Vietnam: A tourist at home
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With the sounds of hundreds of motorbikes, shop owners shouting over each other, and a rather random tannoy that used to deafen me for a good few minutes every morning without fail, its no wonder my mother told me I didn't need an alarm clock.
It was my first day in Hanoi, I was moody and jet-lagged from my 13-hour flight, and I just wanted to eat. Eating out in Hanoi is a lot different from home – and extremely cheap. One huge bowl of my favourite beef pho, the delicious traditional Vietnamese noodle soup dish, cost me just VND$30,000 – around £1.
Back home, I've had my fair share of tummy aches from dodgy kebabs, so when I saw signs around restaurants saying 'dog meat' – I knew that I wasn't prepared to take any risks and made sure to stay well clear of them. Then about a week in, I had lunch with an uncle who had ordered something that I was rather curious about, not because it didn’t look appetising at all, but because he had a hugely suspicious smile on his face – like a kid who had done something wrong and was trying to smile his way out of it.
A lovely couple gave me a reasonable price of VND$100,000 for a necklace that caught my eye. My Vietnamese isn’t the best, and when the shop owners realised this – they tried to give me their ‘tourist price’, not realising that although I might lack in the speaking, I still fully understand Vietnamese. The VND$100,000 necklace had suddenly shot up to VND$400,000! Prior to what the locals here might think about Westerner's being made out of money, I'm actually still a student that's in as much in dept as the next. After a good ten minutes of a tough and heated haggle, I finally got it down to VND$120,000 – a very good price compared to the ‘tourist price’ they had previously tried to get me to pay. In fact, after I had given the couple money for the necklace, they’d thrown in a small beaded ring for free and smiled at me… walking back home, I couldn’t help but think about what lovely people they were – how ironic, since I was getting hot-headed towards them just five minutes earlier when they tried to rob me of VND$400,000 for a necklace.

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A lovely couple gave me a reasonable price of VND$100,000 for a necklace that caught my eye. My Vietnamese isn’t the best, and when the shop owners realised this – they tried to give me their ‘tourist price’, not realising that although I might lack in the speaking, I still fully understand Vietnamese. The VND$100,000 necklace had suddenly shot up to VND$400,000! Prior to what the locals here might think about Westerner's being made out of money, I'm actually still a student that's in as much in dept as the next. After a good ten minutes of a tough and heated haggle, I finally got it down to VND$120,000 – a very good price compared to the ‘tourist price’ they had previously tried to get me to pay. In fact, after I had given the couple money for the necklace, they’d thrown in a small beaded ring for free and smiled at me… walking back home, I couldn’t help but think about what lovely people they were – how ironic, since I was getting hot-headed towards them just five minutes earlier when they tried to rob me of VND$400,000 for a necklace.
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