The Gate of Artemis

How time goes by

I stayed at the Fortuna Hotel, 6b Lang Ha in Hanoi. You can find the casino on the first floor and the nightclub in the basement. Around 5 0’clock, the girls invade the lobby like a flurry of bees. They are tiny but admittedly, very pretty. The advertisement of the spa and fitness facility of the hotel reads: “The pursuit of pleasure is what the ruling elite is all about”. This is not the statement of the communist prosecutor but just an invitation to join.
I did not visit the casino, the nightclub or the spa but the millennial stones of the Confucian university speaking of a long gone by time when wisdom was taught. Here, we are, with the heirs of Uncle Ho and his sandals, a couple of decades down the Ho Chi Minh trail.
I passed by my time and sometimes within it. I wanted someone to notice. It was probably a mistake.