This is the long awaited blog post on finding housing in Vietnam (requested by many readers of the classic Cost of Living in Vietnam post, and this new post is especially about the Ho Chi Minh City rental scene for expats.

As I've mentioned before, I live in an unfurnished two-storey house of about 70 square meters located in a tiny alley (I'll explain why below) which is less than a 10 minute drive from downtown District 1. For this I pay less than $200 per month including all utilities. For the past year, rent has been stable whereas the previous year it went up by $10/month.

I pay more for housing than the average single Vietnamese person pays, while paying far less per square meter than the average expat in Vietnam.

How (can I not get ripped off on housing)?

1. Have Vietnamese friends on your side, finding housing for you that they would be willing to pay for for themselves or their families. Not real estate agents who see each foreigner as a fat commission check (even when they are foreigners themselves), where the higher they can negotiate monthly rent the more money they earn. Agents are incentivized to get you into the most expensive housing you're willing to pay for. Friends want to save you money. The difference between the two methods can mean hundreds of dollars saved each month.

When you first arrive in Vietnam, consider staying in temporary housing, a guesthouse, or a hotel for three months or so, while you build a network of Vietnamese friends. Don't rush yourself into a 1-year contract.

2. "Nhà cho thuê". Memorize this Vietnamese phrase. It literally means "House for rent" and it's a sign that you won't have to pay extra for having some agent with a storefront market the house (or spam the internet). These landlords get less requests for their properties if they're relying on eyeballs on their signs alone. These are hidden gems. If you see a sign in an area (and it should be in an alley) that you'd like to check out then write down the phone number, name (the name is probably preceded by "A." or "C."), and address, then have a Vietnamese friend call for you, ask for the price, and then schedule an appointment to come check it out.

Also be on the lookout for "Phòng cho thuê" which means "Room for rent" which means you'd only be renting a single room in a house. You'll see these signs for guesthouses in the backpacker district as well. For most rooms for rent where the landlord lives in the house and is in charge of unlocking the front door, it will be inconvenient for you to come home after a late night of partying as someone will have to wake up to open the door.

Some other vocabulary:
"ở ghép" - This means a group of people are looking for someone to share a room.
"nữ" - This means the housing is for females only.
"sinh viên" - This housing is meant for university students. Any of these are probably not a good match for foreigners moving to Vietnam.

Spend time walking or leisurely bicycling through kilometer after kilometer of alleys and find as many of these as you can. Especially be willing to venture into dead-end alleys. For the same reason that you'd normally not go into them (which isn't due to any physical danger - Vietnam is generally really safe), for the people who actually live there it's a quiet place to live without the through traffic.

You can also find posters attached to light poles and other public areas although in that case you won't be able to immediately see the outside of the house.

3. Unfurnished housing. A rule of thumb is that furnished housing costs twice as much as unfurnished housing, even though the "value" you get from renting furniture from your landlord rapidly goes down as the price goes up. So at $300/month for a fully furnished room for rent, you could find a similar yet unfurnished room for rent for 3 million VND. A 4 million VND house would easily ask $400/month if furnished.

Picky about furniture? You will actually be better off buying your own and renting an unfurnished place. If you're concerned about not being certain how long you'll be here, just consider that the monthly savings could easily cover buying appliances, etc. in the 6 months your likely minimum shortest contract is for. If you do suddenly leave in 6 months you do have the option of selling your nearly new appliances. On the other hand, wait awhile before you move into your first permanent home and you might be fortunate enough to have new expat friends who decide to leave the country and give you their furniture and appliances! (One thing you quickly learn about being an expat is that we are an impermanent lot)

Oh, don't forget that you can actually affordably have custom furniture built for your home in Vietnam.

4. In general, not being too picky about having something in mind and finding something that matches it exactly. Did you willingly decide to move to Vietnam yourself? Then you should dispel any expectations of Vietnam changing itself to suit you on your arrival without having to conform in any way. If an international company sent you here to work then you might have an argument for being housed in more expensive expat housing.

Do you need to live on any given street, or really close to your work? Probably not if you can ride a motorbike.

In Vietnam, kitchens can range from spacious countertopped rooms to nothing but a sink. But a sink, anywhere with a water hookup, is the kernel of a kitchen. Any area with a sink can be turned into a kitchen with some tables and shelves. If the place is unfurnished, you can provide your own portable gas or electric stoves. Don't expect to find an oven, something most homes in this tropical climate don't have.

If you don't like how the rooms are arranged in a house, have you ever considered knocking down the walls and having the insides rebuilt to your liking? In Vietnam, this is actually an affordable option if you consider the savings compounded over more than a year. This includes adding new sinks or moving them around.

Do you need a pool in your apartment complex? If you did stay somewhere with a pool, keep in mind you would have to pay extra for it, when you could just live near a pool which you could go to when you felt like it. Despite the tropical climate, it's actually too cold to swim for many months anyways.

All that said, you should live somewhere you feel comfortable. If you have special requirements, even if they seem like normal requirements to you, it may take longer to find the right place or you may have to pay a lot more for it.
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How much does a house cost in Saigon? Apartments for rent in Ho Chi Minh City

$25-$100

At the very low end might be a tiny, thin-walled (privacy is optional in Vietnam) room for rent with no private bathroom. In District 1, this might be $100/month. Outside of D1, maybe $25/month, but in this price range it would be more common for Vietnamese to share a room. But it's very unlikely this range of housing would suit a foreigner - if you can even find it such a place on your own.

$100-$125

Next up might be a small but furnished room for rent in District 1 from $100-$125/month. This would have a tiny bathroom in the room, but probably nowhere to cook. The small dimensions would make a lot of tall Westerners feel claustrophobic.

$150-$250

The Pham Ngu Lao backpacker district in D1 is full of guesthouses for rent for foreigners at around $200/month. These are generally furnished with beds, desks, closets, air conditioning, and a private bathroom. Like a hotel, there is housekeeping service included. On the other side of Tran Hung Dao, Co Giang and Co Bac Streets are full of these. Vietnamese would find similar housing for $150.

[ Alleys outside of D1 also have many one to two-storey small houses from 3 million VND (about $150) on up (unfurnished). ]

$250-$350

Old, non-luxury highrise apartments start from about 5 million VND ($250). For example:

• - 1 bedroom apartment in D5, 10 minutes drive from downtown: 5 million
• - 2 bedroom in brand new housing in the suburban districts: 7 million.
• - 1 bedroom in an older midrise apartment complex 5 minutes from downtown: 6 million.

[ The outer districts (Tan Phu, Binh Tan, D6, D8, D12, D9) have a lot of brand new highrises being built. Meanwhile, there are very few buyers and the real estate market in Vietnam is in a deep slump. This means there is a vast oversupply of this kind of housing. ]

$400-$800

At this range you can rent a furnished four or five bedroom house for foreigners or a large serviced apartment (or what they will call "luxury apartments" here). This could be in District 1, District 2 (An Phu), District 7 (Phu My Hung), or elsewhere, and generally people (expats) go through agents to find these, although for apartments you can just walk up to an apartment building you like and there should be an agent on site so you could just cab it from highrise to highrise looking at serviced apartments.

You would also find houses for foreigners in The Ghetto (Thai Van Lung and Le Thanh Ton area of D1, which has many Japanese residents) in this range.

The bigger houses would be harder to find, but follow my instructions above.

$10000

Apparently, you can even pay this much for a crazy villa.

But anything above $1000 is outside the arena of value judgement when it comes to this blog post.

A note on online apartment finding services

While it would be really convenient if we could just use the same websites we used back home to find housing, unfortunately they don't work well here. While Craigslist does exist, it is full of a handful of real estate agents pumping their overpriced products. You can assume that anything on there is a ripoff.

Since MetVuong is no longer up, another website worth mentioning is MuaBan. It's the online presence of a popular classified ads paper published daily or weekly. You can also go buy a copy for a few thousand dong. You will see lots of listings for housing and it will give you an idea of how they're described. Get someone to translate for you. But beware: nearly all of the phone numbers are for real estate agents and not the actual landlord. They may not know which ad you're looking at when you call and they will definitely try to show you some other properties instead. They will also want to charge you for the privilege. It's rare that they will ever find a house for you to move into, but they make their money by just showing you any house.

Otherwise, for the time being, just avoid any online real estate website for foreigners.

Writing Vietnamese is a pain. You have several different input systems to choose from (VNI, Telex, VIQR, etc.) and they all require some effort to memorize and get used to. But as it turns out most Vietnamese text can be understood without those accent (diacritic) marks at all. Vietnamese people are accustomed to texting (sms) each other using Vietnamese words written without marks - because their phones often don't support Vietnamese characters. But it's better to have the marks and emails and posts on forums often do. GMail even supports a Vietnamese software keyboard built into the interface now.

But if Vietnamese people can understand Vietnamese without diacritics, can computers? Turns out there is software that can take unaccented Vietnamese text and ADD the diacritics!

Let's take some text:

Chuyến phiêu lưu khám phá bỏ nhà ra đi đầu tiên của bạn vào năm bao nhiêu tuổi? 
- Nghĩ lại thì thấy hồi xưa mỗi lần mà bị mẹ la là hay giận, bỏ nhà đi lắm, vì lúc nào cũng nghĩ mình đúng hết. Giận thì giận nhưng mà đi lang thang rồi lại về, hoặc về trong tình trạng được tìm thấy và lại tiếp tục bị mắng :D

Then we strip the accents and put it into a few websites to see the results.

http://vietnameseaccent.com/

Chuyến phiêu lưu khám phá bỏ nhà ra đi đầu tiên của bạn vào năm bao nhiêu tuổi?
- Nghĩ lại thì thấy hồi xưa mỗi lần mà bị mẹ là lạ hay gián, bỏ nhà đi làm, vì lúc nào cũng nghĩ mình dùng hết. Gian thi giản nhưng mà đi lang thang rồi lại về, hoặc vê tròn

http://vietlabs.com/vietizer.html

chuyến phiêu lưu khám phá bỏ nhà ra đi đầu tiên của bạn vào năm bao nhiêu tuổi?
- nghĩ lại thì thấy hồi xưa mỗi lần mà bị mẹ là là hay gian, bộ nhà đi làm, vì lúc nào cũng nghĩ mình đứng hết.
gian thì giản nhưng mà đi lang thang rồi lại về, hoặc về trọn

http://www.easyvn.com/tiengviet/index.php

Chuyến phiêu lưu khám phá bỏ nhà ra đi đầu tiên của bạn vào năm bao nhiêu tuổi?
- Nghĩ lại thì thấy hồi xưa mỗi lần mà bị mẹ là là hay giận, bỏ nhà đi lắm, vì lúc nào cũng nghĩ mình đúng het. Gian thì giận nhưng mà đi lang thang rồi lại về, hoặc về tron

The results are nearly the same except for the last word: 'tron'. This is because the real word is "trong" but it got cut off in the de-accenting process! So each different software took a different guess as to what the word was, but it was the wrong word to begin with.

All in all, they do a pretty good job and probably better than even some native Vietnamese speakers due to the fact that some tones are mixed up!

Curious about Buddhism in Vietnam? So was I. When you look around the country you would just about assume that everyone was Buddhist. Until recently, I was only taking in these "Buddhisms" as just another dish in the realm of Vietnamese culture that makes the country so different from the West. But there are also Christian churches (some 10% of the population) as well as a long tradition of Islam within certain ethnic minorities like the Cham who form Muslim communities in their provincial strongholds as well as in the city. There's also a unique indigenous religion called Cao Đài that basically mixes Buddhism and an Abrahamic God. Still it's clear that Vietnam is a predominantly Buddhist country in both religion and culture and it has been for most of known recorded history (notably, there was a dark and critically damaging period for Buddhism in Vietnam when Roman Catholics controlled the Southern Vietnamese government, more on the issue of religious intolerance in another future post perhaps).

What kind or sect of Buddhism?

When one thinks of Christians, they are a diverse group that identify much more with being Catholic or Protestant or Mormon or whatever else more than just being a Christian. It seems every major world religion has similarly broken down over the years into sects that started believing all kinds of things that weren't there at the founding of the religion, and who differentiate themselves from other sects through these new and unique beliefs. While people in Vietnam seem to just think they are Buddhist rather than any special kind of Buddhist, Buddhism itself, as I've found, has not been immune from such corruption -- or innovation, depending on how you look at it.

When you think of Buddhism as just an aspect of being Vietnamese, you don't think much about how Vietnamese Buddhism relates to Buddhism in other countries but in fact it does have its own characteristics. If you split Buddhists into the two main branches, Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) and Theravada, Vietnam falls into Mahayana along with the rest of China's historical sphere of influence (the CJKV countries, ethnic Chinese countries like Singapore and Taiwan, and neighbors like Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia). The Southeast Asian Buddhist countries (Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia) are all Theravadin except for Vietnam. What is relatively unknown is that Vietnam does have Theravada Buddhism among the million or so Khmer (Cambodian) population concentrated in the Mekong Delta as well as with a small number of ethnic Kinh (Vietnamese are mostly ethnically Kinh) who have their own Theravadin temples. There is also a third, newer branch called Vajrayana a.k.a. the Diamond Vehicle (Kim cương thừa or Mật tông in Vietnamese), Esoteric Buddhism, or Tantric Buddhism. There are some small centers teaching Vajrayana scattered throughout the country including ones (associated with Diamond Way Centers) run by foreigners. Otherwise, Vajrayana doesn't lie in Vietnamese Buddhist tradition the same way as Mahayana.

But unlike a Catholic or Protestant, a Vietnamese Buddhist might not really identify with any sect of Buddhism. If you ask them, they might not even know. And Theravadin Buddhists and Mahayana Buddhists can actually be Buddhist buddies together in the same places without any conflict. Vietnamese Buddhists are generally some mixture of Pure Land and Tientai for most people (laypeople) which involves mostly chanting, burning stuff, ringing bells, and praying, or Vietnamese Zen (Thiền-Na or more commonly just Thiền), which is mostly for monks and is where meditation is found. The two types of Buddhism live side by side and are mixed into a unified Zen-Pure Land Buddhism and this doesn't seem to bother anyone. Vietnamese might not even identify themselves as Buddhist, although they will still have a mix of Buddhist, Confucian, and ancestor-worship beliefs and practices.

Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật

A common chant or prayer used by Vietnamese Buddhists is "Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật" which is a call (somewhat like seeking refuge) to the A Di Da (Amitābha) Buddha, who was a, but not the, Buddha. By calling out his name it is said you will be born in the Pure Land (tịnh độ) when you die, where you can more easily attain enlightenment. To me, it sounds a lot like Jesus. However, chanting can also be similar to Buddhist meditation practices by instilling a sort of mindfulness. Anyways, that line is just the first part of a longer prayer which is meaningless in Vietnamese but was transcribed (via Chinese) from Sanskrit. You can find it in small booklets found, among other places, in some vegetarian restaurants.

Vietnamese Buddhist laypersons are mostly not vegetarian, but once a month (although preferably six days a month) Buddhists will abstain from animal food products. On these days, which occur at midpoints in the lunar month, many local restaurants especially those near temples will serve vegetarian dishes. Vegetarian restaurants will be packed, but temples will also provide vegetarian meals, sometimes for free.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

The last piece I'll cover in this introduction to Vietnamese Buddhism is the aspect of Vietnamese Buddhism outside of Vietnam. In America, Buddhism came to be known from Asian immigrants and especially from certain Americans going over to Japan after the war and learning about Japanese Zen. [If there are stories of American War Veterans bringing Vietnamese Buddhism back to the States, I'd love to hear about it.] Buddhism in Japan had itself spread from China which had received it from India. Likewise, Tibetan Buddhism has also spread to the Western world after exiled Tibetans fled to India where they came into contact with traveling hippies.

Vietnamese Buddhists have also had their influence around the world although mostly through a single enigmatic figure rather than a school of thought. This person would be Thich Nhat Hanh (random aside: Thích is the "family name" taken by Vietnamese Buddhists when they become monks and it comes from Thích-ca Mâu-ni or Shakyamuni, the Buddha). Thich Nhat Hanh comes from Vietnamese Rinzai lineage, but today he is said to no longer represents any kind of contemporary Vietnamese Buddhism. Sadly, he is also not allowed to freely return to Vietnam despite being one of the world's greatest living Zen masters.

Another Vietnamese monk who came to be known around the world was one Thích Quảng Đức. It was not his teachings that brought him fame but his self-immolation in protest of religious persecution which became a major event in the end of American support for the South Vietnamese government. A large memorial park was recently constructed at the intersection of Cach Mang Thang 8 and Nguyen Dinh Chieu in District 3 where Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire. Today, as Tibetan monks self-immolate in increasing numbers, also in protest of a certain government, they might learn a thing or two about PR from the Vietnamese.

But like other waves of Asian immigration before, the post-Vietnam War flood of Vietnamese into the US eventually led to temples in maturing Vietnamese communities everywhere in the country. I believe these temples mostly serve to memorialize ancestors and as community centers now but some do serve to teach practical Buddhist teachings that can be useful to more than just Vietnamese immigrants. Today they don't hold the cachet that, say, Japanese-style Zen centers have. But I am, with the help of some good friends, gradually discovering the traditions in Vietnam that have been passed down and were able to foster such great masters of whom Thich Nhat Hanh and Thich Quang Duc are only two.

Thien Vien Truc Lam, Da Lat.

This post is not about basketball.

This post is about staying cool.

During my first few months in Vietnam I sweat a lot. Now I sweat less.

1. Change your genes. If you are Vietnamese, you sweat less. If you are derived from Europeans, you will sweat more at the same temperature. You can "get used to it" and not using the A/C more than necessary helps to acclimate (it will feel a lot more humid if you've been in a cold A/C room all day) but you will never stay as dry as a Vietnamese person. Hmm, we're off to a pretty bad start...

2. GTFO. Saigon and southern Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia can be pleasant during the dry season. In Saigon, that means November to February. December and January are the best times of the year to be here, and also the time most expats are likely to go back to their own countries for Christmas/New Year/Tet. Which is really a shame.

The rainy season from June to October are mixed, weather-wise. But when it does rain, and usually after it rains, the cool winds that created the rainstorms succeed in bringing down temperatures. But it can be quite hot and humid before it rains, or if the skies are promising rain yet failing to deliver.

April and May are pretty awful. Go to Dalat or something.

3. Stop moving. Stop exercising. When the sun is out and it's hot, don't exacerbate the situation by walking around. I used to think walking was normal, or even bicycling. Vietnamese people think it's insane. If you must exercise, do it before the sun comes up or after it goes down.

Riding a motorbike helps immensely. When it's not super sunny, it can be in the 30s and the wind still feels cool. You might think Vietnamese people are crazy for wearing jackets in this heat but a light, airy jacket does serve to keep the sun off. There are also these "nets" for motorbike seats that keep your seat from getting too hot to sit on in the sun as well as slightly increasing airflow to your sweaty arse.

4. Baby powder. If you're male and not Vietnamese you probably have a lot of useless body hair. Fur is great for keeping your body warm during ice ages but it's a gross evolutionary vestige in Saigon's climate. Combined with sweat and trapped under clothes it becomes even more uncomfortable. Use something like baby powder (which Johnson&Johnson have made available to us!).

5. Siesta. Just sleep all afternoon if you can. It's a worthless time to be outside unless you're poolside.

BONUS: Stick ice cubes down your pants.