I read a line somewhere, some years back. “We think caged birds sing, when actually they cry.” I suppose I could use Google to check who wrote that and how badly I’ve just butchered it, but you get the gist.

I took this picture in the Vietnamese city of Nha Trang. The caged birds were in the doorway of a hotel just next the hotel that I stayed in. The day before I tried to get a room there but my attempt to execute that seemingly simply task failed when the woman at the reception told me it wasn’t a hotel.

“Are you sure?” I asked her, which sounds like a stupid thing to say, but believe me this was a hotel. It had a ‘check in’ sign, tourism leaflets next to the reception counter, and a sign that read ‘sorry, internet gone bad,’ which I found myself agreeing with.

“No hotel.” She said again before pointing to the doorway I had just come through. The very same doorway that had a big sign above it that read ‘Hotel’ in large red Helvetica letters. I smiled, said sorry, then left her to get back to the important business of thumbing her phone.

I’m not sure who the birds in the ‘hotel’ doorway belonged to. They weren’t singing, or crying for that matter. Instead they were just sitting there in the full glare of the hot sun probably wishing they could just fly away and find freedom, or at least a little shade.

The picture that I actually published on this day featured a street barber I met and chatted with using Google translate.