Stop that thief!

Katherine and I spent several hours biking around the city today, stopping intermittently to browse in a store, get bubble tea, buy a bootleg Mariah Carey Christmas Cd. We stopped in a dress shop at one point, having noticed some cute items in the window, but left when we realized that the prices were quite high. We had parked our bikes outside of the shop, locked together, and wandered across the street to another shop. Finding nothing in the second shop, either, we started to leave, at which point Katherine started screaming "HEY! HEY! STOP!" I looked across the street to see a man lifting both our bikes. She and I did our best to sprint across the street--one of the bigger ones in the city--but it was damn game of Frogger, with all the the motorbikes. And we were both, by now, yelling at the man (who clearly didn't speak English) to STOP!. Finally, and still screaming, we made it to the other side of the street, where I was confused to find a shop attendant calmly watching the man struggle to lift both our bikes. And that's when we realized it. The man was not a thief. He was the security guard of the shop. And he was just trying to move our bikes so that he could sit in his chair, which our bikes were blocking.

I was mortified. I apologized over and over in Vietnamese, making little bows, holding my hands up in guilt. This, of course, was in between bouts of gut-wrenching laughter and burying my embarrassed face in my hands. The poor man, who we'd nearly attacked, seemed unaffected by the whole debacle, sat down in his newly liberated chair and lit a cigarette.