New Year Markets and the Shutting Down of Towns

As mentioned in an earlier post, families will forgo the possibility of making double the income during Tet New Year in order to spend time with families, especially those who can only afford to go home once or twice a year. New Years is a sacred and special time of year for all of Vietnamese. It truly is a universal celebration among all regardless of religion or economics. Shop owners will close up shop for up to a month to travel home to celebrate with their families. For those visiting Vietnam during Tet New Year it means double the price for everything, all the while there aren't many places to spend that hard earned cash, especially in small villages like Ninh Hoa.

So for our first full day in Ninh Hoa we wanted to head out to the market for some breakfast, but quickly found that while there seemed an appearance of a busy typical day at the open market many vendors weren't operating and finding a nice breakfast was going to be more challenging than expected. Everyone is ready to make a buck right? Not so during Tet New Year it turns out.

There were plenty of vendors selling typical marketing items, but we were wanting some breakfast.We wandering around the marketing hoping to find some specialty New Year's Food prepared and sold only during Tet.We soon realized foreigners are extremely rare in Ninh Hoa, so after being harrassed for money we soon spotted a section of vendors selling Vietnamese desserts Che and Banh Xeo Crepes and decided this was going to be as good as it gets. So we pulled up plastic chairs and ordered up some grub.While not extraordinary in anyway, the fresh crispy crepes and refreshing che desserts satisfied our hunger pangs and at a little less than $5 for all of us to eat until we didn't want anymore was fine with us. The hive of activity is a lot to take in and to be able to sit down and people watch verses wandering around hungry while old woman begging followed us made the pitstop worth it.