Supposedly rainy season starts in July but luckily there were only a few times that it rained and oddly it was always when I landed in a new city. Vietnam is a very LONG country and to get from one end to the other takes over 30 hours by bus/train.
Map of Vietnam highlighting the places visited
Luckily there are cheap in-country flights ($40/one-way) so most of my travel was by plane. Even flights to other countries from Vietnam are cheap. I was able to score a flight from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Bangkok, Thailand for $0.00 and with taxes it came to $23.00. Hard to beat that!
The currency in Vietnam is the Vietnamese Dong (VND) and the US Dollar is also widely used since the dong is so worthless. 1 USD is equivalent to about 20,000 VND and there were a few times that the bill was over 1,000,000 VND. Certain things are extremely cheap… like beer. A glass of beer cost $0.20, just as much as a bottle of water. A typical meal in a restaurant (stir fry and rice) would cost me 2 -4 USD. Vietnam is known for french baguettes, good coffee, and pho (a type of noodle soup). Coffee is either served as “white coffee” or “black coffee” and a lot of times it is iced. Black coffee is obviously just black coffee but white coffee is served not with milk but with sweetened condensed milk. Makes for a very sweet and tasty treat.
The traffic in Vietnam is unlike any other place I have been. It’s absolute insanity! Like the rest of Southeast Asia there are many more scooters than there are cars but in Vietnam a lot of bicycles share the road too. In Hanoi, about 7 million people live there and there are about that many scooters on the road! Add to that the absence of traffic lights, nonstop honking of the horns, and you have chaos. Crossing the street is a bit like parting the Red Sea and goes against everything I have every learned. Imagine a nonstop stream of hundreds of scooters, buses, cars, and bikes. You could wait for a break in traffic but you’d be waiting forever since that won’t happen. After following in the tracks of a few locals I discovered that the key to crossing the street and not getting hit is to start walking slowly into oncoming traffic and just keep walking and don’t stop. It’s when you stop that you’ll get hit. It’s very intimidating looking at all the scooters and cars coming at you but as long as you keep walking they will swerve around you.
In the smaller towns traffic is less intimidating and in Hoi An I rented a scooter to explore the outskirts of town. Driving down the road the local people would drive by me and give me a thumbs up. At first I had no idea what was going on but I spoke with one local and she said it’s because they are surprised to see a foreign woman driving a scooter. I guess that doesn’t happen too often.
The Vietnamese people (and the Thai’s also) worship white skin. In the stores you see plenty of skin care products advertising “whitening” abilities. They see dark skin as a sign of someone who works in the fields and see “white” as a sign of beauty. Since the majority of the people ride scooters or bicycles you will see them covered from head to toe in clothing. It’s common to see them wearing long sleeve shirts, sandals with socks, gloves covering their hands, and almost everyone wears a face mask (even when they are just walking around) to block out some of the pollution.
The Vietnamese covered head to toe
"The Vietnamese people (and the Thai’s also) worship white skin. In the stores you see plenty of skin care products advertising “whitening” abilities. They see dark skin as a sign of someone who works in the fields and see “white” as a sign of beauty."
ReplyDeleteI'm Vietnamese from Vietnam and I've never seen field work treated with stigma. Last time I checked, hard work is honorable.