This page has a selection of topics which visitors have discussed with us and which we hope will help you
to begin to understand some of the differences between Vietnamese and Western ways. Some of the points offer
you positive aspects of society here, some warn you of what you might feel are problems. You can jump to the paragraph of your choice from these headings:
Most people don't get far in speaking Vietnamese. There are two big hurdles: the six possible tones that a set of letters may have, and the personal pronouns which are based on your relationship with the other person - mimicking a family - and not on individuals, so for each person you address, you need a different word for "I". Together these two make opening your mouth difficult at first! Fortunately Vietnamese is written phonetically in Roman script, it is very regular so if you learn the rules you can read aloud with confidence, although with utter incomprehension.
As everywhere, English is the second language here. But it is as hard for a Vietnamese person to learn English as for us to learn Vietnamese, so the level of success is often rather poor, and you may find you have not realised that someone is speaking in English to you. In Ha Noi plenty of people speak some English, but beyond the big cities such people can be few and far between.
Shoes off when you go into a house or temple or long distance bus - so wear ones that come on and off easily and don't need to be laced up. The Vietnamese are amazingly agile at taking shoes off, you hardly notice they have done it; follow people and do what they do. The ground is held to be dirty, people don't sit on it, they squat down, or take their shoes off and sit on them.
In modern restaurants and cafes you will find chairs and tables, on the pavements minute stools, but in private houses you may find yourselves eating sitting on mats on the floor in the traditional manner cross legged. As usual the Vietnamese are relaxed about this and if you sit sideways or kneel they will just think it is funny and will not mind. All eating and cooking is done with chopsticks and you will not see a fork outside the most westernised of restaurants, if you can't manage chopsticks bring a fork with you. Spoons are always available.
There are less in the way of spiders, cockroaches and slugs in Vietnam than where I live in the UK. But when you do see them they can be extra large. Snakes are very rarely seen except on a dinner plate. The only problem for some people is that mice and rats are common especially in Ha Noi. In the modern accommodation in which you are likely to stay they are very unusual, but on the streets, at night, they are common once people have gone away. The 14 second clip of film below shows an animal you are unlikely to see - a scorpion.
Ha Noi is mostly asleep by 10pm and gets up just before it gets light. Breakfast can be hard to find after 8.30. Most people eat lunch at 11.30am and an evening meal at about 6pm. Again wanting to eat at times well after these in the Provinces can prove difficult. The clock time here is 7 hours ahead of GMT. It stays the same all year. It is bad travelling east for many people as you suddenly have to get to sleep 7 hours earlier, but not much of a problem travelling west - it just makes a long day.
Ha Noi is like any international city - there are all sorts of people living different lives. Once away from there you will find the drinking habits often unattractive. Women only drink in moderation, the men make up for this by drinking fast and furiously by Scottish standards. The normal drink is home made vodka which most families make themselves; there are no restrictions on this activity. This is usually very rough and is only drunk to get drunk. Drinking starts early, it is common to have a bottle of vodka at breakfast - bottles being a third of a litre. There are a whole set of customs around drinking which are not good, and induce people to drink more than they wish or should. Bottled beer is universally available, and on the streets of Ha Noi the draught beer is excellent and costs about 25p a glass. Wine is unusual, but the Da Lat product can be excellent, you will not find wine outside the big towns. Whisky (from many countries!) is often available.
Families usually share beds and so these are normally large by our standards. More up-market hotels will have conventional twin bedded rooms with western sized beds. Unmarried people of the same sex often sleep in the same bed - and it is purely for the purpose of sleeping. Normal houses do not have separate bedrooms, (although a separate area may be made available for newly wedded couples) so conducting oneself discreetly is the rule.
There are a range of types of police. The ones you will see most are the traffic police in buff coloured uniforms. They have quotas to fill and stop people for various offences until they are filled. They will not want to be bothered with you as a westerner. There are local police in each village who do not wear uniforms and to whom your passport details will be taken each evening (that is why the hotels need your passport to fill in copious forms - something you can volunteer to do for them if you really want to!). In the towns there are offices where this happens. Then there are the police who deal with the residency of foreigners, again you are unlikely to meet these people in a short stay. The normal army people wear green; white for special army people.
Vietnam is a socialist republic. Like China it is rapidly changing and the views of people who have not been in the country for 20 years are often well out of line with reality. It is not a western multi-party state modelled on particular western lines. The democratic processes are much more complex than in many places. These processes have been models for a modern democracy involving individual citizens in very meaningful ways, and not just the 20% that can be bothered to go and vote occasionally as in some western 'democracies'. However, some of these excellent procedures have become moribund in recent years. The views of people in the south and north are still rather different because of the very different modern histories, this website takes a northern point of view as that is where you will be traveling. While the socialist aspiration is to help all citizens achieve what they are capable of, the crippling effects of the French and American wars against the country have meant that decades have been needed to raise the citizens here back to the middle income status they now enjoy, so there has been too little money for health, education and infrastructure.
Two important points about Vietnam's long history are firstly that following the Geneva convention of the mid 50s Vietnam was divided into two parts and remained so for 20 years until the Americans withdrew. However, that was a formative period for many middle aged westerners who do not realise how artificial and short lived that division was. The vote on the countries future that that convention called for was never allowed by anti-democratic forces in the south, despite repeatedly being sought by the northern government of the time. The other vital bit of history to hold onto is that the Chinese occupied much of Vietnam for 1,000 years until the mid 900s, this has left a deep cultural stamp on the country, and a deep suspicion of the intentions of the big northern 'brother'!
Here as in most countries of the world corruption is a problem, while in the UK it is kept very discreetly hidden among friends in high places, here it is much more commonly in evidence. This is new, the Vietnamese were rightly proud of their un-corrupt governance in the past. As a visitor you are unlikely to encounter any aspect of this, and if you do, we would like to steer you towards first devoting your energy to help reduce corruption in your own country.
The treatment of animals is not good. If you do mind, you will either have to not come, or not look. Animals are regarded as food and that includes cats, horses and dogs. Most animals are for working and eating: dogs for guarding, cats for rat catching, horses for pulling carts, buffalo and cows for ploughing. There is a noticeable dearth of animals in the countryside compared with the splendours of India and this is really simply because they have all been eaten. Almost everything is eaten in one way or another here.
Most foreigners find the traffic in Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh city impressive if not actually intimidating. It is not a good idea to assume that you will be able to drive here - it is a very skilful ability and very different from in the west. Essentially the traffic moves slowly, but has few rules to which everyone adheres. For instance you may be here a little while before you are convinced that the traffic drives on the right-hand side - well shall we say a preponderance does. There are a lot of accidents, about 12,000 deaths a year, so a Jeep rather than a motorbike or ordinary car is no bad place to be!
As with other far eastern societies age gives higher status. If someone is older than you, you should use two hands in dealing with them - as when you pass or receive something. You will notice how young people touch the operating arm with the other hand when they want to be polite, but informal. You should let older people start eating first, and you should allow them to talk when they wish. Try not to pass immediately in front of people, go round behind them, it is considered rude to cut between people or people and food. These are things to do if you want to be a polite Vietnamese person - you don't have to be that, and no one will expect you to know what to do.
You can read the weather reports on the internet. But it is fair to say that the weather is not northern Vietnam's most endearing feature. In the winter it is too cold, in the summer too hot. And always too humid. Ha Noi is the worst offender, only a few feet above sea level, but a 100 miles form the sea, the air sits perfectly still at exactly the same temperature for weeks on end, 24 hours a day. The humidity, lack of air movement and lack of change through the day, all make it a good candidate for the world's worst climate. It is dry or nearly so from October till the end of March, (but still humid) then the rain falls heavily as it does in the tropics, making driving impossible, but it is all over, usually in minutes, rather than hours. The heavy rain causes landslips which close many remoter roads in the wettest months for periods of days to weeks.
Vietnam is a safe country, there is very little crime against foreigners; the same report of a bag snatch near Hoan Kiem Lake is heard again and again. There is of course opportunistic petty theft, as in most places, so leaving valuables lying around, as one might in Iceland for instance, is not on. But you can go where you like when you like as a single woman, and not have to worry - not even about being pestered. You may be stared at a little away from Ha Noi, but that is the worst that will happen, and if you smile back you will be greeted with that great big generous Vietnamese smile in return.
Names from the east always puzzle Westerners - we are quite convinced that ours is the only possible way of naming people. So much so that forms are issued by international companies, and indeed governments, that seem to make it impossible for over half the world's population to respond. In most countries the personal name is more important in daily use than the family name. And the title goes with the personal name, not the family name. The other complication is the order of the names. Again in most countries the family name comes first and the personal name last. An example close to home would be Han's name: Mai Huu Han. His father's family are Mai, and Huu is an old name from previous generations, while Han is his given name, and the name by which he is addressed. So it goes 'Nephew Han' if I am talking to, or about him, not 'Nephew Mai', and so also it comes out that he would call me, in that good traditional Indian way, 'Mr Colin' not 'Mr Brydon'. However, two warnings. Because people in Vietnam know that westerners get confused, they may carefully reverse the order of their names especially to help you! Unless you can recognise a family name versus and personal name you may be wrong footed. And unless you are feeling brave you will not tackle the titles. Han is of an age where he is nephew to me, but for you he might be younger brother, older brother, or grandson. And that is just the tip of the pronoun iceberg on which intentions of leaning to speak Vietnamese get so easily wrecked.
In recent years, in the west, we have come to take electricity for granted. That luxury is not available in Vietnam. Even without the explosion in building factories and houses there is an acute shortage of power. While there is an effort made to protect key institutions such as hospitals and embassies - so in Ha Noi there are few cuts at present - there are many other areas that experience considerable disruption. Often, but not always, notice is given of a cut. The lack of fans and air conditioning is not a problem in the winter, but in the summer can make life miserable. Hotels, offices and wealthier citizens have their own generators. One key side effect, that may reach you, is that in their efforts to share out what power there is, the authorities reduce the voltage, often drastically, before finally cutting the supply. Many appliances are sensitive to this reduction. Computers used to be so effected, but what is still a problem is that routers often re-set themselves when the voltage fluctuates greatly. The only remedy is a visit from the internet provider! Three or four times a month a guy has to come round to our house (and go to the houses of 100s of others) and put the connections back to their proper settings. So a day or two of no electricity can well be followed by a day or two of waiting for a technician. If you have difficulty communicating maybe it can be a reminder that here, as yet, people are using a fraction of the amount of power we take for granted in affluent countries.
Last, but by no means least, small rooms or their lack. Lavatories in most hotels, restaurants and public buildings are cleaner and better maintained than in the UK - hardly difficult. Vietnamese women do not like the smell men, all too easily, leave and don't sympathise with their western counterparts' tolerance. To this end modern lavatories are equipped with high pressure hoses for you to clean the bowl and surrounding floor when you have finished. If you are used to the hoses in the middle east for washing yourself you may at first be confused, if there is no paper available then actually this pressured water can be used - although with care! Where there are no western toilets matters are different. Most houses in the country have a privy, like we had in this country a 100 years ago. This will be a construction over a pit: no water and take your own paper. The smell is bad, but as it is outside tolerable. Men urinate freely anywhere; buses stop the men randomly face the void and the women nip to the nearest bush for cover. Tribal women feel no such inhibition, which can be disconcerting for timid Western souls.