Having now been in Tra Vinh for about a month and a half, I have settled in a routine, we have become regulars at some food places, I can buy things from the marker with relative ease, navigate traffic and so on. So this weekend it was an interesting experience to travel to Can Tho, the Mekong Delta's biggest city overnight.
After checking into the hotel and stuffing ourselves with Indian food (oh the advantages of big cities) we went to a pretty typical tourist market to do a bit of shopping and browsing. As in most tourist destinations, the sellers' focus was on the sale. Never mind what you actually wanted to buy, if you showed even the slightest bit of interest in something, bam there was someone going "sister, many pattern, many colour!" Having been to many touristy destinations before, these sellers weren't really aggressive but it led me to reflect on the judgements that tourists can, and do, draw from these limited interactions with "locals". I do not claim to understand Vietnamese culture, not in the slightest, but I have met so many warm and friendly people here who aren't just trying to hawk their goods.
Tourism is a catch-22 in this way. Often people travel in the search for "authentic" experiences of far off cultures and all they find is a bunch of people that want to sell them goods made in China. At the same time, it is Western influence and tourism that enable these types of markets to exist. There is undeniably elements of Tra Vinh that are Westernized, or globalized, but in decidedly Vietnamese ways.
As I wandered around the market I also reflected how much amusement my three best phrases in Vietnamese ("bao nhieu" - how much?, "mac qua" - too expensive!, and "com tut" - something along the lines of 'bad' or 'i don't like', also spelled incorrectly.) generated. I wondered if the laughs were due more to my butchering of a very complex tonal language or the surprise of this apparent tourist who could ask "how much" and haggle in Vietnamese.
After checking into the hotel and stuffing ourselves with Indian food (oh the advantages of big cities) we went to a pretty typical tourist market to do a bit of shopping and browsing. As in most tourist destinations, the sellers' focus was on the sale. Never mind what you actually wanted to buy, if you showed even the slightest bit of interest in something, bam there was someone going "sister, many pattern, many colour!" Having been to many touristy destinations before, these sellers weren't really aggressive but it led me to reflect on the judgements that tourists can, and do, draw from these limited interactions with "locals". I do not claim to understand Vietnamese culture, not in the slightest, but I have met so many warm and friendly people here who aren't just trying to hawk their goods.
Tourism is a catch-22 in this way. Often people travel in the search for "authentic" experiences of far off cultures and all they find is a bunch of people that want to sell them goods made in China. At the same time, it is Western influence and tourism that enable these types of markets to exist. There is undeniably elements of Tra Vinh that are Westernized, or globalized, but in decidedly Vietnamese ways.
As I wandered around the market I also reflected how much amusement my three best phrases in Vietnamese ("bao nhieu" - how much?, "mac qua" - too expensive!, and "com tut" - something along the lines of 'bad' or 'i don't like', also spelled incorrectly.) generated. I wondered if the laughs were due more to my butchering of a very complex tonal language or the surprise of this apparent tourist who could ask "how much" and haggle in Vietnamese.
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