Five o'clock and the corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen is already full. Stools the height of my knee, plastic, orange and blue, wobbling slightly on the uneven pavement. Someone hands me a glass before I even sit down. Twenty five cents. I keep checking my change like there's a mistake.
The beer is warm-cool, a little flat, brewed that morning somewhere nearby and gone by midnight. Nobody here is precious about it. A man in a motorbike helmet still on his head toasts a table of backpackers. A woman grills something on a tiny charcoal stove six inches from my foot, smoke curling up past the string lights. Scooters thread through the crowd without slowing, horns like punctuation.
I left the Leica in the bag for a while. Just watched. An old man plays cards with three teenagers, losing on purpose I think, or maybe not, his face gives nothing away. A dog sleeps under the table where the beer kegs sit, unbothered by the noise, the heat, the constant shuffle of stools being dragged closer together to make room for one more person.
What strikes me about this junction, more than the beer itself, is the lack of hierarchy. Tourist, local, the stool doesn't care. The price doesn't care. Everyone is twelve inches off the ground, elbows on knees, glass in hand. It is the most democratic bar I've found in three continents of looking.
Someone asks where I'm from. Milan, I say, then São Paulo, then nowhere really, and they laugh the way people do when the answer is more interesting than the question. We keep drinking. The light goes from gold to blue to the orange of the bulbs strung overhead. Não sei quanto tempo fiquei ali. Long enough that my stool left a mark on my calves. Long enough to forget I was keeping time at all.
If you go: arrive by 5pm, grab a stool at the Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen corner, order one bia hoi, stay for three.
