Neighboring a modern, clinical, western-style shopping centre you might step into an old market housing delights from fresh flowers to embroidered shoes, from “fresh” frogs and eels to beaded bags, from incense to locally woven silk materials, from gold and sterling silver jewellery to $1 CD’s, from the latest hi-tech gadgets to locally crafted lacquerware, and more. And more. These markets, in themselves, titillate your senses with their spectrum of colors, textures, sounds, aromas, and tastes. 

Traveling down a street your eyes might dance from a modern high-rise apartment block to colonial French-style terrace houses, from temples and pagodas adorned with colorful mosaics to store after store selling bags, from a lady wearing a conicle hat sitting at the side of the street selling sticky rice to a lady in a miniskirt flying past you on her motorbike, from amodern store pumping out dance music to drivers napping in their cyclos or balancing sleep on their stationary motorbikes.

Layers of sound upon this might include the programmed Lambada tune of a reversing vehicle, a passing sample of a Vietnamese pop song as I ride by a street café, the distinctive clip-clop rhythm of a percussive instrument played by a boy selling noodles, another percussive sound – this time a rattle of a boy riding by who offers massages, or the tunes of Kenny Gee emanating from a traveling scale that will tell you your weight for $1. At first, these foreign sounds produce a mix that is both comical and chaotic. With familiarity these sounds mean more to you: the Lambada warns you of a reversing vehicle, Kenny Gee asks you if you want to be weighed just as a boy’s percussive clip-clop asks you if you want noodles and a rattle tells you where you can get a massage. The street sounds of Sai Gon are indeed alive to the ear. Tastes and smells to entice and to repulse

Like sound, tastes and smells also seem magnified.

In Vietnam, you have plenty of opportunity to try new tastes. For meat lovers there’s frog, eel, snake, snake wine, kangaroo, deer, dog, scorpion, liver, duck embryos, field mice,  intestines, and more – pretty much name it. For vegetarians there’s lots of stir fried veggies and rice or noodles. Some of the Buddhist cafes have big plates of healthy and delicious servings of veggies plus innumerable variations of soya products -including great imitations of meats and seafood. You can definitely eat well in Sai Gon. Part of eating well is the social element of being able to eat meals out on the streets with friends - and so cheaply. 

Whenever we had visitors, we’d take them to a lane nearby that specialized in Vietnamese pancakes - savory thin pancakes usually with prawns, onions, and pork fried in them that you then roll in lettuce leaves and dip in a sweet chilli sauce or a stinky shrimp paste that we endearingly referred to as “green bum sauce”. For work lunches, we established a favorite café with delicious vegetarian dishes of not only Vietnamese style rice or noodles with veggies but also Mexican, Indian, and Italian dishes.

Not to mention their shakes of seasonal fruits including mango, banana, sapodilla, and the exotic dragon and star fruits with ice, milk, or yoghurt. While I considered these meals cheap (a plate being less than $1), I think most Vietnamese people would consider eating regularly at such places quite extravagant. These meals are expensive if you compare them to buying a bowl of noodle soup from the boy with the clip-clop instrument for half the price, or a baguette with meat and salad from a lady at the market for a tenth of the price, or a serving of sticky rice (choose from orange, purple, green, and other colored ones) from a lady with a basket on the side of the street for a fifteenth of the price.

Not only did we have a regular lunch date at work between 12 and 1pm, but we also had daily rituals of morning and afternoon drinks. We would take in turns of going out to the “drink lady” in the alley who would cool our mouths in the hot, sticky afternoon or morning air.

We could choose from a black coffee with ice, coffee with ice and condensed milk (I too cringed at first but by the end of my year somehow became addicted to this daily treat), tamarind nectar with ice, a hot or cold lemon drink, and the world-wide temptations of coke and other softdrinks. When talking of drinking, I must mention the places that specialized in draft beer where waiters/waitresses provide a replacement drink when you’re still half-way through your current glass. Luckily (or perhaps not, if you’re thinking of your liver) a glass of beer will only cost you less than 50c (sometimes as little as 15c).

While there were many tastes and aromas to please the senses, there were also those that repulsed. I found it difficult to walk through the section of the markets that sold frogs which were still squirming but which had been skinned. The suggestion of intestines or fried balls on the menu also pushed the wrong button in me (although, rationally, I know that eating one part of the body should not be any better or worse than another).

Sometimes when walking the streets, the smell of urine-blanketed walls also led me to either block my nose for as long as I could or to cross the street as quickly as I could. It was often my nose that reminded me of the poverty that still exists in this city. Because of the wealth that has crept in through modern buildings, shops, cafes, and bars you can sometimes forget that there are still lots of people living in poverty on the streets.  Similarly, while traveling across bridges, you would sometimes catch the pungent odor of waste-polluted rivers.

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