Buy Me

City Hall

I head down DL Thanh Thon, passing the City Hall and onto DL Le Loi towards the Pham Ngu Lao area to get to the Ben Thanh Market, and I’ve never seen so many clothes, shoes, bundles of silk and other cloth in one place before! The variety of fabric is bewildering, and it’s little wonder that with so much choice of brightly coloured and highly patterned material about, that most of the clothes (particularly worn by the women) are completely non-coordinated.

Some might say fashion disasters.

As dusk approaches I leave the market and head towards the hotel along D Ham Nghi, and being careful not to fall into one of the multitude of humungous potholes, or to get entangled in any electrical cabling that may have fallen from the pylons above (!) Perhaps it would be safer to get on the back of one of the mopeds that keep asking me if I want a ride. Perhaps not.

Ben Thanh market

I thought I’d head back to the Pham Ngu Lao area for dinner tonight – it’s more backpacker than 5-star, but there are a few places recommended by the guidebook, so I thought I’d take a look; apparently there is one pho place that Bill Clinton went to, so I head out to find that. This is certainly a more interesting, and I guess perhaps more authentic, part of town with locals sitting on small stools all over the streets, mopeds everywhere, including on the pavements this time, street sellers wandering up and down the place selling virtually everything you can think of – all of this was around the Dong Khoi area, but here it was magnified hundredfold. Quite a number of women on bikes rode along side me asking where I was from and informing me that they were “Me Sale”

Good for you. You can stay that way too; I'm not buying!

I found the place that the former president went to, but to be honest it was completely packed and I didn’t fancy hanging about waiting for a table (I was also starving) so I settled for another quieter noodle bar and had more noodle soup and beer for dinner before wandering back down to the river and eventually back to the hotel later.