The Cyclo, The Spray Paint and the Wardrobe

Sounds a bit like a C.S. Lewis classic, doesn't it? This is kind of a long entry, but worth it (I hope). It was our first real Vietnamese cultural experience...

It all started with the wardrobe. Our apartment was furnished when we moved in—sort of. We had a bamboo table with some bamboo chairs, some other bamboo chairs and a bamboo couch, some bamboo shelves and a bed that feels like it’s made out of granite. In other words, most everything we would need to survive, if not thrive. What the apartment was lacking, however, was any sort of place to put our clothes. I take that back; we do have a tiny built-in cubbyhole that smells like it’s had wet rags stored in it since the 1970s. We elected not to store any of our clothes in there.

Since we didn’t feel like living out of our suitcases for the next six months and since we’d been given some start-up funds by our organization for occasions like this, we decided to get ourselves something to keep our clothes in. With the help of Shelly, our country director’s wife (who speaks Vietnamese), we headed down to “Furniture Street,” about three blocks from our apartment.

When I say “Furniture Street” (not to be confused with “Bamboo Wicker Furniture Street,” which is in an entirely different part of the city) you might well imagine a street with a few good-sized furniture shops on it. You would be wrong. Rather, furniture street is a virtually unbroken string of tiny furniture shops that runs, near as we can tell, the entire width of the city of Hanoi. People make, sell and buy furniture all along Furniture Street, and sometimes even partially into the roadway of Furniture Street. It's also been dubbed “Crazy Street” because it has no sidewalk and though it is only about as wide as a single “U.S.” lane of traffic, it inexplicably carries more scooters and buses than virtually any other street we’ve seen in Hanoi.

With Shelly’s help, we found our way to a relatively inexpensive shop on Furniture Street and chatted with the owner for a while. He offered us a cheaply made but reasonable-sized wardrobe for about $65. We took it, and the fun began.

The question after purchasing the wardrobe then became: How on earth would we get it to our second floor apartment four blocks away? The owner answered matter-of-factly, “Cyclo.” A cyclo (pronounced SEE-clo), for those unfamiliar with Vietnamese culture, is a modified bicycle. Kind of a reverse tricycle, actually, with one wheel in the rear and two wheels up front, with room in the front to carry tourists, vegetables and—apparently—wardrobes. The fact that it would have never in a million years have crossed my mind to try and move a wardrobe with a tricycle didn’t slow the process down a bit. The furniture shop owner got on his cellphone and a few minutes later our cyclo driver pulled up. He and the shop owner hefted the six foot tall wardrobe onto the cyclo, tied it down, and we headed off, walking alongside our driver.

The cyclo driver pushed his heavily-laden trike along Crazy Street and ran with it down a steep drop onto the side street that we live on. Things were going swimmingly for the first two blocks until we reached Obstacle Number One. Our side street is called a pho, which means something like ‘alleyway,’ and which is not to be confused with “pho” which means ‘noodly breakfast soup.’

In any case, our pho is not the narrowest of streets in Hanoi, but it’s pretty dang tight and is made tighter by the fact that there are several cement poles in the middle of it. While trying to negotiate his way around one of these poles our cyclo driver made a slight misjudgment and bashed the top corner of our wardrobe into the pole, gouging the side and partially separating the top piece from the rest of the wardrobe. Whoops.

Without missing a beat, our driver parked his cyclo in the middle of the ally, rummaged around in his belongings for a bit, pulled out a can of dark brown spray paint and proceeded to ‘repair’ the gouge on the spot with a quick shot of paint. Voila, problem solved. (It was pretty clear that he’d been through this routine before.)

We reached the front gate of our apartment building, whereupon the driver parked it again, pulled out his screwdriver, and re-tightened the top section of the wardrobe which had been loosened in the crash. Good as new.

Steven and the driver then picked up the wardrobe and began to carry it into the building. Soon they were confronted with Obstacle Number Two: the tight spiral staircase that climbs up to our second floor apartment. It was at this point that Shelly, our translator, had to leave to pick up her son from school and it was at this point that things began to break down even more. The cyclo driver looked at the staircase, made some “tsk, tsk” sounds, said something in Vietnamese and started to disassemble the wardrobe. He pulled the doors off to make it lighter and—as we later discovered—to keep them from getting gouged all to heck. Then he and Steven lifted the wardrobe again and started up the stairs.

At the first hairpin up the stairs, things got ugly. The wardrobe jammed tight between the wall and the railing and would go no further. The driver—who was lifting it from the top—started motioning and saying a lot of words in Vietnamese to Steven, who was lifting from the bottom. He could have been saying “push it,” “turn it,” “move back,” “I quit,” “why don’t you let your wife do it,” or any number of more colorful sayings—it didn’t matter, though, because Steven couldn’t understand a word of it. Though the wardrobe was clearly stuck, Steven just kept lifting and pushing, for lack of any better ideas.

Finally, the driver decided to take matters into his own hands. He handed the top end of the wardrobe off to Joelle and somehow contorted himself around it and down the stairway to take the bottom end from Steven. A few vigorous jerks of the head and more Vietnamese words made it clear that Steven should go elsewhere. So he clambered his way up the railing of the spiral staircase to help Joelle at the top end of the wardrobe. After another minute of lifting and gouging, the wardrobe somehow came free and squeezed around the hairpin. From there it was a straight shot into the apartment, thankfully.

After setting the wardrobe down in our apartment, the driver—looking somewhat sweatier and less congenial that he had initially—gave the wardrobe a few more shots of fix-it-all spray paint and left without saying a whole lot further. For our part we laughed and decided a couple of things: 1) It would be good to learn some Vietnamese if we’re planning on living here and 2) Though we’ll be moving elsewhere in six months, the wardrobe isn’t coming with us.