Eating out in Saigon – part 1

Pho – the traditional noodle soup that is eaten at breakfast or at lunch. My favourite is one with chicken and lime. At a local place this bowl costs around 2 USD.

Vietnam is haven for lovely, tasty and delicious meals. Some of them are also incredibly cheap. We have found almost every kitchen from around the world here, and the variety of food is amazing.

The first part of food-related blogs is about Vietnamese food. Besides the business dinner just after we had landed in the city, we have been to several other restaurants. We have not tried all local dishes and have not made any effort to taste the different cuisines of different regions. Usually we have just ventured into a restaurant that had an interesting menu or a restaurant that was recommended by someone.

Typical local lunch dish with either rice or noodles. Fresh coconut and ice tea are popular drinks at all meals.

Vietnamese always order loads of food. It is a small miracle how the locals stay so thin with all the amount of food that is ordered to the table. The best way to get started with Vietnamese food, is to go with locals, when someone (usually the person who invites and pays) orders for the whole party.

Fresh spring rolls are delicious and they are often offered as starters. Or it can be the deep-fried version. Rolling the rice paper is a bit tricky, especially if the papers are getting dry and sticking together. But they are easy as one can always choose what to put inside the rolls.

Spring rolls that you roll yourself. Ingredients include noodles, salad, thai basil, star fruit and shrimp on sugar cane or beef. They are then dipped in different sauces, depending on main ingredient (shrimp, beef, pork..).

Sauces are important in the Vietnamese cuisine. Usually, a different sauce is brought with every new dish. Most common sauces are chili sauce, soy sauce with chili and salt and pepper with lemon. Other sauces we have not figured yet what they contain, some have been sweet and sour, some just odd and strange to our taste buds.

In many seafood restaurants, there a plenty of fish tanks, where the fish and other seafood are still alive until they are ordered. We have seen strange looking fish, neatly tied crabs, and even rays.

Local people eat a lot of seafood, there is a big variety of fish, prawns, clams, squid and oysters available.

Locals eat a lot of seafood, and you can find a huge variety of fish, prawns, clams, squid and oysters.

Like in Thailand, in many places the dishes are brought to the table when they are ready. The kitchen may not have any hotplate, so dishes are taken out in the order they are ready. Starter can sometimes be an unknown concept. You may get your starter first, or it can be brought together with the main course or after it. Vietnamese are not eating startes: everything is brought to the table in a miscellaneous order. Usually when bigger groups gather for lunch or dinner, the dishes are meant to be shared.

BBQ places are common. In a barbecue restaurant the dishes are grilled at the customer’s table. Some places have a grill that sits in the middle of the table. In other places, the waiter brings a mobile grill and either grill at your table or at the table next to you if you do not like the smoke from the grill.

In this restaurant, the grill is in the middle of the table, under the salad plate.

The grill at our table.

Many of the BBQ places are open-air restaurants. A couple are situated on roof-top terraces, like this one.

Another option is to have the waiters bring a mobile bbq and prepare the dishes at the table.

Usually the food has been good. Once, we went to a seafood restaurant without knowing it and ordered beef and chicken. That will be described in one of the future blogs. Vietnamese, like most Asians, eat everything in an animal. So far, I think I have not had chicken hearts, duck tongues or anything similar.

Western and Asian views on what looks tempting are quite different. In Vietnam, chicken and duck usually have their heads left when they are served.

 

Efficient and fast computer service

Just before leaving Finland, I managed to drop some liquid on my keyboard. Luckily, the next day my computer worked, but on morning of departure, the keyboard was immobile. First day in Saigon, and the computer is still dead. Besides worrying about all the material I had on the desktop, I did not feel like buying a new computer first thing upon arrival. On our second day in Saigon, we were taken by our local help Danh to a computer service shop.

The building does not look like the Western image of a computer service centre.

Past the motorcycles, you enter the building and climb the stairs up to the first or second floor, depending how full each floor is. You are given a yellow form, where you write what is wrong with your computer. You sit down and they call you once they start working on your computer.

All the computers have a yellow service sheet.

The service staff worked very fast and seemed to be able to fix most problems.

After about 20 minutes of waiting, it is my turn. The guy starts checking the computer and after a while tells me there is nothing wrong with it. Apparently, the bubbles had dried.. He double checked the whole keyboard and did not charge anything for the check-up of my computer.

Atte’s computer got stuck a while ago. It had had the same problem before, and in Finland he was told it takes 10 days to have it checked. This time he knew where to take his computer. He was told the keyboard needed to be changed and that it would cost 1,500,000 dong. Next day, when we went to pick up his computer, they told that actually they only had to clean the computer and that the price was 150,000 dong, less than 6 euros. So besides getting the computer fixed, the price was only a tenth of the estimate. That does not happen too often in Finland.

Atte’s computer could not be fixed while waiting, but it was ready the next afternoon.

If it is broken, it can be fixed, seems to be the motto in this country. We like it.

Birds singing in the park

We live next to a park called Tao Dan. Every morning you can hear birds singing as you walk by. There are birdcages hanging from special metal stands and people sitting around in little plastic chairs. Sunday mornings are the busiest with most birdcages. We ventured to the park on Sunday to discover what this was about.

It is busy in the park on Sunday mornings.

Bird singing is a popular hobby, not just amongst elder people. People compete whose bird is the best singer. As we understood it, there is a competition once a year. All the other times the birds are taken into the park so that they would meet other birds and especially so that they would learn singing from more skilled birds. We have not found out how that happens. We were told some birds sing only once a week, but their sound is so beautiful that it makes the bird valuable.

On our way to the park, we bought some grasshoppers from a sales lady on the street.

Grasshoppers, bugs and worms for sale.

A small bag of grasshoppers cost 5,000 dong.

When we sat down, we noticed one man plucking the legs off the grasshoppers and the putting the remains of the grasshoppers into one bird’s cage. A we did not know if anyone is allowed to feed the birds, we gave our grasshoppers to him. He thanked us with a big smile.

Sundays are the busiest birdsinging days: there were more than 50 bird cages in Tao Dan park. And there were lots of spectators, mostly men. It is actually very relaxing to listen to the birds. They sing so loud that you barely hear the traffic righ next to you. The birds were of all colours and ranging from very tiny to medium-sized with long feathers.

Most of the cages are made of wood or bamboo and they are round, just of different sizes.

The best birds can have a value of almost a prize-winning dog. We still need to find out how they are sold or traded and how they teach the birds at home (in case they do it). When the bird geets too agitated, the cage is taken down and it is covered with a hood. If the birds are shy, they can also stay in a covered cage to familiarise with the sounds of the park (humans and other birds).

Most of the cage covers were made of cotton but some with nice elaborate silk.

We hope to see the real competition once it will take place. Maybe by then we will also know more about bird singing and have more intriguing facts to share.
There is a short video, which is in my Facebook, did not manage to insert it here.

A collection of bird cages in a motorbike repair shop.