Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Vietnamese Cooking Class and Chinatown

On July 30th Mads and I took a Vietnamese cooking class. I had taken a Thai cooking class while I was in Thailand and really enjoyed it. When I was in Hoi An (Vietnam) my Contiki tour group took a Vietnamese cooking class but I was still sick (from food poisoning) and was unable to attend.

The class size was only 10 people, which made it very interactive and easy to follow.

We started off making fresh spring rolls with shrimp, pork and rice noodles, with a peanut dipping sauce. They were super easy to make, and very delicious! All you have to do is use rice paper to roll together lettuce, basil, mint, bean sprouts, rice noodles, pork and shrimp. You use some water to make the rice paper sticky so it’ll hold the ingredients together when rolled. Then for the peanut dipping sauce you mix together peanut butter, hoisin sauce (black bean sauce), water, garlic, chili and crushed peanuts.

Next on the menu was a water spinach salad with prawns, fried shallots and garlic. This salad was interesting to make: we used a splitter knife to split the water spinach into long, fine pieces which then curled when placed into ice water.

The salad also contained onions, carrots, shrimps, garlic, shallots and peanuts. The dressing was easy, and was made from mixing together kumquat juice, sugar, fish sauce, water, garlic and chili. The salad was very fresh and delicious!

Our last dish was lotus fried rice in a lotus leaf. We were all given small portable stove tops to cook with.

For this dish, you cook together a collection of ingredients including chicken, sausage, shallots, garlic, carrots and onions in a wok and then add the rice. Once it’s all well blended and cooked, you put the rice inside a large lotus leaf and wrap it up.

I was surprised how easy the dishes were to make, and I’m definitely going to make them at home!

In addition to the cooking class, we decided to do a bit more touring of the city. Mads took me into Chinatown so I could see the Cho Binh Tay market, which is very similar to the Ben Thanh Market, except that this market has very few tourists, and is manly for locals, while the Ben Thanh Market is packed with tourists and souvenir stands. This market was very chaotic and busy, but it was interesting to see the local Vietnamese people going about their daily business without the interference of tourists.

The most interesting and eye opening experience at the market was my visit to the washroom. This might have been the most local Vietnamese place I have visited, with the fewest tourists. I had been using the washrooms in Southeast Asia for months and have gotten quite used to the lack of sanitary and clean toilets. It’s normal to have no toilet paper, and it’s also very normal to see “squatter” toilets (basically a hole in the ground where you squat and do your business into).

But after visiting this local market, I realized that the toilets I had been using my whole trip have been cleaned up for tourists, while this bathroom was definitely for locals! I was shocked (and honestly quite grossed out) when visiting the washroom. Basically the womens washroom is a large room with just a couple of private stalls. People don’t really use the stalls though… instead they squat in the open room and urinate on the floor. They then pour water all over the floor to wash it down. I had to walk through the wet, urine-filled floor in my flip flops in order to get to a private stall. Once I left the washroom I thoroughly washed my feet and flip flops with tap water outside before proceeding with our touring.

We then stopped at a park in Chinatown where we could admire a dragon fountain:

From there we headed over to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, built in 1909 by the Cantonese.

Our last touring stop was the Sheraton Hotel, where we took the elevator to the very top so we could have a good view of the city:

A motorbike parking lot:

These past few day have been harder knowing that my travels through Asia are coming to an end. I have had such an incredible trip, and an especially amazing time with Mads. I’m sad to say goodbye to her soon!