North half

The buildings are narrow, taller for being so narrow, each one its own slender pagoda except each floor is different, where one is a shop decorated with my idea of authentic, some curly gold-scaled dragon, mouth stuffed with shimmering pearls, then a floor mostly plain but with window shutters that remind me of New Orleans more than France exactly but is French colonial in the most absolute sense and then the third floor is corrugated tin and lines of laundry. The buildings line up like jagged teeth, the front six of which, we are told, are filed down to indicate maturity. At night I grind my teeth and wonder. In the city everything is crowded, four people on a scooter, four zeroes to buy coffee on the sidewalk (though no sidewalk), and I remember how to cross the street like I could kill a car or die trying, a fierceness in myself generally untapped and when no car takes the challenge I am both triumphant and weary. Young women in silk and fur pose at every storefront and their pockmarked photographers dutifully document it and then they both gaze into the reflective surface to evaluate the results. Outside the city we travel by bus past whole towns of row upon row of identical houses, a contrast to the city in how empty they are, and how pristine, ghost towns, no cars or influence in sight. We take a boat into a bay full of limestone mountaintops, now worn at the base, and the guide smiles and we smile back; and his tobacco-stained teeth echo the islets. There are dozens of boats, giant and gleaming white, and dotted amongst them are small entire villages of primary colors selling fruit and fish that later appear on our plates in beautiful bite-sized pieces. Many things are tiny and precise, carved and chopped to fit in the palms of a thousand hands. We learn how lacquer is made, I've dismissed it as kitsch but now I want it the way I want anything shiny and possibly poison. At a rest stop where an uncomfortable level of aggression is used to encourage us to buy a coffee, use the toilet, or spend money generally, there is a woman cracking eggshells with a mallet into smaller and smaller particles of white which will become conical hats in a grouped image or maybe a moon rising over a rice field, equally authentic and unreal.