You never know if the price is right
(But haggle, haggle, haggle, oi, oi, oi!)

Price fighter Teddy de Burca Jnr. admires the competitive sport of haggling, which is part and parcel of everyday life in Vietnam

I came to Asia wearing sandals, but hanging out in the Bangkok markets I learnt that you had to have your haggle boots on in this fair continent.

The first experiences can be humiliating, in hindsight. You know you looked too keen, “oh my!” you gasped to your partner, “That’s such a cool shirt” she agreed. “How much?” you squeaked. The ‘been-here-seen-this all before’ trader sized you up in an instant and after analysing your enthusiasm, place in the demographic pool, nationality, dress sense, naïve expression and sunburnt nose, he coolly charged you probably about four times the price.
I thought I was smart by saying “oh no you don’t” and knocking a few dollars off the initial quoted price but I still ended up buying it for at least double. After I left there was no high five with his family. He’d seen me coming a mile away and novice western-hagglers are easy pickings.

On arriving in Vietnam, I soon learnt bartering or haggling is a way of life here. At first it seems you get to fight for everything: fruit, xe om fares, rent, electricity bills with your landlord – why I even haggled for oil at a petrol station once; the pump attendant was wearing a handkerchief mask, but I could tell she was smiling when she tried to charge me three times the normal price.
Living here “dat qua” are often the first words you learn, until a Vietnamese friend tells you to say “I’m not a chicken” in Vietnamese, and although you suspect it’s a practical joke and feel pretty stupid saying it in the market, it seems to work.

The locals, if you watch them, are fond of the ‘put the price on the table first’ trick. You might see them pick up a cap then ask how much it is before answering their own question: “VND20,000, phai khong?” for example. This way you’re controlling the haggle, or throwing the first punch, so to speak. The “walk away and expect them to come running after you” trick never really worked for me. It seems invariably sellers are like patient fishermen, she or he knows the big fish will come, sooner or later – sure isn’t one born every minute?

One foreign friend of mine is fond of acting out an entire dialogue. He picks a price he thinks is right, say VND70,000 for a shirt, then he begins, “I’ll give you 35,000 for this”, before answering to himself, “VND35,000? Are you mad? I have a wife and family to feed, it costs VND100,000!”, “VND100,000?” he continues. “You should be wearing a mask you barefaced bandit! I’ll give you VND40,000 and that’s my final offer”, and so on, until he ends by slapping down VND70,000 on the table. Admittedly his success ration is well below 50 per cent, but worth a shot if you don’t mind making a complete spectacle of yourself.

Another foreigner told me he decided to take a Vietnamese colleague along to the cloth market, Cho Hom, on Pho Hue street - just presuming she would know the price, as if all Vietnamese women were born with a price list of fruit, shoes and clothes, swimming around their happy heads. It ended in disaster. He knew he was being overcharged but the Vietnamese colleague foolishly agreed on a price with the trader. He stormed off thinking she was right behind him. When he found her 10 minutes later she was in tears holding the large bag of cloth that he had been haggling for. After he had fled the sellers had – she said – bullied her into buying it.

But despite this sob story (not to mention all the times you were taken to the cleaners) haggling is an art form and a battle to be admired: The opening gambits. The outrageous first price. Your insulting offer in reply. The glowering looks. That feeling of the begrudging respect from the trader as you play hardball. The nods of approval from passers by when you finally score a kilo of mangoes (even though you only wanted one single fruit) for roughly the right price (but not necessarily the right weight).

Despite this, I must admit, increasingly, I find myself hanging around supermarkets and staring at fixed price tags on market streets, but years from now, I hope I can still pull off the gloves and do my “Marvelous Marvin Haggler” routine because sometimes, as we all know, there’s a thrill in not knowing if the price is right.

Hello - is it me you're looking for?

While on holidays Teddy de Burca Jnr. rediscovered the simple joy of a simple hello in the middle of nowhere, before forgetting it ever happened at all

Of course, living in Vietnam it’s inevitable that you will become used to, if not immune to, all the children saying “hello” to you, and all the grown ups who also say, er, “hello”, as you pass them each and everyday, here, there and everywhere.

But you can’t be a happy go luck foreigner all of the time – except for that one guy who we all know who is always happy, yeah, you know the one, he doesn’t even get hangovers he’s so incorrigibly happy-go-lucky – so after a hard day’s work you can’t be blamed for dropping your head, switching into getting-home-mode and ignoring everything around you.

There are after all thousands of foreigners in Vietnam and, therefore, if I alone hear 10 hellos a day that means there are tens of thousands of hellos uttered everyday, which multiplied by 365 is a staggeringly, if not frighteningly, large number of hellos being said every year. So who could blame you for giving up on that word altogether (if so, may I suggest experimenting with an exotic “buon giorno” or a polite “good day to you, sir” instead).

But, if, or when, the city depersonalises you to this extent you should know it’s time to get out of town. Of course, if you fancy driving out of town it is a labour Hercules himself would have struggled to pull off (though I read that one of his 12 labours was to impregnate each of King Thespius of Thespia’s 50 daughters, which if you ask me, even if you failed, though Hercules didn’t, you might not be too bothered with the other 11 tasks and start writing your autobiography). For there is a Biblical proverb, I’m sure, that goes “the road to peace and tranquillity is not easy, in fact it’s horrible”, or is it “the path to a nice weekend away is a particularly hairy one”. Or how about the expression “trucks and cars and motorbikes may break my bones or even kill me but it’s the incessant beeps that really make me cry” – Book of Corinthians, perhaps?

Nevertheless through the dirt and past the gigantic speeding automated vehicles driven by men who look like they’re 15 years old, you travel, and somewhere, out there, way out there, and definitely past Thai Nguyen, you will find roads that are joyously empty and air that is actually nice to breathe.

And wherever you are – on the road to Sapa, winding your way down to Ba Be Lake, lost on the way to Ha Giang – the wind will be blowing through your hair, so you will slow down to take in the scenery and realise that the last interfering noise is the engine of your motorbike, so you’ll turn it off and roll to a standstill and listen to that sweet sound of eat-your-heart-out-Simon-and-Garfunkel-silence until, that is, you hear a small voice behind you say, “Hello!”.

Yes, it has been six months since your last hello, and you swore you’d never say it again, you said it was history, but when you wheel around and see a small girl beaming at you with what must be at that very monment the widest smile in the north of Vietnam, even though your sunburnt face is covered in mud and you might easily forgive her for considering you to be some kind of bogey man, and you know you can’t deny her, as you might hear 365 times 10 hellos per annum but it’s not every day the bogeyman pulls up outside her house, so you say “Hello!” before she tears away screaming with joy because you made her day.

However – it would be out of character to end so pleasantly - the only problem for you is at some stage you have to turn back. And yes, the drive back into Hanoi is just as horrific as the drive away, the only difference being your trip is over and you’re totally exhausted. So when you end up pulling up to your gate with deafened ears, grit in your eyes, an aching back and a stiff neck, thinking why didn’t I take the train, you find that you can barely get off your bike.

And as you fumble for your keys, you hear the pitter-patter of tiny footsteps running up to you and a kid materialises beside your knee, and as the lock clicks open and just before you collapse inside the gate, you mutter, “Listen kid, you know that I know you see lots of foreigners on this street everyday, so forget it” but unperturbed by your gobbledygook he stares you dead in the eye and shouts “hello!” before racing away while screaming with joy and you realise, he doesn’t even need you to make his own day. All he needs is that one little word – Hello!