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Let's set some ground rules: Street food must be eaten on the sidewalk without the option of eating indoors, as many "proper" restaurants also have outdoor seating, even though such "al fresco" appropriations of the street are actually illegal and subject to periodic police inspections where illegally placed plastic chairs and tables are confiscated. For Vietnamese small business owners who don't even rent space inside any buildings, their whole business depends on police not cracking down on them. Perhaps a better solution would be a non-corrupt (haha) registration and hygiene inspection process for street food vendors, then the government could get some tax income, the business owners would have some stability, and the consumers would get some level of food safety. But for now, let's get back to reality.
1. Banh Xeo - often translated as Vietnamese pancakes or Vietnamese crepes. Like pancakes or crepes, a batter is poured into a circular pan to crispen a thin round layer of this "cake" which has toppings like shrimp and pork, bean sprouts, and sometimes mushrooms (but not so much in the street). Banh Xeo Mien Trung is a smaller version. You can try this on Phan Ke Binh Street (near DeciBel) and Ung Van Khiem Street near D2 in Binh Thanh District.
2. Banh Mi Thit - the Vietnamese submarine sandwich / roll. Next to pho, this is probably the most famous Vietnamese dish outside of Vietnam. A French bread roll spread with pate (both foods from the French colonial era) stuffed with some kind of meat, julienned carrots and pickled daikon, cilantro - and some fresh and extremely spicy chili peppers if you don't remember to ask them "khong ot". Vo Van Tan near Cach Mang Thang 8 in District 3 has a popular shop to get some takeaway banh mi thit. Also try Banh Mi Heo Quay, pork with delicious -crispy- fat and skin attached, available on Ngo Tat To Street in Binh Thanh District.
3. Mi Hoanh Thanh - Chinese Won Ton Ramen Noodle Cart. Also seemingly referred to as "van than" in the North Vietnamese dialect. "Mi" refers to ramen noodles and if you think ramen means cheap instant noodles then you need to get schooled. Often these will be served in fancy wooden noodle carts which you can also sit at. The noodles should be fresh, not instant industrially dried noodles. Hoanh Thanh are won ton noodle dumplings. Also try Mi Xa Xiu - "char siu" in Chinese or cha-shu in Japanese. Try it at the corner of Xo Viet Nghe Tinh right after the Thi Nghe Bridge.
4. Banh Khot - Banh Khot is similar to Banh Xeo but thicker with a much smaller diameter. Too similar for me to distinguish is another dish called Banh Canh, not to be confused with the similarly pronounced Banh Canh noodle dish. Like Banh Xeo, after the batter and toppings are fired in their clay vessels they are wrapped by your hands in lettuce or mustard greens and rice paper, topped with fresh herbs, and then dipped in fish sauce.
5. Hu Tiu (Nam Vang), Hu Tiu Go - Hu Tiu (or Hu Tieu) is a kind of noodle. Hu Tiu Nam Vang refers to a version of this noodle dish, which can be eaten in soup or "dry", which should be Khmer - Nam Vang is an old Vietnamese word for Phnom Penh. Hu Tiu Go isn't a flavor of Hu Tiu. Rather it refers to the way it is sold. Go means to knock, and a seller of Hu Tiu Go will push his cart down the street while knocking on wood to let people know he's coming.
6. Banh Trang Tron - A favorite after school snack of Vietnamese girls. A trail mix of rice paper, herbs, chili chopped up and mixed with dried beef or quail eggs and served in a plastic bag with two small sticks to be used like chopsticks.
7. Com Tam - broken rice, a traditional South Vietnamese breakfast as opposed to pho in the North. Using the broken grains of rice served with BBQ pork (suon), sunny-side up egg (op-la), (bi), (cha), and with fish sauce (nuoc mam) dripped over to taste.
8. Xoi - Sticky rice. Can be served with separated chicken as easily as with ripe mango or other sweets. A favorite of mine is Xoi Khuc.
9. Bot Chien - What look like mochi cubes are thrown in a wok and fried with an egg or two into an omelette with fried cubes of... what exactly? Photo attached.
10. Banh Cuon - Kind of like a giant round noodle. Banh in Vietnamese can mean many things although it's often translated to cake. It can also mean bread and sometimes the noodle in a noodle dish. Banh Cuon is some kind of batter steamed in a giant circle until it's hard and noodley then topped with something like ground beef (or seafood or chicke and mushrooms if you want to get fancy). Then you add some "cha", herbs, and bean sprouts and pour on the nuoc mam and put it all into your mouth.
11. Bo La Lot - This one almost killed me. Street food is all fun and games until you are vomiting out both ends of your body for 24 hours. This dish of mystery beef wrapped in "lot" leaves and then cooked over coals, then wrapped in rice paper or greens and topped with thinly sliced papaya or unripe bananas and other leaves, can be quite tasty. But take it from me: avoid buying it from the sidewalk sellers on Ton Duc Thang Street right at the beginning of Le Thanh Ton Street.
Drink
Refreshments
Nuoc Mia - The quintessential street drink. Sugar cane juice made by running sticks of sugar cane through a press. When I first started drinking this it was availale for 2000 VND/glass but now it's no less than 4000 VND, which still comes out to less than 20 cents.
Sinh To - fruit smoothies. Strawberry, tomato, avacado, custard apple, banana, mango, etc. Go to the Hang Xanh Roundabout (aka The Circle of Death) after midnight if you're bored and thirsty.
Trai Dua - This is not even street food, it's jungle food. In the Mekong Delta, in provinces like Ben Tre, this magical fruit literally grows on trees. Coconuts can be drunk anywhere as long as you have a way to crack them open.
Tra Chanh - This is a street drink but it's not a Saigon street drink. Next time I will write about drinking this lemon tea on the streets of Hanoi.
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As a tourist or expat living in Vietnam you'll get used to hearing "xe om" (motorbike taxi) guys call for you - by yelling "You!" - at every street corner offering to take you places you probably don't want to go and otherwise offering you drugs and/or prostitutes. And if you're here alone while in Vietnam then it will often make sense (financially) for you to take a xe om instead of a regular tax. If you're with at least two other friends then it makes sense to take a regular taxi instead.
Most people in Vietnam nowadays have their own motorbike so they don't need to take a taxi, whether two- or four-wheeled, but when they do they - even they! - have to haggle with the xe om driver over the price.
How to get a sense of how much it costs to ride a xe om / motorbike taxi?
When trying to figure out a price for a motorbike taxi, keep in mind at least two things. The first is that it should cost about half as much as a regular taxi. The motorbike is not air conditioned and you don't have comfortable seats even though a xe om can slip through traffic quicker (OTOH a taxi will go faster on a clear straightaway). If a regular taxi cost around 12,000 VND/km then a motorbike taxi should be about half that or around 5000 or 6000 VND per kilometer. The glaring difference of course is that a taxi has a meter (if it doesn't, get out immediately!) so you know exactly how far you're traveling whereas the motor bike taxi does not have a meter so you have to kind of gas how far you're traveling and so does he.
Next, to know how much half of the taxi fare is, take a taxi first! You can take the same route by regular taxi once so you know how much that would cost and the halve it. Amazing.
Another thing to keep in mind is if you're a fat Westerner then you probably weigh three times as much as a normal Vietnamese person and even though xe oms don't charge by weight don't be surprised if they take this into account when calculating a price for your journey.
Tips
- Make sure the price is clearly agreed upon before you get on the bike. Otherwise there will be an argument when you reach the destination.
- Befriend a local driver near your house and get his mobile phone number (because they all have cell phones). And then anytime you need a trusty driver you can call him up and he will take you home. If you're too drunk to find your way home this can be helpful.
- Another thing to know ahead of time is that often people in Vietnam don't use maps. Instead they will ask around to get the general direction and then when they get closer they will ask again and eventually they will find the place. But they may get lost a few times on the way and hopefully it's not further than they thought in which case they'll bug you for more money. Not that it's your fault.
- Have Google Maps on your smartphone and show them exactly where you want to go because they won't understand your Vietnamese pronunciation of street names. They are much more likely to recognize the street name by seeing it written down rather than hearing you try to pronounce it. This applies to regular taxis as well though. One day we'll all have Androids and this will no longer be an issue.
- If you don't have a map you can also try writing down the name even without the accent marks (called diacritics). It's not your fault that Vietnamese is hard to pronounce at first. P.S. Learning Vietnamese, while difficult compared to learning Spanish, is definitely possible.
- As always when haggling on prices, be prepared to refuse and walk away. This means you should keep in mind the locations of a few other motor bike taxi drivers in case this one says no. So you might walk past the first one you see and not start bartering until the next one you see. Often times they won't agree to take your price until you turn your back to them. Practice showing people your back side a few times.
At the end of the day, though, a lot of xe om drivers outside the touristy areas are trying to earn a meek living and aren't just scheming to rip you off. Know what the approximate going rate is, be prepared to pay it, and don't get upset if he (and sometimes, though very rarely, she) tries to charge a 20% premium for having to make sense of the noises coming out of your mouth or to carry your bonus hundred pounds of weight. Just so long as you're not paying what it would cost to take a taxi.
And there's always the bus. For only 4000 VND you can cross the city in style.
Hackation. That's what people are calling hackathons (sponsored hackathons!) away from home. It could be in NYC, Bali, Berlin. But a lot of people are moving to the Bay Area or quitting their good-paying jobs in the Bay Area and sticking around and building their startup product from there. There are a lot of good reasons to be near Silicon Valley when you're a tech startup. Access to capital, a local consumer market who's up for and used to using experimental products.
But not every product needs to be developed in Silicon Valley. Not everybody needs to submit themselves to the pumped up rental prices there right now. Not every product person needs to be in the echo chamber of tech startup talk. Not everyone needs to live in a van just so they can afford to bootstrap in the Bay.
Haters gonna hate. Hackers need to hack.
Why Vietnam?
Vietnam? Isn't there like a war going on there? Answer: No. But due to nearly two decades of disastrous economic mismanagement by the government the country, and its remaining people (those that didn't risk their lives to escape on boats), remained in a post-war stupor until the turn of the millenium when things really started turning around economically due to open market reforms culminating in entrance to the WTO. Today, Vietnam's economic capital Ho Chi Minh City (which you may call Saigon) has a sheen of modernity to it. Western fast food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut abound. Downtown Saigon is full of new shopping malls and department stores - great for window-shopping. Young people increasingly choose between carrying iPhones or Samsungs, although Nokia still dominates. Traffic, once dominated by bicycles and rickshaws, is now completely gas-powered - but mostly scooters, not cars. Wifi is freely available and 3G internet can be had for $2/month. Of course, underneath it all is a missing public transit network, lack of public safety controls, regular brownouts, streets that flood due to poor urban planning and rapid development, an Internet that is reliant on a handful of undersea cables, and a currency that is subject to periodic devaluations. For the Vietnamese citizenry all is not rose-colored.
Low cost == Longer runway.
For foreigners though, late economic development, a huge population of underemployed people, cooling foreign direct investment sentiment, and a perenially weak currency means cheap guesthouses vie for customers, beers cost from 1 to 4 bottles per dollar, and a hacker can hack it in this country for $10-$20 a day. Are you consisting on ramen? Living in your car? Or otherwise roughing it to save money for your startup? Maybe I can convince you to reweigh your options.
Incubators, events, community
Vietnam is not particularly good at a lot of things. It's also not an Asian Silicon Valley - that's a title Singapore is trying way too hard to earn. There's no Y Combinator (okay, there was a V Combinator....) and no Google or Facebook. But we do have a scrappy and growing community of tech entrepreneurs. We have programs like Topica Founders Institute, shared work spaces like the Start Network, incubators like Officience, mLabs in the Saigon High Tech Park, annual events like Startup Weekend Ho Chi Minh and BarCamp Saigon, and smaller events like Start Me Up and Mobile Mondays.
It's not a lot but it may give you just enough sense of community to concentrate on building your own damn product. You won't overhear product pitches at every cafe (of which there's an order of magnitude way more of in Saigon than anywhere in the States).
But once you do need to hire help you will be able to do it affordably, whether for software development, testing, usability, marketing, research... While you're here, take advantage of the fact you don't have to pay Silicon Valley salaries.
Link to Silicon Valley
With all that said, there are a lot of reverse refugees from the Bay Area now living in Vietnam. After the Vietnam War (referred to here as the American War) ended and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, especially the educated and merchant classes, fled the new government, many of them wound up living in San Francisco and then San Jose. Others ended up in Orange County, Dallas, Houston, and other parts of the world. But today, a huge population of Vietnamese-Americans lives and works in Silicon Valley. Now that business opportunities are better in Vietnam, many experienced technology workers have returned to their birthplace to start companies. And so, thanks to their experience, today a large software industry exists in Vietnam. And many non-Vietnamese have come to join them. Maybe you'd like to be one of them?
Anyways, it may seem like a crazy idea at first. Moving to a foreign country and all. But if you're young, single, a bit adventurous, and determined to strike out on your own - or already have and are now ramen-profitable - then consider the costs: $1200 for cheap-ish rent in the Bay Area, buys you a round trip ticket from SFO to SGN. And every month of rent thereafter buys you two whole months of living nicely (all expenses) in Saigon. If you have a couple thousand bucks in the bank you can easily triple or quadruple the length of your runway by spending the time in Vietnam.
--
Who the heck would retire in the Bay Area? Retire to Vietnam instead.
Booking a hotel in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia is a lot different from back in the States. In the US, online hotel booking is quite competitive and hotel inventory in any city is high. You can find some great deals by searching and booking hotels online. In developing countries like Vietnam it's quite different. Most hotels aren't online and can't be booked online. The ones that are online charge higher rates if booked online than if booked in person! That never happens in the US. On my first trip to Southeast Asia, I made the mistake of booking hotels online for the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc. and either then or now I found out that I paid way too much for my rooms. I booked online because I didn't think I could just arrive in a foreign country and easily find a hotel. In the US, if I flew to another city and didn't book a hotel first, I would have a hard time finding a reasonable hotel (first I would have to rent a car) and I would surely pay more than what I would pay if booking online. Now I've traveled all over Vietnam and stayed in dozens of different hotels without reserving rooms in them first.
Finding a hotel in Vietnamese cities
Tourism is a large and important industry in Vietnam. This includes domestic tourism. This means that there are hotels everywhere, ranging from run down no-star "motels" to backpacker-friendly guesthouses to medium-sized 2 or 3 star business hotels on up to the large, branded 5-star hotels. When you arrive in a Vietnamese city, head to the center of town and you should find an area with a high concentration of hotels. For example, in Hanoi you might head to the Ho Hoan Kiem (Hoan Kiem Lake) area. In Ho Chi Minh City, you would head to the Pham Ngu Lao backpacker district, or Bui Thi Xuan Street, or the area around Ben Thanh Market. In Dalat, you would also head to the lake and main market area, or Bui Thi Xuan Street. Without knowing the names of any hotels (and not letting any touts take you to their hotels) you can quickly look at several hotels and make a choice.
I've since traveled by bus, plane, train, bicycle, and motorbike to cities from Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Quy Nhon, Nha Trang, Phan Thiet, Da Lat, Vung Tau, and many others and found cheap hotels using this "method". Just go to the center of town where there's a concentration of hotels competing with each other, investigate a few, negotiate the price (90k VND and up for a "nha nghi" guesthouse, 200-300k VND and up for a large room with a big bed or two and bathtub), and leave your passport with them - this is Vietnam.
When investigating rooms, here is a short checklist of things to look for:
1. Turn on the A/C. Is it blowing out cold air or is it just a fan?
2. Run the hot water. There will probably be a water heater attached, if not make sure hot water comes out. Is there a hot water tank? It may need to be turned on for awhile before there's hot water - good luck.
3. Do you smoke? Are you bothered by stale smoke?
4. Is the fridge unplugged? Is there melted ice?
5. Do you want a mosquito net?
6. WIFI - Most important. Check that it works and the signal is strong enough. This is why you should have a smartphone in order to quickly check the wifi connection in a room. Except for expensive hotels, ironically, most hotels have free wifi. Some hotels don't have any wifi, but it's rare for hotels except the luxury hotels to charge for wifi.
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Awhile ago, some time after I undertook a bicycle trek from Nha Trang to Mui Ne, I was contacted by a reporter from Tuoi Tre News to write something about it. Only a tiny bit of the information I provided was actually used and I've since lost track of the article so I'll just post what I already wrote here.
1. How do you think about this new trend: travelling across the
country by bicycle. Is it popular in your country? Did you ever make
it or finish it shortly?
If it really is a trend rather than just a few outlier cases, then I
think it's great and it should really be encouraged as a wholesome and
healthy activity as well as a way to travel. In the US, it's actually
not a common thing to do although there are clubs which regularly meet
and do long-distance rides together, which may also include camping,
if the weather is agreeable. But I would like to see more people in
Vietnam ride bicycles for sport and exercise and also as a means of
transportation, not just for slow but far journeys like the one we
took. Besides the possibility of extremely cold weather in my home
country, there are many other ways in which Vietnam is a more ideal
long distance cycling destination which I hope to blog about someday.
My father is a cyclist and I joined him on a ride through forests and
countryside before I came to Vietnam. Unfortunately, I don't have a
bike to ride with me now.
2. According to Vietnamese traditional lifestyle, youngsters all
should follow the same way: finishing school, going to work, getting
married and living in peace for the rest of their life. Youngsters who
choose to go other ways like: doing gap year, going through other
countries by bicycle in a long time… means something crazy and
undervalued. How do you think about this way of thought?
Actually, I think most people can fit a cycling trip into an otherwise
traditional education since it can easily be organized during a break
and can be done on a budget. I don't think it's crazy at all, nor
should traveling to other countries or taking off for a gap year be
considered especially crazy. If you think so then your bar for what is
crazy is set too low. I do think that Vietnamese youth should be
willing to try new things and not constrain themselves only to what
the mass majority has done in the past. And definitely learn from what
people are doing around the world, not just the world around you.
3. According to your opinion, what is the thing that youngsters
gained and you lost after this trip?
I lost some weight, haha. Otherwise, there's really nothing to lose.
I gained some new friends who I now have a lot of respect for. I
learned things about myself as well. Any time we travel we gain new
experiences as well as learn about ourselves. And of course seeing a
country at the slow pace of a bicycle is much different from a car on
a highway. On a bicycle, not only do you see the terrain but you feel
the gradients, the shade from every tree, and the difference in wind
from province to province. What I gained was a new perspective on
Vietnam and especially the Vietnamese people.
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What's the first thing tourists to Vietnam do after deplaning? They go through immigration and then get in a taxi to go to their hotel, reverse on the way home.
Generally, people from Europe or the Americas need to pre-arrange a visa to enter Vietnam, unlike most other Asian countries, or they can be brave and pre-arrange a visa-on-arrival.
If you've never gone this route, it works like this.
Read the rest of this article...Here's a trick for storing and compressing information in a pinch.
Let's say you have an address or a set of directions or maybe a shopping list.
Example: "Calle de la Magdalena N8, 5D Floor, Madrid, Spain 28012"
Stick it into http://bit.ly but prepend "http://" to the text, to make it look like a URL: "http://Calle de la Magdalena N8, 5D Floor, Madrid, Spain 28012 "
When we go to the resulting shortened URL http://bit.ly/dL9MXS we get an error, but Chrome displays back:
"Oops! Google Chrome could not find calle de la magdalena n8, 5d floor, madrid, spain 28012" and voila! we have the text we wanted.
All we have to write on our hands, remember, or pass around via text message is the string "dL9MXS". It takes less work than using a pastebin and the resulting URL is shorter anyways.
Any other practical uses for this trick? Leave a comment!
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