Bootstrapping in Saigon

I'm a US citizen who runs a digital agency and lived in Hanoi for a year in 2013-14. When I visited Saigon, I couldn't believe how much of a shit show it was. Whereas Hanoi had the occasional "westerner" who tried his/her hardest to integrate with the Vietnamese culture, Saigon was full of loud, disrespectful foreigners who were just looking to work abroad (illegally) and bum off of the culture and cheap prices.

If you want a real taste of Vietnamese culture, I'd recommend travelling elsewhere. And if you do decide to bootstrap in SE Asia, try to respect/understand the unique environment you will be living in.

I lived a year in Hanoi and left in May this year.

I can't speak for HCMC, but what i experienced wasn't much different from how you describe Saigon - it's full of loud and disrespectful foreigners (backpackers, many English teachers) living in their own little bubble of cheap booze, pot and western restaurants.

That being said, I can only recommend my experience, it's an amazing place to immerse yourself (even if you live in a relatively western area like Tay Ho), amazing food and the extremely low costs allow you to pursue ventures for much longer than you'd be able in the west (if at all).

I'd recommend it, though only if you are up for some adventure and culture shocks and not just to work.

It does come with some catches:

- Rougher manners and culture than Thailand/Cambodia/Laos (casual encounters are usually very manner-of-fact)

- Much more polluted than most other countries in the area (safe for the usual suspects in china)

- Lot less developed than Taiwan, Korea, Japan (which are basically first world countries at this point) and still a lot behind China. So get used to more dirt, poverty and worse infrastructure

- The climate in the north isn't very friendly (boiling in summer, moist and cold in winter - everything gets moldy). I heard the south is nicer in this regard.

> he says the Vietnamese use the English alphabet. That's not quite right

What he says is:

> The written language uses English letters that you can learn to pronounce. So memorizing street names is a bit easier.

He's not trying you say that you already speak it, he's just trying to distinguish it from languages that use thousands of characters that--without actually learning the language--you have no hope of being able to use for the basics like street names. And to that end, it uses an alphabet close enough to English's that, yes, you can learn enough of to pronounce street names.

Here's how you spell Beijing in Chinese: 北京. Or Seoul in Korean: 서울시. Or Tokyo in Japanese: 東京都. Or Bangkok in Thai: กรุงเทพมหานคร.

Here's how you say Ho Chi Min City in Vietnamese, in the Vietnamese written alphabet: "Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh". You do indeed have some hope of pronouncing that and explaining it to a cab driver without actually speaking Vietnamese. You can probably learn to do it for any street or city name, in a few hours or less.

You can probably get there with a little more effort in Korean or Thai because they do use alphabets, but you're not already immersed in it like you are English. And no amount of learning how to read the Chinese 北京 will help you in reading 长安街 or 王府井.

> Lot less developed than Taiwan, Korea, Japan (which are basically first world countries at this point)

sigh. those aren't "basically" first world countries, they are first world countries by definition. either the old definition, or the new definition.

in fact they invented the term to describe countries like tw, kr, and jp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World