Category Archives: Saigon life

May4

Saigon strike

Posted on by
Standard
Saigon strike

I love the spectacular weather experiences Saigon throws on its residents.

I know, it’s not a lot of fun being caught in a sudden torrential downpour when you’re on the back of a motorcycle going nowhere in peak time traffic on Pasteur and there is no weather proof jacket to hand.

With the rainy season almost upon us, the thunder and lightning storms across the city are becoming more common. Never before moving here have I seen such spectacular displays from Mother Nature of forked lightning, beautiful bright rays of light ‘cracking’ the sky.

Last night was no exception and for once I had the time to grab the camera and see if I could finally capture some of the beauty.

And somehow I fluked it as the image below shows!

Saigon strike, May 3, 2012.

This is a real photograph (Photoshopped only to balance the colours and contrast). No trickery or superimposing. (For some reason on WordPress the image looks blurred onscreen – but if you click on it you’ll see it clearly, I promise).

Modern buildings like Bitexco Tower – like comercial aircraft – are equipped with lightning conductors to ensure if they get hit there is no damage to the electrical systems. But it sure looks spectacular if you’re lucky enough to capture the moment on camera.

Some people are scared of thunder, others of lightning. I was once staying in a hotel room high above Marina Bay Singapore when an electrical storm hit. My partner at the time lept out of her chair and hurriedly closed the curtains. I was gobsmacked!

Why did you do that, I asked? “Because I’m scared.”

Of what I could never deduce, but I immediately squeezed between the heavy hotel curtains and the windows and enjoyed the show for the next 20 minutes.

Last night over Ho Chi Minh City was a far more enjoyable show.

And afterwards – these storms are usually short, sharp and spectacular – as I headed into town on the back of a motorcycle for dinner, it was cool and fresh and for the first time all day I didn’t like I was breaking out in a sweat.

Roll on the Rainy Season and the entertainment it brings with it!

Above is another shot from the same ‘show’.

Apr15

Lunching with the toys, sleeping in the kitchen

Posted on by
Standard
Lunching with the toys, sleeping in the kitchen

Shopping or dining in Saigon exposes one to opposite extremes of the customer service experience – often in just a single day.

At this point, I should divulge (for those who don’t know me outside the blogosphere) that I’ve spent more than a decade observing, writing about and photographing retail stores all over the world – that’s my day job. So I figure by now I can recognise good customer service when I experience it. And bad.

I’m a regular customer at Highlands, my favourite of a fairly limited offer of espresso-style coffee chains here. At Highlands one can experience the best and worst of Saigon service – sometimes in the same store.

At Vincom Highlands, where I am a regular, some of the staff know me well enough to just check my order without offering the menu (although the new menu this month caused confusion when I decided to indulge in pancakes with strawberries only to discover they’re no longer made – at least my doctor will be pleased). One or two will often give me two or three extra of those yummy little complimentary cookies with my cafe latte, making me feel special and more inclined to return.

But this weekend, I had the opposite service experience at the Saigon Centre Highlands, probably the city’s busiest.

A smiling young male takes my order: a tall cafe latte hot and a croque monsieur – with an egg on top. He sets off to arrange it and I resume writing my blog (the next instalment).

Several minutes later, about the time I would be expecting my coffee to arrive, he returns, this time holding an order pad. “Excuse me sir, can I check your order?”

“Sure,” I say and wait for him to speak. But wait, this is in fact his way of conveying he has forgotten my order and wants me not to check it but to repeat it. So I do.

“OK,” he confirms. “One cafe latte tall. Hot. And one croque monsieur.”

“Yes, with an egg.”

“An egg?”

“Yes.”

He looks confused.

“An egg,” I repeat yet again. Fried. On top”.

I am confused. After all, this dish has been on Highlands’ menu since I arrived here four months ago.

So I quickly open a new tab on my laptop, type egg in the address bar and Google takes a few seconds to display some images of eggs. I point to one of a fried egg on the screen.

“Yes, I know. Egg”. I feel chastised. Perhaps I was, as 10 minutes later my croque monsieur arrives. Without an egg. I gave up.

Hey at least this guy was awake! Well, OK, ambulatory.

The grainy image below was taken on my iPhone one day in Vincom when I was looking for some cooking implements. Fortunately I was not seeking a new kitchen.

But this is an all too common sight in Vietnam: store staff asleep behind the counters, huddled together watching sitcoms on laptops – sometimes at full volume! – or chatting animatedly about their weekend, often while you’re standing confused in the middle of their store trying to catch their diverted attention for some guidance.

Sometimes they’ll be eating their lunch.

Sometimes they’ll do that in the middle of the store. On the floor. In an aisle between stock displays.

I kid you not! Several weeks ago I was in one of the toy shops in Vincom Centre selecting something for my baby niece’s first birthday. I turned to walk down an aisle only to find it blocked by one of the store staff. He had placed a sheet of cardboard on the floor, unwrapped his bowls of food and proceeded to enjoy his lunch.

I couldn’t believe my eyes! If this was a shop house in a backstreet of District 5 or a Sari Sari in Manila, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But this is in the most modern (well, for another month or two at least) shopping centre in downtown Saigon, a western-style mall…

In my western experiences store staff are forbidden to eat or drink food in front of the customer. It’s considered impolite.

There are two main factors driving the lack of service culture in retailing in Saigon: firstly, labour is cheap and store staff are usually paid little more than a survival salary. Workers prefer to work in an air conditioned store environment to a fan-cooled clothing factory, so they might covet a job in a shop. But retailing is not exactly considered a career here.

Secondly, training is evidently non-existent.

By good fortune more than anything else, Vietnamese-run retailers might occasionally hire staff with their own instinctive abilities that make them stand out above their colleagues: people who smile at customers, for example. Western run retailers – like the owners of L’usine off Dong Khoi – will recruit only staff who know how to smile and make the customer feel important. It’s called engagement and engagement is what makes occasional customers loyal customers – and ambassadors for the store.

But consider this experience from the Geox shoe store in Saigon Centre: I walk in, my attention caught by a pair of official Red Bull Racing team sports shoes (I’m a Formula One addict and a mark Webber fan). I seek my size, but they don’t have it in store. So I try on a pair one size larger just in case – nope, they definitely don’t fit. At this point, the store staff were ready to let me walk out of the shop.

But I am very keen to buy these shoes if I can find a pair which fit. So I ask if the store has other branches in Saigon.

Yes, they do. In the Parkson department store on Le Than Ton.

Does he know if they’d have my size in stock?

Not sure. No surprise there, but it’s 2012 and I’m sure both stores have a phone…

Good customer service would have seen the guy offer to phone another branch and see if they had my size in stock well before I thought to ask him to.

Excellent customer service would have been to suggest I have a coffee at the cafe next door while they had the shoes brought across town on a motorbike – they would have impressed with the service, achieved a sale and had me singing their praises to anyone who would listen (or read!). And a motorbike courier from Parkson on Le Thon Tan to the Saigon Centre would have cost less than one US dollar – to achieve a sale of a pair of shoes worth around $200!

Saigon is becoming home to more and more expats, not to mention the growing ranks of overseas educated Vietnamese returning home having been exposed to many different ways of the world. In years to come, consumers will be demanding higher and higher levels of customer service and retail execution.

The challenge for local operators will be to learn from abroad, improve their customer service offer, recruit better and train better. In doing so, perhaps retailing will become a more serious career option for many Vietnamese.

At the very least we should all be able to shop in stores without tripping over staff sitting on the floor eating their lunch!

Mar18

A late night kiss…

Posted on by
Standard
A late night kiss…

One recent night, very late, I was walking through the city centre heading home when I came across an almost surreal sight.

Picture an empty intersection – no-one moving, not a single car or motorcycle (a rare event in itself in Saigon!). Empty but for two Vinasun Toyota taxi wagons locked in a late night kiss. It was eerily quiet and I felt like I’d walked onto a movie set. If I was in another continent, I’d have expected to see a tumbleweed rolling through the frame at any moment.

So here they were: two vehicles with mashed front quarters interlocked, neither having yielded to the other at the intersection, each calling the other’s bluff until it was too late for one to back down.

There was a small group of people standing in the shadows of an awning on one corner discussing the scene. I’m not sure if the two Vinasun drivers were amongst them: it’s possible they were unconscious. Not from the collision, which wasn’t really that serious, but from the punch-up locals tell me inevitably ensues when these highly competitive taxi drivers come to vehicular blows…
One could write a short book about taxis in Saigon. They have their good points and their bad.

On the bad side there are a lot of shark operators here, though their fleets are thankfully small compared to the good ones. These cowboys are probably the single biggest cause of tourist antagonism in the whole city – marginally ahead of complaints from those visitors who don’t understand that pedestrian crossings in Saigon have no common purpose with the identical looking ones back home…

On the good side taxis are incredibly cheap. Flagfall with the biggest operator – Vinasun – has just risen ‘sharply’ from 10,500 dong to 11,500. That’s 52 Australian cents in total. I forget the flagfall in New York, but in Sydney, the world’s seventh most expensive city in which to live, the standard rate is $3.50. That’s how much you pay just to climb in the cab. And the taxi operators are pleading to raise the prices further!

That said, to a Vietnamese person, taxis are expensive. Locals compare a 30,000 to 40,000 dong fare from my apartment in District 4 to downtown (five to 10 minutes depending on traffic) to a 4000 dong flat fare on an air conditioned bus, a ticket that takes you literally half way across the city. Again the conversion: A$1.36 to $1.81 verses 18 cents. No, that is not a typing error! 18 cents across town by bus! And they’re near-new air conditioned Hyundais (unlike half of Sydney’s 20-something year old rusting fleet).

But back to the late night kiss. The small group of witnesses and, one assumes, the two drivers, were waiting for the police to arrive. But the scene seemed so inevitable. It was an outcome I could not believe I had not seen earlier in my time here. Many times as a passenger in a taxi darting about the downtown District 1 I’ve marvelled at how taxis have missed other taxis. Or motorbikes. Or bicycles. Or pedestrians. Some drivers have respect for their passengers, other road users and the infinitely flexible road rules which apply here. But not all…

Others behave like reincarnated Kamikaze pilots determined to achieve their mission of getting their passenger from A to B with no regard for anyone else on the road or elsewhere.

In the most hair raising of many ‘moments’ in taxis here, one freshly qualified lunatic was in a race against another taxi approaching from the other direction, both turning into the same lane. Fair in the middle of said lane – on one of those strips of painted white lines – was a solitary pedestrian. Looking with rapidly widening eyes at these two taxi racers fighting for the patch of seal he was occupying.

In the end all three stopped. My taxi on the wrong side of the median strip blocking traffic coming in the opposite direction. The other taxi’s front bumper a bee’s-width from the pedestrian by now paralysed with fear. But the other taxi had won the right to be first in line for the lane when the whitened pedestrian cleared the way.

My taxi driver had not finished. He reversed back and raced off after the other taxi – which I recall was from the same company – tooting his horn and raising his fist then at the next intersection, then cutting him off while turning from Nguyen Hue onto Ton Duc Thang. More gesturing, tooting and general teenage-style aggression.

Soon our taxis took different paths, but my guy was by now well fired up. He cut off a motorcyclist he should have given way to on my right, whose handlebars nudged the taxi. He swore (I assume – I don’t know enough Vietnamese to be sure but his lips moved while he blasted his horn and struggled to stay upright.)

When we stopped at my apartment I nearly swore, but settled for a glare, well aware this guy had anger management issues and watches enough American movies to understand four letter words in English… He did not get a tip…

Of course not all taxi drivers are idiots like this. To drive a car in Ho Chi Minh you have to be a little aggressive otherwise you’d never get anywhere. But that does not mean you have to drive dangerously.

Another issue with taxis is their route knowledge. Ho Chi Minh is a large, spread out city and no-one expects every driver to know every street in every district. But that’s why God invented maps. And more recently the GPS.

Alas, taxis here come equipped with neither.

Every Vinasun Toyota wagon comes fitted with an LCD screen playing movie previews, advertisements, clips from a European ‘Candid Camera’ style show and other things to amuse passengers in the back. But not even the simplest of GPS device.

Last night I set off from home to a restaurant in District 6 to attend my cute niece’s first birthday party. I had the address on my iPhone in its very own Note page. The driver read it, nodded, smiled and off we went. (Thao was with me, so language was not a problem, this time). Eventually we get to D6 and pull over to the side of the road. So the driver can get out and ask directions, as the meter ran on.

He gets back in the car and Thao translates the good news: we’re just five minutes away.

Five minutes later we come to a stop. Not at the restaurant, but so the driver can again get out and ask directions… Turns out our destination was just around the corner.

Two nights earlier it took a consultation between three taxi drivers outside my apartment tower to work out how to get to a function venue hosting an Internations event, just outside D1 in D3. It was at the Ly Club on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia – one of the main routes from the airport to downtown. About three blocks from the popular Barbecue Garden restaurant. Hardly an obscure address.

So why did my driver then take me half way to the airport before eventually understanding my rapid gesturing urging him to do a U-turn and head back to the city. A trip that should have cost 50,000 dong had climbed to 136,000 on the meter. I handed him 100,000 to save an argument and he accepted, apologising as best he could.

One thing about Ho Chi Minh City… you learn not to take life too seriously.

For every lunatic taxi driver there is a pleasant, friendly one who tries to engage in conversation.

For every driver who can’t read a road map and fruitlessly tries to demonstrate navigational skills he lacks, there’s on who knows a shortcut I’d never have discovered (like the guy who circled Bitexco Tower this morning to get me right outside Saigon Centre without taking one  congested main street).

As for the late night kiss: Bent and buckled taxis are everywhere around Ho Chi Minh City. But the good thing is, the roads are so congested that if I am ever a passenger in a taxi involved in such an accident, it’s unlikely I’ll be injured. Because even the lunatic racing his colleague wasn’t driving fast enough to cause any real damage – except to the hapless pedestrian of course…

Feb5

The taste of Red Velvet

Posted on by
Standard
The taste of Red Velvet
Confession time: before moving to Ho Chi Minh City I used to consider cupcakes the most over rated, boring food fad of all time.

Mouthwatering, no? Wait til you taste it!

I could never understand why cupcake shops were sprouting up all over downtown Sydney and its better-heeled suburbs. Frozen yoghurt I got, macarons, (a more recent craze) I loved. But cupcakes, in my view were destined to be the shortest-lived foodie craze of all time.

Until, as I said, I arrived in Vietnam.

In than a dozen visits to Ho Chi Minh’s best coffee shop L’usine  I got used to watching customers of all ethnicities oohing and aahing over the colourful cupcake collection at the counter trying to make up their mind which one to try. Then loudly exclaiming for every other diner’s benefit how delicious they were (I now know the word ‘yum’ in at least three different languages!).

It took very little persuasion to enlist my sweet toothed friend Thao to put one to the taste test with our flat whites (yes, any Aussies or Kiwis reading this – L’usine serves a flat white as good as any you’d find back home).

Thao chose a Double Chocolate. I was bemused by one called Red Velvet. This turned out to be the most aptly named food of all time because inside it was red and it had a texture of velvet. Soft velvet which melts on your tongue – just like every other flavour available as I have since discovered for your benefit through extensive research (it’s OK, readers, you deserve it!).

My frequent mid-morning workspace...

L’usine’s cupcakes come from a local business Cupcakes by Sweet and Sour whose owner and founder Barbie has a bakery in An Phu where the majority of her daily production run is sold. (Address: Thao Dien D2. Ava Residences. 40/4 Nguyen Van Huong; Open from 10am-6pm.)

A website is coming soon, she tells me, but for the meantime, there’s a great Facebook page with lots of photos and news about special recipes (there’s even a Barbie flavour cupcake).

Having tried Sweet and Sour’s cupcakes at L’usine I now know I got cupcakes all wrong: or rather I must previously have tried all the wrong ones (one delicious cupcake home-cooked by a Sydney colleague being an exception).

The Barbie (Image from Cupcakes by Sweet and Sour Facebook page).

It can’t be that hard to make a cupcake look delicious with colourful toppings, iced decorations and patterned paper wrappers. It’s a lot harder to make it light and airy – fluffy even – in texture, yet tasty and fulfilling. In my past experience it was impossible to achieve all three at once – until Barbie proved me wrong.
After my conversion to Cupcake worshipper I have been through most of Sweet and Sour’s flavours. Red Velvet remains my favourite, but Strawberry Velvet, Vanilla, Lemon Drops and Double Chocolate (very rich; guaranteed to delight any chocoholic) all come very close, depending on the mood of the day. And they cost – at L’usine – just 50,000 dong each (which translates today to A$2.20).

Presentation is everything with cupcakes and Sweet and Sour offers cute boxes for four for those who want to take them away to share with friends or colleagues – or present as a gift. Choose four brightly-iced cupcakes and when boxed it’s like looking into a kaleidoscope.

Barbie has a core list of mainstream flavours, to which other limited editions are added form time to time. The other mainstream varieties are Classic Carrot, Black and White, Caramel Bombs, Choco Coco, Classic Birthday and Roasted Banana.

More are under development she tells me.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m off for a flat white.

And the taste of Red Velvet…

Footnote: Finding L’usine can be a challenge for newcomers to Ho Chi Minh City – it’s not uncommon to see bemused tourists holding travel guides scratching their heads! The easiest way: Find the Caravelle Hotel. From the side entrance to the Caravelle (the one through its shopping arcade) take the pedestrian crossing across Dong Khoi St and turn left. After about 20 metres you’ll come to an alleyway full of paintings, a sort of artist’s market. Walk through until you reach the motorcycle parking. If you look above, you’ll see a big sign not visible from the street pointing you to your right. Follow the sign, climb the stairs and walk along the balcony until you smell the fresh coffee!


Jan22

Torture chamber or fitness lounge?

Posted on by
Standard
One of the down sides of living in Ho Chi Minh – or pretty much anywhere in southeast Asia for that matter – is the lack of opportunity for walking.

It’s not that there is nowhere to walk to, it’s just that the humidity is such that when you arrive where you’re walking to, everyone assumes you’ve swum there.

So where I might easily have walked up to an hour a day in Sydney, usually in the cool of the evening to and from the city for dinner, walking here is usually restricted to roaming around air conditioned shopping malls or a short venture to local shophouses for freshly baked French sticks or dragon fruit.

The end result is an unfortunate contraction of Saigon Swell… best described as a rapidly enlarging belly for which in a city full of delicious food, cheap beer and other readily available diet-stretching indulgences there seems little panacea but for more exercise.

That’s how I ended up at the counter of a brand new gym, splurging a whole 3.5 million lucre on a three month all inclusive membership (it’s the only type they sell). Don’t panic, that’s exactly AU$160.43 plus point one of a cent, according to that day’s cross rate. (Mathematical skills, iPhones or pocket calculators are essential here where one Aussie dollar buys you a whole 21,816 dong which, incidentally, is enough to buy a cold Tiger at Happy Hour at a local establishment, or gives you change for two HD quality digitally copied Hollywood movies in the downtown tourist shops…)

For those who know me well, I have a reputation for regarding gyms as one of the free market’s most bizarre inventions: a large building where people can go and strap themselves into sophisticated torture devices and pretend they enjoy stretching, compressing, bending and bruising almost every part of their anatomy. And yet rendition is a crime (Oh of course, that’s not voluntary; right…).

Anyway, rest assured there will be no such torture devices wrapped around me – my intention was purely to find an air conditioned location to walk, cycle or run with a subsequent shower close by rather than be seen with large dark patches all over my shirt…

California Fitness & Yoga opened shortly before Christmas in a converted waterfront warehouse two blocks from my apartment. Which means every piece of equipment from the torture devices and treadmills to the shower booths and kit lockers is brand spanking new. Some of the machines have barely been unwrapped.

Noting the number of expats working on the site and expecting the same sort of hard sell techniques employed by Australian gyms, I made it clear I was only looking to use cardio equipment (in layman’s terms – stationery cycles and running/walking machines) but the manager, Ryan from Seattle, whose bulging muscles made him look a little like a young Arnie Schwarzenegger, gave me a tour of the place nevertheless. Did I say place? I should have said Palace.

This palace is half gym, half lounge bar. Besides the rows of gleaming machines waiting to torture the excess fat off your belly there are gleaming glass-walled studios for yoga classes or pilates – even a pole dancing room with rows of shiny vertical pipes.

“Are you into pole dancing?,” asks Ryan. I must look bemused. Seriously, how is an average male supposed to answer a question like that, when asked by another male? He changes the topic to kick boxing…

Near this room is a lounge. Yes, a lounge, complete with paisley prints on the wall, comfy sofas and coffee tables. All that seems to be missing is the chiller filled with racks of Champagne.

Downstairs, however, there IS a bar. A juice bar. Where a couple of jaded expats are perched, seemingly in recovery mode. No espresso I am assuming. And no vodka shots to blend with the cranberry juice but, hey, this IS a gym I remind myself. It just feels like something far more relaxing…

Back upstairs Ryan shows me the sophisticated screens on the stationary cycles. This is where it can actually be fun! If you speak Vietnamese there’s a dozen local TV channels to select from. If not, you can surf the internet, watch videos on YouTube, play Soduku or other puzzle games, or plug your iPod or USB device in and listen to or watch whatever you like. At any time you can pause and check the distance you’ve cycled, the number of calories burned off and your top speed. Even check your heart rate.

I truly am impressed – very much a first for a gym visit.

Two bikes along from where Ryan is demonstrating all this to me a cute young local girl wrapped in impossibly tight pink Lycra is setting a cracking pace on a reclining exercycle. She smiles at me and for a moment I feel much better about my flabby physique. Until the sudden realisation it’s a smile of sympathy… I suck my breath in, fruitlessly trying to hide the Saigon Swell, but the millisecond long window of opportunity to impress has long since closed.

So that’s how I discovered a gym and came to part with a whole 3.5 million dong.

As gyms go this is far from ordinary and who knows, it may just make for a more comfortable means of toning up a little.

Meanwhile, I have this nagging feeling the gym bunny in the pink Lycra might just be part of a carefully plotted conspiracy to get us expat guys to commit to memberships…