DAY 8
The morning started as usual. We had breakfast and got on
the bus to go to Vietnamese class. Today we learned how to bargain and barter.
I actually felt really confident with what we had learned. Right after class we
went to the Ben Thanh Market.
The Ben Thanh Market is a huge market where you can haggle for prices and get really cheap stuff. To me it was more about winning a haggling battle than actually buying something. I created a method in which I would go to a vendor ask him/her what the price of a specific item was and then simply leave and find another vendor selling the same product and demand a close to 3 times lower than the price the other vendor offered. If they said no I’d simply start walking away and let them chase me down and sell me the item at the price I wanted in the end. It was fun. I made a woman cry though while I was bartering. That was sad. But I got the shirt for $1.50 so whatever.
After buying some really cool goodies for me, my girlfriend, and my mom, my friends and I went to eat lunch. We ate some Pho, which is like the Vietnamese signature dish apparently. It’s like soup but way better.
After the market we went to visit a Vietnamese temple and a memorial site where a Buddhist monk died in protest. Honestly, this was a really cool experience. Their temples, or pagodas as they call them are very similar to Hindu temples. I was fascinated to see the connections between the two ways of life here.
The Ben Thanh Market is a huge market where you can haggle for prices and get really cheap stuff. To me it was more about winning a haggling battle than actually buying something. I created a method in which I would go to a vendor ask him/her what the price of a specific item was and then simply leave and find another vendor selling the same product and demand a close to 3 times lower than the price the other vendor offered. If they said no I’d simply start walking away and let them chase me down and sell me the item at the price I wanted in the end. It was fun. I made a woman cry though while I was bartering. That was sad. But I got the shirt for $1.50 so whatever.
After buying some really cool goodies for me, my girlfriend, and my mom, my friends and I went to eat lunch. We ate some Pho, which is like the Vietnamese signature dish apparently. It’s like soup but way better.
After the market we went to visit a Vietnamese temple and a memorial site where a Buddhist monk died in protest. Honestly, this was a really cool experience. Their temples, or pagodas as they call them are very similar to Hindu temples. I was fascinated to see the connections between the two ways of life here.
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