I’m back from Vietnam! From Saigon to Hanoi, the whole trip was filled with excitement and stress as well. There were so many motorbikes in the city and each time we had to cross the roads, it wasn’t just “look left, look right, look left again.” It was more like “look left, look right, look left again. Ok now you look left, I look right. Please look at the right side. No! Wait there’s cars coming! Ok cross now. S*** there’s more bikes again. Wait, RUN!”
I was really stressed by the whole road crossing issue and their 4 million bikes in Saigon didn’t help much. It was pretty scary if you don’t master the art of crossing the Saigon roads. The locals kept telling us to “just walk, don’t stop or you’ll get horn”
But when the roads got bigger and wider to cross; trust me, you won’t want to “just walk”. It’s simply crazy over there and the air condition was really bad. Most times, I could hardly breath and I had to hold a wet tissue on my nose to filter out their dusty air. It feels really good to be back in Singapore right now although I do miss the “Pho” and their chilly weather over there.
During our stay in Hanoi city, along the roadsides, everywhere was selling this beefsteak sandwich wrap with a French loaf that cost S$2.50 each. Wondering what is the local buzz about, we chose the cleanest shop we could find along the streets and placed our order there. Below was a photo taken while waiting for our sandwich.
Mind you, this is the cleanest local shop we could find and we had to queue for these stuff. There were also cafes mainly situated in the tourist area but the food they served were the usual “Ang Moh” burgers, club sandwich, fried rice and noodles.
The next day, we went back to this shop again for our beef steak sandwhich. This time, we sat inside the shop and had our bread there. I wouldn’t want to remember the sight I saw while we were there. We ordered 2 cups of coffee. While we were drinking them, to our horror, one of the waitress picked up the used cups from the next table, threw the remaining coffee out of the shop into the road side drain, brought the cups back into the shop and took the table cloth to wipe it dry. The cups were returned back to the shelves to be reused :0
OMG! I can’t believe what we saw and I couldn’t bear to finish up my coffee after that. The next thing we saw was that they took out tubes of cold but cooked sausages from a big plastic bag. After that, one of the ladies went behind me and picked up a used and wet chopping board from the floor. Once again, she took the table cloth to wipe the board. -.-” Then she start chopping the sausages. By that time, I then realised all the cold sausages within our sandwich came from that kind of condition. Yuck!
This was really a lesson for myself who works in a kitchen. I’m really thankful to our local health authorities who put chefs and kitchen users into a compulsory intensive hyginene course before we can operate in a food stall. If not for the NEA restrictions, there wouldn’t be control over the hygiene condition in our local food.
Below are some of the other food we ate during our journey in Vietnam.
Local Fruits served at Coconut Island along Mekong River.
Deep Fried Elephant Ear Fish from Mekong River.
Flaming Banana in one of their cafes in Hanoi.
