I was at the supermarket recently when I had a rather singular incident that will no doubt stay with me for a long time. As those who live in Vietnam know, the 10,000 Dong note and the 200,000 Dong note are rather similar shades of orange and can be mistaken for each other if you're not paying attention to what you're doing. In this case, I was not.
It was rather late and I had been told to go and get something or other from the local Co-op supermarket. I got the stuff, headed to checkout and waited while the lady swiped everything through. At the end, the total came to 196,000, so I gave her what I thought was 206,000. While I waited for her to get the change, I looked at something else and when I turned back she was holding out 16,000! I assumed she'd miscounted, but my Vietnamese wasn't up to explaining, so I tried using various gestures and the few words I knew to get what I wanted to say across. She didn't understand (or so I assumed) and called over another lady to help. The situation rapidly escalated, and soon there were no less than 4 assistants and a security guard trying to get me to understand... something.
They kept pointing to a 200,000 note and saying "two hundred thousand" (I assumed this was the 200 I had given them) and doing the same for a 10,000. Finally I thought "Wait a minute - what if..." and checked my pocket. Instead of seeing the 10,000 note that I had brought for parking, staring at me was Ho Chi Minh's face on a 200,000 note. When I realized that I had given the lady the wrong note, my face looked something like this:
Luckily, everyone seemed to have a good sense of humor and all the people laughed as they saw I had clicked. I paid the correct amount, grabbed the bags and left in rather a hurry.
No comments:
Post a Comment