Is Mighty Pretty

Last night I found myself hanging out with smokers, which meant standing out on the street in front of a groovy bar drinking vodka. It was Absolut Citron and Soda if you must know. The drink itself about 7 years out of date but I'm bringing it back on account of my ... umm ... stomach. Given that Vietnam is about 25 years behind the rest of the world, when I get back I'll be fashion forward and retrotastic at the same time.

Giving up drinking is not an option. Not only would it would be social suicide, but it would probably give me the shakes (and not in a good way). Alcohol is the core social (and occasional sexual) lubricant of ex-pats; probably why vodka comes from potatoes.

Back to the smoking section.

At one stage an extremely drunk potato came staggering through us. She was really pissed and had that otherworldly-but-focused expression on her face that spells "I'm drunk and I'm on a mission and I won't living in your world for a few more hours and I don't really know where I'm going but I do know I'm not stoppiong.". Her bottom lip seemed leaden, causing a slight agape to her mouth. Her eyes were not those of a pedestrian; they were focused on some point just a bit farther than they needed to be. It was like the street had become one big magic eye picture for her and if she looked hard enough, she would find her friends in it.

All this strident weaving was like witnessing Courtney Love staggering to breakfast after a big night.

And I think we all know how her hair looked.

An adjacent smoker - Claudia, a Polish woman - also noticed our drunken potato and said with a slight chuckle "It's very windy tonight, isn't it"?

She explained that this a Polish expression. Whenever someone is weaving home drunk, they say "it's very windy tonight" and then get back to their own drinks. I'm going to start using it.