Daughter.