Hanoi, Vietnam
The wild streets of old town Hanoi at midnight as the street stalls dismantle; police enforcing curfew with a cacophony of megaphones as the throngs of locals and tourists alike funnel to secret locations throughout the city. The squat neon plastic stool tradition was born of the need to quickly stack and surrender when police cars begin their slow crawl through the old town streets. The Vietnamese government requires a strict 12pm shutdown which has naturally given rise to a subset of discreetly shuttered speakeasies around the edges of the district where one can indulge in smoking entire packs of $2 cigarettes indoors, sucking down laughing gas from "happy balloons" and drinking .50cent cans of Tiger beer with an in-the-know ex pat crowd comprised of English teachers, aging Australians and the occasional assuredly underage local teen. Some of my favorite moments in Hanoi were spent sitting on these chaotic streets, sipping plastic steins of the fresh draught "Bia Hoi Hanoi", brewed daily and sold till the keg runs out for 5,000dong (.25cents) a glass, sweating so hard you'd stop caring, watching the chaos control and release itself.