Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black Read Free Book Online Page B

whirlpool. Can’t go forward on your motorbike? No problem: go up on the sidewalk. Still can’t go forward? No problem: do a U-ey and go back. One-way street? No problem.
    Sounds like chaos, and on Salt Spring it surely would be. But in Saigon, as in a river, it works. In three weeks I saw more motorbikes and scooters than I could see in three lifetimes on Salt Spring, but I saw only two motorized mishaps—and even they weren’t proper traffic accidents. A motor scooter fell over while the owner was parking it, and another guy had his brakes freeze as he was crossing, well, a sidewalk, but that’s another story. Point is: no damage, no injuries.
    Ah, you say, but what about pedestrians? What about trying to cross that river of chrome and steel? Well, that’s where it actually helps to be from BC. Especially if you’ve ever crossed a salmon stream while the fish were running. If you have, you know that if you walk slowly and steadily, those salmon—those tens of thousands of obsessed, hormone-besotted salmon—will not run into you. Their fins will tickle you; you will feel the ripples of water as their tails lash by—but head-on and T-bone collisions will not occur.
    Same with the rivers of traffic in Saigon. If a pedestrian walks slowly and steadily and most of all with intent, those tooting, revving motorbikes and scooters will magically part on your upstream side and rejoin on the downstream stretch without so much as brushing your Tilley trousers.
    It should be a disaster, traffic in Saigon, indeed in much of Southeast Asia. Stop signs are ignored, traffic lights are merely a broad suggestion, vehicles travel in every direction at once. It would be total chaos if we tried it here at home, but there, somehow, it works.
    Day after day, night and day, the streets of Saigon, gorged with people and vehicles, continue somehow to function. It’s an Act of Faith, crossing a Saigon street. Which is another thing that can’t hurt. I know I said three Hail Marys before I stepped off the curb in Saigon. And I’m not even Catholic.

 
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    Make Mine a Double-Double
    T here are many things in this world beyond my feeble ken—nuclear physics, Microsoft Word, women—but a daily and ongoing bafflement is the corner coffee shop. How does that work exactly?
    By which I mean: how do those enterprises stay in business?
    From an outsider’s perspective, it’s economic hara-kiri. You have proprietors paying a hefty rent to occupy a trendy, expensively refurbished space to sell heated beverages to, well, basically, a roomful of freeloaders.
    Granted, the cafe owners get a nice return on the four or five bucks they charge for a mug of hot water and .000003 cents’ worth of ground beans, but still . . .
    Think of the customer turnover compared to, say, a hamburger joint. At the Burger King the customers are sliding through like Jeep chassis on a Chrysler assembly line. And at the coffee shop? Well, the lady at the first table—the one hunched over her iPad next to the chai latte that’s so old it’s sprouting lily pads—is working on chapter twenty of her doctoral thesis on the influence of Rumi on neo-Renaissance architecture. At table two, a homeless guy wearing Bose headphones is puzzling over the New York Times crossword. The rest of the clientele is reading, writing, snoozing, gazing into space or murmuring sweet nothings into adjacent earholes.
    Hardly any of them are buying and nobody’s moving. I’m no economist, but that does not sound like an outstanding model of mercantile viability.
    And speaking of unsound business practices, who’s the marketing genius who came up with the idea of offering free Internet access in coffee shops? Brilliant! Now every geek with a laptop who’s still living with his parents has a free downtown office (with a heated bathroom and complimentary serviettes) where he can go and play Grand Theft Auto until