I saw someone lose it this morning. It was because of the street vendors. Every time you walk outside here, a seemingly endless number of people try to sell you things. It can get irritating, overwhelming even. On the other hand, this is just the way people do business here. They’re industrious. No matter how little they have to work with, they’re out there trying to make a living… and that’s the part I try to keep in mind. They’re just trying to earn a living in whatever way they can. Usually their way is polite. Sometimes it is a little too pushy for my taste, too in-your-face. Sometimes they don’t take no for an answer. It’s not like we don’t have our share of pushy salesmen in the United States, too.
There are several street vendors working this section of the waterfront in Hoi An this morning. One is a woman in her twenties with a bamboo shoulder pole, bananas hanging on one side and mangoes on the other, with a knife, scale and plastic bags buried somewhere. Doesn’t that thing bite into her shoulder, I wonder. She doesn’t even have a pad on it. One is a lady selling peanut brittle from a basket strapped to her bicycle. Another is a ten year old kid who walks up to me, glances around furtively as he sticks his hand in an inner jacket pocket and pulls out a well worn brown paper lunch bag full of postcards like it was a bag of pot.
The kids are the ones who affect me the most because kids should be carefree, not worried about money already at the age of eight or nine. About halfway through my trip I get an idea. I’d bought a mango on the street, peeled and sliced, and as I walked away with it a little girl sidled up to me asking if I would buy her postcards. “Ten for one dollar very cheap one, two, three…” All without pausing for breath. She was very good at counting to ten, that girl. They all are. I didn’t want any postcards, but I couldn’t bear to just tell her no and walk away. Instead, I asked her if she wanted a piece of my mango. I slipped the first piece halfway out of the bag and held it out to her. Her eyes got huge. Suddenly she forgot all about being a postcard girl and was just a girl. Yes, I nodded, would you like some? With a big smile she took a mango spear and trotted off down the street sucking on it as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
After that I bought a bag of candies to carry with me and it has the same effect on working children every time. When those brightly colored wrappers come out they run around like kids under a broken piñata, laughing and smiling and forgetting all about making money.
Fortunately, there are no really young kids working along the waterfront in Hoi An this morning. One vendor who stands out is a middle aged woman on a hand pedaled trike selling a previously used copy of the Viet Nam News. All she has to sell is a single used newspaper, but she is not asking for a handout and I can appreciate that. She isn’t asking me for money, she’s asking me to buy something that I actually might find useful. She spends her day recycling newspapers, picking them up from café tables when their first owners are done with them and redistributing them around town to new readers. If they look worn or are missing pages she reconstitutes a nice presentable complete set. She’s doing a real service when you think about it. She’s saving trees.
She pedals that trike around with her hands all day long. It’s the kind of contraption used in Vietnam by people whose legs are missing or crippled. They take a bike or cyclo and rework it so that it can be propelled using a forward and back hand motion against a small stick. A wheel is usually fitted to it for steering but sometimes the rider just leans in one direction or the other to turn.
Nobody manufactures bicycles like this, but the Vietnamese can make anything, modify anything, fix anything. They really can. Go find some broken thing you’ve got stowed away in a closet somewhere and take it to any area considered to be a “Little Saigon.” Whatever it is and whether or not he’s ever seen one before, I’ll bet you can find a Vietnamese who can fix it. If you can’t, I’ll buy you a drink the next time we’re in the same town together. Write to me to let me know how it goes.
The used newspaper lady in Hoi An is in a hand pedaled trike because she is missing a leg. It may have been blown off of her by an American bomb for all I know. But I’m not supposed to feel guilty about war damage. If I didn’t have three brand new copies of the same newspaper available to me at my hotel, I would buy one from her. Sometimes when she pedals by my table I want to buy one from her anyway. I want to buy one from every used newspaper seller.
It takes a while to get used to the vendors, but you have to get used to them if you’re going to travel here for more than a week or two. If you let them get to you, you’re liable to snap. Everyone has their breaking point and I have already seen more than one person reach theirs. Today it is a pleasant looking German lady. In her sixties maybe. Probably someone’s grandma. She reminds me of my mom, walking peacefully along the waterfront, enjoying a Sunday morning in Hoi An lost in her own daydream world, seemingly perfectly content.
Like every Western tourist here, she must have been approached by scores of street vendors since she arrived in Vietnam. The poor peanut brittle lady isn’t any different from them. She is just trying to sell her peanut brittle, which is probably delicious. She isn’t even aggressive. She doesn’t follow the German lady around, she doesn’t pester her, doesn’t ask her more than once. She just says, as she has said to every tourist passing along the waterfront this morning, “Peanut brittle, one dollar. Very cheap. You buy some?”
But that is the straw that breaks the poor German grandma’s back. This kind woman minding her own business stops in her tracks. “One dollar?!” she yells straight ahead of her to nobody. “One dollar?!” She turns around to face the astonished peanut brittle lady. Vietnamese don’t get angry. It is considered poor behavior in Vietnam to lose your temper. It’s just not done. When it happens, Vietnamese don’t know how to respond.
“One dollar here and one dollar there,” she screams, pointing to every corner of the street. “One dollar for everybody,” pulling out the pockets of her white linen pants to show clearly that she has no dollars left to spend. She pauses a moment, then walks away like a crazy lady, muttering the phrase over and over again, emphasizing different syllables each time, “One dollar. One dollar!”
I can understand it, I really can. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to crack, too. No one likes to be followed around, pestered, pressured into buying things they don’t need. Sometimes the sellers are really pushy. You say “no thank you,” and they keep at you. “But I’m trying to be polite,” you say. “I told you no thank you. I don’t want a banana / a paperback / a pair of sunglasses / a bag of peanut brittle. I don’t want to have my tennis shoes polished. I don’t want a manicure. I don’t want to stay at your hotel. I don’t want to ride your motorbike. I’m trying to be polite… why do you keep asking me over and over again? I’m trying to be polite, why are you being so rude?”
It wears you down at some point.
Dilek, a young Turkish woman I met in Hanoi helped me gain some perspective. We had both been in Sa Pa and were dumped back in downtown Hanoi by the same sleeper train at five thirty in the morning. I must have commented about the lack of aggressive vendors on the street at that early hour. “They’re just trying to earn a living, though,” Dilek said. “At least they do it with a smile.”
She was right. There are some exceptions, but most of the vendors are actually pretty respectful. They ask you once, usually with a pleasant face, and if you say no they don’t ask you again. Some of them are more persistent or downright scary, like the hat ladies at the sampan dock in Duc Khe. That must pay off from time to time or they wouldn’t do it. It’s as much our fault as theirs. Either way, though, they’re all just trying to support their families. These people are not becoming fabulously wealthy selling cone hats or home made peanut brittle, that’s for sure.
I could have spent a lot more time with Dilek. I meet a lot of people when I travel but there are usually just a few who I really connect with. The ones who may weave into and out of my life in the space of a single day but make enough of an impact to stick in my mind long afterwards. Dilek was one of those. We met at the train station at the crack of dawn and ended up spending the entire day together. We ate, we talked, we shopped, we went to museums. We had dinner at Cha Ca La Vong, the oldest restaurant in Hanoi. That’s where we met Mathew and Andrew, the guys from Australia. We were all seated together at a table for four because the restaurant was short on space. The four of us went out afterwards for drinks and ice cream because we got along so well over dinner. The next day Dilek was moving on to China and two days later I would be heading back to Saigon, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we became friends that day and not just acquaintances.
I keep Dilek’s words about the street vendors in mind when I start feeling frustrated and they help me keep perspective. The next time the used newspaper lady pumps her contraption my way I flag her down and buy her single piece of merchandise, even though I’ve got three others just like it back at the hotel.
- - - - -
From Hoi An Robert and I move on to Hue. We have less than twenty four hours here but it’s enough. The long bus rides are starting to wear on us. Both Robert and I are a little grumpy by the time we arrive at the Sinh Café Tour Office a few blocks from the river. An aggressive onslaught of hotel hawkers swamps us the moment we get off the bus. “No thank you,” we tell them, “we’d like to look around ourselves.”
“It’s good hotel. Very cheap,” one replies.
“No thank you,” we say. “We’re not interested.” We walk around to the other side of the bus to get our luggage. One guy follows us and shoves a brochure for his hotel in my hand.
“No thank you,” I say again. “We don’t want it. We’re going to look around on our own.”
“Good hotel. Very cheap. Close to river,” he replies.
“She said no,” Robert tells him, his voice getting a notch louder. We put our bags down on the sidewalk and start thumbing through our guidebook. The same man approaches us again.
“This one very close,” he says. “You want to see?”
“No,” I say. “You’re being too pushy. Please leave us alone.”
The man continues to follow us around. He shoves another brochure at us. We take it. “Thank you,” one of us says. “We want to know the name of your hotel so we can make sure that we never ever stay there, even if it’s the only hotel in the entire city that has a room.”
We duck into the tour office thinking we will find protection from the mob. Sure enough, half a dozen hotel hawkers are standing at the door, heads leaning in but feet still outside. The lady at the desk has no sympathy for us, though. We got angry and that’s just not done.
We head back out the door, tired, grumpy social outcasts, and check in to the four-star Saigon Morin hotel. We deserve to splurge a little. I convince Robert that he should give Vietnamese massage another try and we make appointments for… oh, but I’ve forgotten to tell you about Robert’s naughty massage.
I wanted us to go get massages before we left Saigon. I had heard stories from other travelers about men being propositioned by their masseuses so I was careful to choose a reputable day spa in the center of the tourist district where I was sure Robert would get a straight massage with no extras thrown in. But no… even at this upscale spa the naughty extras, as they are called, were on offer. Practically forced upon him from the sound of it. “I touch you here,” she told him. “You like I touch you here?” moving up his anatomy. “You pay me later. Your wife doesn’t have to know.”
“She’s not my…” he hesitated. “Oh she’ll know. Just a regular massage will be fine.” This more or less continued throughout the session. When I found him in the sauna afterwards Robert was a bit shell shocked.
“How was your massage?” I asked him.
“She tried to make me have sex with her.”
“Not here,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Oh I’m sure.”
“Wo’ow, I’m jealous. Mine didn’t want to have sex with me.”
“You’re a woman.”
“So? How does she know I’m not a lesbian?” He had to think about that for a moment. “What did you tell her,” I ask him.
“I told her no. What do you think? Paying for sex is just not a path I want to go down.”
“Poor girl. You could have at least let her give you a quick hand job.”
“It’s a slippery slope, Patti.”
So it was not a relaxing experience. Not for Robert, at least. My masseuse was great. She sang Vietnamese folk songs the whole time like she was singing her baby to sleep.
It is understandable that Robert would hesitate to get another massage, even at a reputable four-star hotel. But he agrees to give it a try. We sign up for a couple of late appointments, then wander off to see what we can find for dinner in the city of Hue.
I had heard about Hue food. Hue was the capital of Vietnam in the nineteenth century under the Nguyen Emperor Gia Long. It is still known as The Imperial City even though the capital has long moved back to Hanoi. Hue is famous for its double walled, double moated citadel that was practically shot to rubble by the North Vietnamese who captured the city during the 1968 Tet Offensive and the Americans who took it from them a month later.
Hue is known for its Imperial meals, flavorful food served in tiny portions, like Spanish tapas, because the Nguyen emperors liked variety. According to legend, each meal had to consist of fifty different dishes made by fifty different cooks. If a cook served up something the Emperor had seen even once before that cook was not long for this world. Hue food is great for those of us who want to try a bit of everything… lots of little dishes and none in enough quantity to get tired of it. But apparently that’s just the way they make Hue food in Saigon or Hanoi. In Hue they eat regular food.
After walking around looking for Hue food for about forty five minutes, we give up and decide to eat at the first place that looks appetizing. We wander by an incredible display of fish, prawns, beef, rice, noodles, soups, vegetables… all piping hot and laid out on a table on the sidewalk. It is fabulous but we can’t tell where it came from. There aren’t any restaurants here, just a place called DMZ Travel. DMZ stands for demilitarized zone. Lots of tourists are war vets who come here to visit the places they helped destroy in hopes of finally, thirty years later, alleviating their guilt. The Vietnamese forgave them years ago, so hopefully they are successful.
We wander into the courtyard of DMZ Travel, since it seems to be somehow affiliated with the delicious looking table of food out on the sidewalk. In the courtyard we find elegant linen draped tables and a European couple eating dinner. We’re still not sure why there is so much food on the sidewalk but this is clearly a reasonable – if oddly located – place to have dinner so we sit down and ask for a menu.
As we eat, a Buddhist priest in a colorful six-paneled head dress approaches the table on the sidewalk. He rings a bell rhythmically and chants in a low voice… calling the ancestors, we later find out. The proprietors are looking for approval from their ancestors to add a restaurant to their travel and tour business. Apparently, the kitchen we are about to eat from has not yet received its blessing to operate. The food could be risky.
The ceremony is long and elaborate. We ask the waiter to turn off the techno beating on the stereo so that we can listen to the quiet chanting of the priest. We are the only customers once the Europeans leave, so they oblige us. Whatever we ask for, whether it is on the menu or not, DMZ Travel can make. The proprietress tells us that she learned to cook from her mother and can make any Vietnamese dish we ask for. “How do they stock all the ingredients to make all this stuff?” Robert says. We order a large collection of interesting-sounding dishes and a few minutes later a cook’s assistant dashes out the courtyard with a shopping basket. “Oh, that’s how.” They certainly are accommodating.
Meanwhile, the priest tosses a coin into a dish three times to find out if the ancestors agree that today is a propitious day to perform the ceremony. The coin must fall in a certain way at least one of the three times. That signifies the ancestors’ consent to perform the ceremony today. Statistically, of course, the priest is unlikely to get three out of three adverse tosses. The ancestors agree on the second toss and the ceremony is a go. Each form of food is blessed separately – beef, chicken, seafood, noodles, soups and of course rice. The priest burns incense, sips tea, burns paper replicas of money and clothing, sending them into the ancestors’ world. Various members of the family come out to participate in one portion or another of the blessing, which lasts almost our entire meal, and then, when they are all done, the food comes back off the sidewalk and into the restaurant, the priest takes off his head dress, and everyone sits down to eat.
We feel honored to have been here watching the blessing of this new restaurant. What will they call it, we wonder? The DMZ Diner? We hope for their sake that they come up with a better name. The proprietress joins us for a few minutes to talk about her restaurant. Before we leave we compliment her food, which was delicious, and wish her luck with her restaurant. “You might change the name to something more descriptive, though,” Robert suggests. “We almost didn’t come in.”
“We’re glad we did, though,” I add. “It was just what we were looking for.” And actually, it was. The food was not advertised as Imperial style Hue food, but in fact it fit the description. We roll up to our hotel room just in time to shower for our massages.
My masseuse gives me the usual slapping and pinching treatment with a few thumps worked in for good measure. She also sings to me, like many of them do, which is one of the best parts of a Vietnamese massage as far as I’m concerned. I love music, and my search for Vietnamese musical experiences has been frustrating. Any formal performances touted as “traditional Vietnamese music” have been disappointing. I want to hear Vietnamese folk songs, but what I get is “Auld Lang Syne” sung to the accompaniment of Vietnamese instruments. I want music in irregular rhythms and a five note Asian scale but what I get are traditional instruments played in 4/4 time with Western style flourishes. Fortunately, all you have to do is walk around the streets with your ears open and you’ll hear as many traditional tunes as you want. That’s where culture really happens in Vietnam… on the street, in the home, at the day spa, as a part of everyday life. It’s not on formal display, it just is.
I come back to the room feeling relaxed and ready to spread out on my luxurious king sized bed. Robert looks traumatized. The poor guy isn’t safe anywhere. “You did say you wanted a full body massage,” I remind him. It does not pay to be ambiguous. “That is part of your body after all.” At least he’s learning how to say “no” like he means it. Your average American guy probably doesn’t get much practice doing that.
I have a bit of an episode at breakfast next morning. This pretentious four-star hotel is too much for me, full of fat, blubbery pasty faced men and women with too much perfume and not enough humility. They ignore the staff that walks around quietly catering to their every need, trying to anticipate whether the man with two chins at table eight is running low on butter or needs sugar for his tea.
The woman with him was at the spa last night. She walked in and sat down without a word, the edges of her lips pulled down so far her mouth made a perfect circle with her pudgy chin. She never even acknowledged the lady who steam cleaned her face or the man who scrubbed the dead skin off her heels and kneaded her tired tourist feet for an hour. Such wealthy feet that they can get tired just from lugging all that mass around town.
If the staff takes offense at being treated with disdain, they don’t show it. But I wonder if the secret of Vietnamese massage may lie here. Maybe blood flow is just an excuse and all that slapping and pinching really evolved as a way of getting back at the lazy French colonialists who were probably just as fat and arrogant as the crowd I’m staying with here at the Saigon Marin hotel. “Let’s go,” I say to Robert. “I have to get out of here.”
We meet an energetic group of school kids on our way to the citadel. They play with us for a while and get my energy flowing in a positive direction again, but I never really feel much for the city of Hue. We hop in a cab less than twenty four hours after arriving here and head for the airport. Yes, we’re flying this leg. No more buses. Next stop is Hanoi. I have been looking forward to showing Robert around Hanoi, but as it turns out he meets a German woman on the plane and I defer playing tour guide for a little while so they can get to know each other.
There are several street vendors working this section of the waterfront in Hoi An this morning. One is a woman in her twenties with a bamboo shoulder pole, bananas hanging on one side and mangoes on the other, with a knife, scale and plastic bags buried somewhere. Doesn’t that thing bite into her shoulder, I wonder. She doesn’t even have a pad on it. One is a lady selling peanut brittle from a basket strapped to her bicycle. Another is a ten year old kid who walks up to me, glances around furtively as he sticks his hand in an inner jacket pocket and pulls out a well worn brown paper lunch bag full of postcards like it was a bag of pot.
The kids are the ones who affect me the most because kids should be carefree, not worried about money already at the age of eight or nine. About halfway through my trip I get an idea. I’d bought a mango on the street, peeled and sliced, and as I walked away with it a little girl sidled up to me asking if I would buy her postcards. “Ten for one dollar very cheap one, two, three…” All without pausing for breath. She was very good at counting to ten, that girl. They all are. I didn’t want any postcards, but I couldn’t bear to just tell her no and walk away. Instead, I asked her if she wanted a piece of my mango. I slipped the first piece halfway out of the bag and held it out to her. Her eyes got huge. Suddenly she forgot all about being a postcard girl and was just a girl. Yes, I nodded, would you like some? With a big smile she took a mango spear and trotted off down the street sucking on it as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
After that I bought a bag of candies to carry with me and it has the same effect on working children every time. When those brightly colored wrappers come out they run around like kids under a broken piñata, laughing and smiling and forgetting all about making money.
Fortunately, there are no really young kids working along the waterfront in Hoi An this morning. One vendor who stands out is a middle aged woman on a hand pedaled trike selling a previously used copy of the Viet Nam News. All she has to sell is a single used newspaper, but she is not asking for a handout and I can appreciate that. She isn’t asking me for money, she’s asking me to buy something that I actually might find useful. She spends her day recycling newspapers, picking them up from café tables when their first owners are done with them and redistributing them around town to new readers. If they look worn or are missing pages she reconstitutes a nice presentable complete set. She’s doing a real service when you think about it. She’s saving trees.
She pedals that trike around with her hands all day long. It’s the kind of contraption used in Vietnam by people whose legs are missing or crippled. They take a bike or cyclo and rework it so that it can be propelled using a forward and back hand motion against a small stick. A wheel is usually fitted to it for steering but sometimes the rider just leans in one direction or the other to turn.
Nobody manufactures bicycles like this, but the Vietnamese can make anything, modify anything, fix anything. They really can. Go find some broken thing you’ve got stowed away in a closet somewhere and take it to any area considered to be a “Little Saigon.” Whatever it is and whether or not he’s ever seen one before, I’ll bet you can find a Vietnamese who can fix it. If you can’t, I’ll buy you a drink the next time we’re in the same town together. Write to me to let me know how it goes.
The used newspaper lady in Hoi An is in a hand pedaled trike because she is missing a leg. It may have been blown off of her by an American bomb for all I know. But I’m not supposed to feel guilty about war damage. If I didn’t have three brand new copies of the same newspaper available to me at my hotel, I would buy one from her. Sometimes when she pedals by my table I want to buy one from her anyway. I want to buy one from every used newspaper seller.
It takes a while to get used to the vendors, but you have to get used to them if you’re going to travel here for more than a week or two. If you let them get to you, you’re liable to snap. Everyone has their breaking point and I have already seen more than one person reach theirs. Today it is a pleasant looking German lady. In her sixties maybe. Probably someone’s grandma. She reminds me of my mom, walking peacefully along the waterfront, enjoying a Sunday morning in Hoi An lost in her own daydream world, seemingly perfectly content.
Like every Western tourist here, she must have been approached by scores of street vendors since she arrived in Vietnam. The poor peanut brittle lady isn’t any different from them. She is just trying to sell her peanut brittle, which is probably delicious. She isn’t even aggressive. She doesn’t follow the German lady around, she doesn’t pester her, doesn’t ask her more than once. She just says, as she has said to every tourist passing along the waterfront this morning, “Peanut brittle, one dollar. Very cheap. You buy some?”
But that is the straw that breaks the poor German grandma’s back. This kind woman minding her own business stops in her tracks. “One dollar?!” she yells straight ahead of her to nobody. “One dollar?!” She turns around to face the astonished peanut brittle lady. Vietnamese don’t get angry. It is considered poor behavior in Vietnam to lose your temper. It’s just not done. When it happens, Vietnamese don’t know how to respond.
 |
| Lunch vendor |
I can understand it, I really can. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to crack, too. No one likes to be followed around, pestered, pressured into buying things they don’t need. Sometimes the sellers are really pushy. You say “no thank you,” and they keep at you. “But I’m trying to be polite,” you say. “I told you no thank you. I don’t want a banana / a paperback / a pair of sunglasses / a bag of peanut brittle. I don’t want to have my tennis shoes polished. I don’t want a manicure. I don’t want to stay at your hotel. I don’t want to ride your motorbike. I’m trying to be polite… why do you keep asking me over and over again? I’m trying to be polite, why are you being so rude?”
It wears you down at some point.
Dilek, a young Turkish woman I met in Hanoi helped me gain some perspective. We had both been in Sa Pa and were dumped back in downtown Hanoi by the same sleeper train at five thirty in the morning. I must have commented about the lack of aggressive vendors on the street at that early hour. “They’re just trying to earn a living, though,” Dilek said. “At least they do it with a smile.”
She was right. There are some exceptions, but most of the vendors are actually pretty respectful. They ask you once, usually with a pleasant face, and if you say no they don’t ask you again. Some of them are more persistent or downright scary, like the hat ladies at the sampan dock in Duc Khe. That must pay off from time to time or they wouldn’t do it. It’s as much our fault as theirs. Either way, though, they’re all just trying to support their families. These people are not becoming fabulously wealthy selling cone hats or home made peanut brittle, that’s for sure.
I could have spent a lot more time with Dilek. I meet a lot of people when I travel but there are usually just a few who I really connect with. The ones who may weave into and out of my life in the space of a single day but make enough of an impact to stick in my mind long afterwards. Dilek was one of those. We met at the train station at the crack of dawn and ended up spending the entire day together. We ate, we talked, we shopped, we went to museums. We had dinner at Cha Ca La Vong, the oldest restaurant in Hanoi. That’s where we met Mathew and Andrew, the guys from Australia. We were all seated together at a table for four because the restaurant was short on space. The four of us went out afterwards for drinks and ice cream because we got along so well over dinner. The next day Dilek was moving on to China and two days later I would be heading back to Saigon, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we became friends that day and not just acquaintances.
I keep Dilek’s words about the street vendors in mind when I start feeling frustrated and they help me keep perspective. The next time the used newspaper lady pumps her contraption my way I flag her down and buy her single piece of merchandise, even though I’ve got three others just like it back at the hotel.
- - - - -
From Hoi An Robert and I move on to Hue. We have less than twenty four hours here but it’s enough. The long bus rides are starting to wear on us. Both Robert and I are a little grumpy by the time we arrive at the Sinh Café Tour Office a few blocks from the river. An aggressive onslaught of hotel hawkers swamps us the moment we get off the bus. “No thank you,” we tell them, “we’d like to look around ourselves.”
“It’s good hotel. Very cheap,” one replies.
“No thank you,” we say. “We’re not interested.” We walk around to the other side of the bus to get our luggage. One guy follows us and shoves a brochure for his hotel in my hand.
“No thank you,” I say again. “We don’t want it. We’re going to look around on our own.”
“Good hotel. Very cheap. Close to river,” he replies.
“She said no,” Robert tells him, his voice getting a notch louder. We put our bags down on the sidewalk and start thumbing through our guidebook. The same man approaches us again.
“This one very close,” he says. “You want to see?”
“No,” I say. “You’re being too pushy. Please leave us alone.”
The man continues to follow us around. He shoves another brochure at us. We take it. “Thank you,” one of us says. “We want to know the name of your hotel so we can make sure that we never ever stay there, even if it’s the only hotel in the entire city that has a room.”
We duck into the tour office thinking we will find protection from the mob. Sure enough, half a dozen hotel hawkers are standing at the door, heads leaning in but feet still outside. The lady at the desk has no sympathy for us, though. We got angry and that’s just not done.
We head back out the door, tired, grumpy social outcasts, and check in to the four-star Saigon Morin hotel. We deserve to splurge a little. I convince Robert that he should give Vietnamese massage another try and we make appointments for… oh, but I’ve forgotten to tell you about Robert’s naughty massage.
I wanted us to go get massages before we left Saigon. I had heard stories from other travelers about men being propositioned by their masseuses so I was careful to choose a reputable day spa in the center of the tourist district where I was sure Robert would get a straight massage with no extras thrown in. But no… even at this upscale spa the naughty extras, as they are called, were on offer. Practically forced upon him from the sound of it. “I touch you here,” she told him. “You like I touch you here?” moving up his anatomy. “You pay me later. Your wife doesn’t have to know.”
“She’s not my…” he hesitated. “Oh she’ll know. Just a regular massage will be fine.” This more or less continued throughout the session. When I found him in the sauna afterwards Robert was a bit shell shocked.
“How was your massage?” I asked him.
“She tried to make me have sex with her.”
“Not here,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Oh I’m sure.”
“Wo’ow, I’m jealous. Mine didn’t want to have sex with me.”
“You’re a woman.”
“So? How does she know I’m not a lesbian?” He had to think about that for a moment. “What did you tell her,” I ask him.
“I told her no. What do you think? Paying for sex is just not a path I want to go down.”
“Poor girl. You could have at least let her give you a quick hand job.”
“It’s a slippery slope, Patti.”
So it was not a relaxing experience. Not for Robert, at least. My masseuse was great. She sang Vietnamese folk songs the whole time like she was singing her baby to sleep.
It is understandable that Robert would hesitate to get another massage, even at a reputable four-star hotel. But he agrees to give it a try. We sign up for a couple of late appointments, then wander off to see what we can find for dinner in the city of Hue.
I had heard about Hue food. Hue was the capital of Vietnam in the nineteenth century under the Nguyen Emperor Gia Long. It is still known as The Imperial City even though the capital has long moved back to Hanoi. Hue is famous for its double walled, double moated citadel that was practically shot to rubble by the North Vietnamese who captured the city during the 1968 Tet Offensive and the Americans who took it from them a month later.
Hue is known for its Imperial meals, flavorful food served in tiny portions, like Spanish tapas, because the Nguyen emperors liked variety. According to legend, each meal had to consist of fifty different dishes made by fifty different cooks. If a cook served up something the Emperor had seen even once before that cook was not long for this world. Hue food is great for those of us who want to try a bit of everything… lots of little dishes and none in enough quantity to get tired of it. But apparently that’s just the way they make Hue food in Saigon or Hanoi. In Hue they eat regular food.
After walking around looking for Hue food for about forty five minutes, we give up and decide to eat at the first place that looks appetizing. We wander by an incredible display of fish, prawns, beef, rice, noodles, soups, vegetables… all piping hot and laid out on a table on the sidewalk. It is fabulous but we can’t tell where it came from. There aren’t any restaurants here, just a place called DMZ Travel. DMZ stands for demilitarized zone. Lots of tourists are war vets who come here to visit the places they helped destroy in hopes of finally, thirty years later, alleviating their guilt. The Vietnamese forgave them years ago, so hopefully they are successful.
We wander into the courtyard of DMZ Travel, since it seems to be somehow affiliated with the delicious looking table of food out on the sidewalk. In the courtyard we find elegant linen draped tables and a European couple eating dinner. We’re still not sure why there is so much food on the sidewalk but this is clearly a reasonable – if oddly located – place to have dinner so we sit down and ask for a menu.
As we eat, a Buddhist priest in a colorful six-paneled head dress approaches the table on the sidewalk. He rings a bell rhythmically and chants in a low voice… calling the ancestors, we later find out. The proprietors are looking for approval from their ancestors to add a restaurant to their travel and tour business. Apparently, the kitchen we are about to eat from has not yet received its blessing to operate. The food could be risky.
The ceremony is long and elaborate. We ask the waiter to turn off the techno beating on the stereo so that we can listen to the quiet chanting of the priest. We are the only customers once the Europeans leave, so they oblige us. Whatever we ask for, whether it is on the menu or not, DMZ Travel can make. The proprietress tells us that she learned to cook from her mother and can make any Vietnamese dish we ask for. “How do they stock all the ingredients to make all this stuff?” Robert says. We order a large collection of interesting-sounding dishes and a few minutes later a cook’s assistant dashes out the courtyard with a shopping basket. “Oh, that’s how.” They certainly are accommodating.
Meanwhile, the priest tosses a coin into a dish three times to find out if the ancestors agree that today is a propitious day to perform the ceremony. The coin must fall in a certain way at least one of the three times. That signifies the ancestors’ consent to perform the ceremony today. Statistically, of course, the priest is unlikely to get three out of three adverse tosses. The ancestors agree on the second toss and the ceremony is a go. Each form of food is blessed separately – beef, chicken, seafood, noodles, soups and of course rice. The priest burns incense, sips tea, burns paper replicas of money and clothing, sending them into the ancestors’ world. Various members of the family come out to participate in one portion or another of the blessing, which lasts almost our entire meal, and then, when they are all done, the food comes back off the sidewalk and into the restaurant, the priest takes off his head dress, and everyone sits down to eat.
We feel honored to have been here watching the blessing of this new restaurant. What will they call it, we wonder? The DMZ Diner? We hope for their sake that they come up with a better name. The proprietress joins us for a few minutes to talk about her restaurant. Before we leave we compliment her food, which was delicious, and wish her luck with her restaurant. “You might change the name to something more descriptive, though,” Robert suggests. “We almost didn’t come in.”
“We’re glad we did, though,” I add. “It was just what we were looking for.” And actually, it was. The food was not advertised as Imperial style Hue food, but in fact it fit the description. We roll up to our hotel room just in time to shower for our massages.
My masseuse gives me the usual slapping and pinching treatment with a few thumps worked in for good measure. She also sings to me, like many of them do, which is one of the best parts of a Vietnamese massage as far as I’m concerned. I love music, and my search for Vietnamese musical experiences has been frustrating. Any formal performances touted as “traditional Vietnamese music” have been disappointing. I want to hear Vietnamese folk songs, but what I get is “Auld Lang Syne” sung to the accompaniment of Vietnamese instruments. I want music in irregular rhythms and a five note Asian scale but what I get are traditional instruments played in 4/4 time with Western style flourishes. Fortunately, all you have to do is walk around the streets with your ears open and you’ll hear as many traditional tunes as you want. That’s where culture really happens in Vietnam… on the street, in the home, at the day spa, as a part of everyday life. It’s not on formal display, it just is.
I come back to the room feeling relaxed and ready to spread out on my luxurious king sized bed. Robert looks traumatized. The poor guy isn’t safe anywhere. “You did say you wanted a full body massage,” I remind him. It does not pay to be ambiguous. “That is part of your body after all.” At least he’s learning how to say “no” like he means it. Your average American guy probably doesn’t get much practice doing that.
I have a bit of an episode at breakfast next morning. This pretentious four-star hotel is too much for me, full of fat, blubbery pasty faced men and women with too much perfume and not enough humility. They ignore the staff that walks around quietly catering to their every need, trying to anticipate whether the man with two chins at table eight is running low on butter or needs sugar for his tea.
The woman with him was at the spa last night. She walked in and sat down without a word, the edges of her lips pulled down so far her mouth made a perfect circle with her pudgy chin. She never even acknowledged the lady who steam cleaned her face or the man who scrubbed the dead skin off her heels and kneaded her tired tourist feet for an hour. Such wealthy feet that they can get tired just from lugging all that mass around town.
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| My all time favorite picture of Robert |
We meet an energetic group of school kids on our way to the citadel. They play with us for a while and get my energy flowing in a positive direction again, but I never really feel much for the city of Hue. We hop in a cab less than twenty four hours after arriving here and head for the airport. Yes, we’re flying this leg. No more buses. Next stop is Hanoi. I have been looking forward to showing Robert around Hanoi, but as it turns out he meets a German woman on the plane and I defer playing tour guide for a little while so they can get to know each other.
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