Words worth a thousand pictures

Beautiful Hue beach

During a trip to South-Central Vietnam I was at last able to experience some of the differences I had so often heard about between northern and southern Vietnamese. I wanted to test the anecdote that I was once told describing the differences in character between the regions.

"A young man goes to the market to buy some fish sauce (staple Vietnamese ingredient), but after purchasing a few bottles, he clumsily sets his foot in a ditch and the bottles shatter to the ground. A woman from the North walks past and says: "How clumsy you are! Be careful next time!" Just behind her, a woman from the South walks by, stops and, looks at the boy while handing him some money saying: "Here you go young man, some change to buy some more sauce." Finally, a woman from the Center walks by and kneels to the ground desperately attempting to collect what little sauce can be recovered from the accident.

After spending a few days in Hoi An and Hue (both cities located in Central Vietnam), I realized that the last lady in the story is certainly a myth. I couldn’t help but be taken away by wide-smiled warmth and hospitality of the locals.

Rice fields in Hoi An countryside

What I quickly realized was that, in order to trigger a deeper and more permanent beam enlightening their faces a simple effort to speak Vietnamese was sufficient. Let's not get ahead of ourselves; I still express myself worse than a 2 year-old butchering any notion of pronunciation and tones. Nevertheless, when capable of getting over my initial hesitation, my struggles to say something even remotely comprehensible proved to be a highly effective and strong tool. When in Hanoi, my scattered and poorly pronounced vocabulary is cause of puzzled looks and usually impatiently annoyed grimaces. In Hue and Hoi An, on the other hand, even the most negligible effort would immediately trigger "Oohs!" and "Awwws!" In moments of extreme confidence, I would even try and develop slightly more complex sentences, inevitably resulting in the best possible customer service. Doors opened. Smiles widened. Eyes lit up and questions started pouring, "Why do you speak Vietnamese? Do you live here? Where? For how long?"

Hue beach boy

Our first night in Hue we had a very late dinner in a small restaurant a few streets down from our hotel. The restaurant was practically empty, but we liked the simple bamboo furniture and overall vibe. We were looking to taste some of Hue's famous banh dishes and, sure enough, found it there. The waiter was extremely hospitable and accommodating. We even had a little chat at the end of the meal and left feeling that Hue would be a nice closure to our week's holiday. Our last day, we decided to have lunch at that same restaurant, this time for some Pho Bo and Pho Ga. The same waiter was there, obviously excited to see us again, asking us all kinds of questions about our stay in his native city. He dug deeper to see what the plans for our last day were. Despite the oppressive heat, we were determined to go see some of the Nguyen dynasty's tombs, at which point our waiter suggested: "Why don't you just go to the beach? It's a perfect day for that and it's only 13km from the city-center!" We admitted to not having thought of that and were also unsure of how we could make our way out there, an uncertainty he quickly tried to clarify: "Oh! Don't worry about transportation; you can just take my motorcycle! I'm working all day anyway, until 10pm. You could just take the bike this afternoon, go for a swim, and return it this evening when the sun sets." My jaw dropped. Was this guy for real? I made him repeat his proposal just in case I missed something between slowly ingesting the steamy soup and desperately attempting to wipe transpiration droplets from my liquefying self. No. I had heard what I had heard. He wanted us to use his old Honda Wave and go to the beach.

The ride out there was an incredibly beautiful adventure. We got to explore Hue's countryside, feel the breeze through our hair and get a feel for the day-to-day living outside the tourism frenzy. The beach was beautiful: natural, with no signs of oppressive hotels or herds of pasty white potato people (literally the way foreigners are called in Vietnamese); just some locals playing around in the water or enjoying some seafood at an improvised eatery. What a beautiful way to conclude our vacation, to mentally prepare for the return to the Hanoian traffic-frenzy, pollution and chaos. All this thanks to broken sequences of basic vocabulary vaguely sounding like Vietnamese. Instead of the picture being worth a thousand words, the words were worth a beautiful picture.