This photo was taken by Chợ Bến Thành, the famous Ben Thanh Market. It's a five-minute walk from my hotel. It's also smack bang between the two main tourist areas, so it's lousy with tourists, as Holden Caulfield might say. It's also an actual market for actual Vietnamese, so it is a busy market indeed.
If you walk in through the front you have to wind your way through narrow passages lined with stalls selling clothes and souvenirs. It's such a competitive environment that merchants will literally grab you by the arm or shirt and try to pull you into their stall. Fun stuff.
The smart thing to do is go through the back entrance. Here is where the food stalls are. It's not quite as crowded and aggressive.
One of the joys of Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia is street food. When you see a woman pushing a metal cart down the street what you're looking at is a restaurant on wheels. She'll go to her usual spot and unpack the cart. Little metal tables and tiny plastic stools are arranged on the sidewalk. By tiny I mean the seat itself is the size of a napkin and maybe eight inches high.
The kitchen is unpacked. Most vendors sell one thing: fried rice, noodle soup, etc. It normally takes me forever to decide what to order in a restaurant so I actually like the lack of choices. You get fried noodles with beef ... or you go somewhere else.
Tourists and locals have concerns about the sanitary conditions, and understandably so. Glasses and dishes are washed in plastic tubs right there on the sidewalk. I've never gotten sick (knock on wood) but I know I'm taking my chances.
People who work at surrounding businesses will order from these sidewalk vendors or from nearby restaurants. The women will whip up a batch and deliver it. When finished diners will sometimes return the dishes. Usually they don't. They'll stack the dishes on the sidewalk or, as seen in this photo, in the gutter. Eventually someone will come around and pick them up.
Also in this photo are a tourists buying nước dừa, fresh coconut water. It's yet another example of how the locals put their motorbikes to clever use, in this case by running a drink stand from the back seat.
Wow, do I ever love fresh coconut water. Here you can see where someone has gone to the trouble of whittling it down so that it's easy to handle. They even cut the bottoms flat so they can be stacked, and to make them easier to drink. The price for one of these on the street is usually 5,000 dong, or about 25 cents. Consider all the labor involved in getting these things to market. They have to be collected, transported, sold to vendors and carved. Somehow they can do all that, sell them for a quarter and still make money!
They're not always whittled down to manageable size. Often you'll get the whole coconut. It's like drinking from a bowling ball. But tastier.
Depending on the size of the coconut there might be as much as a quart of water inside. It tastes like coconut, of course, but the flavor is fairly mild. It's coconut water, not coconut milk. It's not like drinking a Mounds bar. There is nothing more refreshing on a hot day. And in this part of the world every day is a hot day!
It's also a great hangover remedy. Not that I've ever needed it for that. People tell me these things. You know how it is.
If you order a coconut at a restaurant they'll usually serve it with a long spoon, too. You use it to scrape the meat off the inside. It's not the hard, chunky coconut meat we're accustomed to back in the US. It has a jelly-like consistency. You drink the water with your meal then eat the meat for dessert! However, if you order coconut in a restaurant it will usually set you back at least 20,000 dong which is -- gasp! -- more than a dollar.
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