Currency is all relative

Lincoln gets the Penny and the Fiver

Jefferson gets the Nickel and the elusive Two buck bill

FDR gets the Dime

Washington gets the Quarter and the Dollar bill

JFK gets the Half Dollar

Sacagawea and apparently Grover Cleveland get the Dollar Coin (Thanks Wiki)

Mr. Hamilton shows off his stuff on the 10 dollar Federal Reserve note

Jackson graces the Twenty

Grant looms over us on the Fifty

And

Franklin reminds us all that he was nice enough to start the first libraries every time we spend a hundred bones.  Lucky for us, we never spend more than a Hamilton on our library fines.

Here in Vietnam only one man stares back at you as you pay your electric bill.

To think, his brother who sold chicken was the disappointment in the family, he never had his own currency.

Also, since the 500,000 is worth about 24 bucks, I happened to have all this currency on me today.  The 500 because I can't spend it anywhere, everyone rounds up or down to 1000 except someone 3 weeks ago who gave me the 500.  I keep a hold of the 1000 and the 2000 to park our motorbikes.  We have to keep 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, to do business with street vendors.  We have to make a point to split our 500k and 200k bills at the grocery stores so that aren't handing unbreakable currency for 20,000 worth of chicken on a stick.  It sounds very bourgeois.  We are not drowning in money (in paper currency- we sometimes are) but its hard to transition form a card economy to a minor-bill economy for most of our transactions.

We can only get 100,000 or 500,000 notes out of the ATM, but if we give a 10,000 note to park our bike the security/parking men look at us hatefully, so we carry nickles and dimes in cash, piles of it, daily.

Insects!

Guillermo Del Toro should have included this insect from the Perfume Pagoda in Pan's Labyrinth.

Good Beer and a Bike

So we were dropping of my dry cleaning (yup, in Hanoi I'm fancy enough to have dry cleaning).  We spotted a bar next door that we've driven by many times and never seen.  It would be a 'hole-in-the-wall' bar in the US.  Here it is a nice little joint and far bigger than the hole-in-the-wall places which actually are a hole with road-side/in-road seating.
Why are you mentioning this Jeff?
Thanks for asking.
There was a huge keg in the bar.  It looked more like where they ferment the beer.  The tap was labeled as Fresh Beer but it wasn't the same stuff that they sell at Bia Hoi.  It was malty and tasted like ... real beer!

Look at that nice brown beer in my Kansas glass.  The bottle is how you get a liter to-go.  At first we thought it was just a re-used bottle.  Here is the lid: 

Custom made!

This is starting to sound sarcastic, but this truly is good beer.

It is even better tasting because even the imported beer here is terrible.  You can either pay 8,000VND for local beer (330ml) or 68,000VND (500ml) for imported beer that tastes the same or 30,000VND (330ml) for Heineken which we all know tastes like minty garbage.

1 liter of Fifth Ocean, fresh from the tap to your own plastic bottle: 100,000VND.

Now that we can just pop a bottle of beer onto our bikes and head home, it is a good time to mention bikes...

I'm done renting a little semi-auto Honda Wave.  I bought myself a manual Honda Win.  It needs some work, but it runs fine.  For what I paid, I don't mind putting a few bucks into it.  More importantly, I now own a motorbike (sorry mom).

-Jeff