Behind the Photo: “The Innocent Girl”
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This young Vietnamese girl on the right looks so innocent, right? Wrong!
As we’re walking down through the markets just north of Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi we’re approached by this young woman at an intersection. She’s carrying this contraption full of pineapple and it’s nothing that we haven’t seen women carrying many times before so we continue to walk past her. She steps in front of us in stride and says “Hello”.
No, thanks” we’re not hungry.
The girl insists that Liz try holding the pineapple on her shoulder and then she plops the traditional Vietnamese hat on top of Liz’s head. It all happened so fast that I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth to tell Liz not to let her put the pineapple on her shoulder, never mind the hat on her head! I said to the woman…
“No money, right?”
She replies, “No money, it’s okay”. I snap a quick photo of Liz looking funny and before you know it this young woman is stuffing zip-loc bags full of pineapple into Liz’s hands telling her you must buy! I stepped in quickly and ended it before she got too aggressive but she was basically telling Liz that she MUST buy the pineapple now.
Your thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below!
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I have been living in Vietnam for 5 years and yeah that's the typical situation for tourists and backpackers…
Understandably this is "typical" but this also bad for Vietnam tourism. It's just like Egypt when you get charged more for being a foreigner in certain places. This unfortunately hurts the reputations of all Egyptians in the end. Not good!