Traveling is a tough business on the streets of Saigon. Luckily, traveling IS our business; afterall, we do, in fact, "live on vacation."
Our first day of touring around the capital city of Vietnam was marred by two consecutive experiences of people trying to rip us off.
The first was our seemingly friendly Cyclo driver. A cyclo is a gigantic bicycle with a big, almost comfortable seat perched before the handlebars. A very Saigon experience, slowly meandering through the madness of street traffic. (Traffic = throngs of bicycles, motorcycles, cars, buses, vans, trucks, horsemen, unicycles, hovercrafts, swarming intersections like fratboys to the keg or filipinos to the buffet...a sight to be seen.) He greeted us with a very elaborate handshake, quoted us a reasonable price of $2/hour, assured our comfort and delivered us to some very nice tourist attractions (most notably, The War Remnants Museum, which ably depicted the gruesome inhumanity of the Vietnam Conflict through horrifying photos, unbelievable quotes, embalmed mutated human fetuses, and, of course, war remnants: bombs, gas cans, guns, etc.). When it was all said and done, time to pay up, suddenly it was $2/hour EACH! We handed over the money we had originally agreed on, but he refused to accept it. "Only half," he claimed. After some serious posturing, he finally accepted his due, and not a dong more. Off he pedaled, and good riddance.
The next episode came at the Ben Tranh Market, the city's largest open air market. We'd decided to get a bite to eat at one of the many food stalls within. We sat at a counter and ordered some fresh spring rolls, seasoned ground pork and fresh greens wrapped in rice paper. Ang sarap. As we started to eat them, our hostess slyly slid sausages on our plate, sausages we clearly had not ordered. I must admit that I was still steaming from the first ill encounter, and comsumed the sausages ready for a faceoff. "She's gonna charge us for these, but I'm not paying 'cause I didn't order them," I told myself. "I'm from America, gol dernit." When the bill came, of course it included the unordered mystery meats. When I only payed for the spring rolls, she indicated the sausage. "But I didn't order these, you just put them on my plate. They must be free. You were just being nice, right?" My "must be free" ploy didn't work in the end, and we ended up paying for everything... but not without telling off the entire staff of the place with broken english, the only kind of english understood in thses parts (Claire tried doing it in French, I think). "You bad. You cheat. No like you." And not without causing quite a commotion in that particular corner of the market.
How's that for drama? Best kind. Human drama.
(For the stat trackers, our argument was over 10,000 dong, the equivalent of $ .65. Cheap drama.)