Four Observations on Departing Vietnam

If you enjoy this post, please  subscribe to my RSS feed to automatically receive my latest updates! You can also follow me on Twitter @chinaandbeyond.

A few final observations from two weeks in Vietnam:

  1. The sales pitch: Vietnamese salesladies have mastered the personalized pitch. In Sapa, every handicrafts-toting woman and girl began her pitch with “You buy from me?”, thereby making irrelevant the bags of handicrafts we’d already purchased. After all, we hadn’t bought them from her.
  2. The books: Way back in Nanning, a fellow traveler just leaving Vietnam gave me a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha with the warning that it was missing 10 pages. Not because they were torn out, but rather because they had been skipped in the photocopying process. It turns out that almost every English book for sale in Vietnam is just a photocopy — down to the shiny colored covers. The quality varies, but my copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything was so good that the only giveaways were the “Fujifilm” logos on the inside of the cover.
  3. The raunchy jokes: For some reason, all of our various guides — at Halong Bay, at Hoi An Market, on the way to the Cu Chi Tunnels — seemed to love making jokes on the spectrum from slightly-salacious to I-couldn’t-say-that-to-my-mother. (Did you know “yum” in Vietnamese means “I’m horny”?) Where did this come from?
  4. The touts and scams: Observation #1 aside, where are they? Guidebooks, the Internet and my fellow travelers led me to expect horror stories. “Everyone will try to rip you off,” “no one in Vietnam is genuine,” etc. Happily, our worst fears did not come true. While we probably paid a dollar extra on cab fares here and there, most of the people we met were absolutely lovely. No one pushed us to sign up for tours or to buy tickets we didn’t want, and a firm “No, thank you” was enough to get moto drivers to leave us alone.

Written from the road in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Subscribe to my RSS feed for more stories and come back in February for photos!

Related Posts:

  1. China to Vietnam, By Land
  2. Two Tiers of Transport in Vietnam
  3. Halong Bay: Exceeding Expectations
  4. The Cu Chi Tunnels & the Disneyfication of the Vietnam War

Filed under: Travel Beyond China by Jess on January 19th, 2010
Tags:

Leave a Reply

« »