TADIOTO

A friend in Europe sent the image below a few days ago.

The article is about a law allowing people in Holland to have sex in the park.  There are some rules, and hours, you must respect.  One must avoid “doing it” too close to children playgrounds, and one must dispose of condoms and “the eventual cigarette” properly.  Public employees, according to the new law, must not bother the couples going at it, as long as the couples aren’t bothering others.  Dog owners aren’t too happy, as the new law will also mean better enforcement of laws against people taking their dogs to the parks without leashes.

These people, you’d think, are way ahead of others in many countries.  But then again, people here in Ha Noi have been doing it in the park for years.  Illegally, of course, but cops don’t seem to bother them that much.  From the small green patches around West Lake, to larger parks…

And then again, my friends tell me this used to happen in parks in Viet Nam in the 70s.  When you have no room at home, what are you going to do? 

During one of the summers of my youth, refugees from Quang Tri and Hue descended on Danang, in Central Viet Nam, to escape from the fighting and the advancing Communist troops.  The refugees took over our school.  Students put away our books, and all the benches and long desks: the classrooms became bedrooms for hundreds of families.  Sometimes we’d go out to the clogged up Highway One to distribute bread and whatever else available.  But mostly, we hung out day and night at the school, cooking and feeding people, cleaning up, and generally helping to maintain some order.  And then late into the night, we’d go spy on people.  It wasn’t really nice of us.  Even in those horrible days of warfare and fear and uncertainty, people were doing it.  It was as if making love was a way to reassure or reaffirm themselves, to maintain their humanity in the face of so much desctruction and all that comes from the fighting.  It might have been fear of possible separation that made people more amorous.  And yes, they did it in our schoolyard, behind the few bushes.  In the park.