(music)
- Goodbye, Saigon.
- My name is Blank and I've been in Vietnam how many years.
- My name's Blank and I've been in Vietnam how many years.
- My name is Jason.
- My name is Mark.
- My name is Kate.
- My name is Kattina Rabdau-Fox.
- My name is Brian.
- My name is Natalie.
- My name is Katja.
- My name is Megan.
- My name is Ray.
- My name is Bilal.
- My name is Dave Fox.
- And I've lived in Vietnam for five years.
- For five years.
- For two years.
- For three years.
- For three years.
- For three years
- For five years.
- Three years.
- For almost five years.
- For three years.
Question: What is something you could have only experienced in Vietnam?
- I traveled to Ninh Binh
a year or two ago.
That's where King Kong was filmed.
So that, I think in and of itself,
was kind of a unique experience.
But, we went to this really local guest house
and that's where we stayed for a week.
And, the owners,
and the family of the owners,
they kept bringing us all of this homemade wine,
and it was wine from different resources.
So, like, wine from the snake.
Wine from the grass.
Wine from the trees.
Wine from, the huts.
It was all of this different homemade wine,
that I think is a uniquely Vietnamese experience.
- The first year we were here,
we wanted to go down to the Mekong Delta,
and it was so far,
but on the map it looked so close.
We're like, it's oh, it's only 150 kilometers,
we'll be there by nighttime.
And, we got in the motorbike,
and we realized very quickly
what all the hammocks
and coconuts were for,
because driving on the road was so exhausting.
We arrived to the Mekong,
to our homestay, and they're like, "Where did you come from?"
And, we're like, "Oh, well we came from Ho Chi Minh City."
And, they said,
"You're the first ones to have ever motorbiked
all the way from Ho Chi Minh City."
And, then we looked, we turned around,
and we said, but that's Ho Chi Minh City.
And, they're like, yeah but it's still far,
even though you can see it.
- I think when my sister came
to visit my first Christmas here,
and my cousin,
and we did a bike trip
from Hoi An down to Nha Trang,
and our guide, Tao,
took us, as our guide you know,
took us on this trip.
And he said he had never taken a bunch of girls on a trip.
It was either a female with her male partner or just males.
So, guiding a trip with just females was really new for him,
and super exciting and surprising.
And when we said,
well how's it going so far?
He said, it's the weirdest but most fun experience
that I've ever had guiding.
And, then he introduced us to his family for a meal.
Just the whole trip was just really awesome.
- I was lucky enough to be invited to spend Tet holiday
with a family in Hanoi.
I can't even put it into words.
- Quintessentially, Vietnamese experience was staying
in a very open, bamboo hut in Ninh Binh.
And, it was beautiful,
and yet, sort of infuriating,
because the wind was howling all night
and we were harassed by mosquitos.
But, it was such an amazing place,
and such a beautiful countryside,
that it was absolutely a Vietnam only experience.
- Ah, baby size chairs?
- Riding a motorbike with six boxes on it.
They're just, you're just holding a box,
there's something between your legs,
you're riding with one hand,
and like, somebody else is holding some other junk,
and there's something strapped to the motorbike.
Only in Vietnam.
- The difficulty of a custom ordered pizza.
Or, custom ordered anything that might not appear
on the menu, but with the ingredients somewhere on the menu,
just not in the particular combination
for the particular pizza that you would like to order.
And the difficulty by which one needs
to go through to achieve that pizza.
- May I add to it?
It's also the most horrific karaoke
I've ever, ever heard in my life.
- I was calling a GrabBike,
trying to get home,
and he was lost, and he couldn't find me.
And, it was really bad and I was confused.
And this one younger man on a motorbike was watching me,
and I assumed he was a Xe om driver,
the people who did this before GrabBike,
and so finally he said, are you waiting for Uber?
And, I said, well, Grab.
He can't find me.
And he said, where do you want to go?
And, he wound up taking me home.
And at the end I went to pull out my wallet,
and he said, "no, no, no!"
and he pulled out his phone
and he typed into Google translate
and he held it up
and it just said, "I help you."
And, he drove away, and it was the sweetest thing.
- I was living for a while
in a very Vietnamese neighborhood,
without a lot of Westerners there.
And, I was sitting in a coffee shop one day,
and there was this guy.
I was at a table right by the street,
it was an open coffee shop,
and there was this guy,
and he was kind of hanging out,
and he was looking at me.
And, I had my iPhone out.
And, iPhone are, in certain parts of Ho Chi Minh City,
they're a favorite thing for pickpockets to snatch,
Because they're worth a lot of money.
This seemed like a really unlikely place
for this guy to do this,
but I saw him there and I put my phone away.
I was doing some work
and I started just writing stuff out by hand,
rather than working on my phone and my computer.
The next thing I knew,
he came, I didn't see him coming up behind me,
he came up behind me,
he reached around with his phone
to take a selfie of me and him together.
And, just on reflex, I blocked the selfie
and I said no to him,
and he very sheepishly apologized and went running off.
What I realized afterwards was that,
I was in an area where there were some people,
there are a lot of people who have moved to Saigon
from poorer parts of the country,
from out in the countryside,
where they haven't had a lot of exposure to Westerners yet.
And, he was just fascinated with seeing a Westerner.
He wanted to maybe show his friends back in his own village,
hey look at this guy I took a selfie with.
And, he meant no harm by what he was doing.
I was so taken aback that my reflex was
to say get out of my face.
And, I actually felt quite bad about that afterwards,
once it clicked in my mind what was going on
and what his motives were.
- Well, we had our baby in Vietnam
and had to navigate
the bureaucracy
of getting a birth certificate.
- Yeah, I think that the red tape
is probably the most unique experience
that we've had here as we've been living abroad.
Just sort of the stamping, and the paperwork,
and the photocopying at the offices.
And, more photocopying, and stamping, and paperwork.
- And then taking... we had to come back the next day
to literally take paper
from one office to the next office
and there were doors connecting the offices.
So, things like that.
- I think just being so welcome by the people
is an experience in itself.
I've been to a lot of other countries and a lot of cities,
and a lot of people are more closed off,
whereas I felt the Vietnamese people are very welcoming.
And, that's an experience that really
is only experienced here.
You're just being so welcomed wholeheartedly.
What is a challenging experience you've had in Vietnam?
- I think, for me, every time that I have
to travel a long distance in Vietnam is a challenge
because I moved here from New York.
And, in New York,
the public transportation system
is pretty efficient.
And, though there can be delays,
and there can be people who jump onto the tracks,
for the most part,
it's functioning and it gets you where you need to go
in a timely manner.
But in Vietnam, the motorbike situation
and having to participate,
and engage, and be completely invested
in the travel experience is very different for me.
- I'd say crossing the streets,
but that's cliche and I've been here once before,
so that was not the worst.
Probably the fact
that you had to do
a lot more things
with a language barrier than anywhere I've ever been.
- I just think moving to a country
where not everybody speaks English
was initially the hardest thing.
And, then going to different...
there's not just one store
where you can get everything.
So, you have to go to five different stores
just to cook one meal.
And, in those stores, none of the items are in English
and nobody speaks English.
And, for me, getting used to a cash based society again,
or at all for the first time,
was initially the biggest shock,
and the hardest thing to get used to,
and mentally the most draining.
- For me, it was smells.
Now I like them, but the smell of taxis,
with the mung dug leaves inside,
smell like bad socks to me at first.
And, it was a lot of them going around.
Now, I love the smell and I'm used to it.
Culturally, I'm adjusted,
but at the beginning I was thinking,
something is dying in the taxi behind me.
- I mean, the language is obviously challenging.
Being able to ask for what you want,
and when you say what you think you want,
and you did not say it right.
Or, using Google translate,
and Google translate does not have it.
That's a pretty big challenge.
- Your answers are much better than mine so far.
Goodbye Vietnam. And Bloopers.
- Interviewing me (laughs)
- Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
- Pho Kim Hung and it has delicious food.
- [Interviewer] Awesome. And what is (groans)
- Unbelievable.
- Um, spruce in Vermont, er, Vermont,
that's my home state, um, Vietnam.
- (laughing) it's kind of like Vietnam.
- Start with a V, they have mountains.
It's all good
Colder in the North.
Let's see, really...
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