We kindly declined each time she came over with a new plate, but she was having none of it. She would quickly set down the plates anyway and pour sauces and add condiments, as if she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Once, she even picked up a piece of sausage and literally fed it Julie. When we were not eating enough of the grilled pork skewers for the stall lady’s liking, she rushed over, grabbed five skewers and slid the meat off on top of other uneaten dishes. When I had yet to add the additional meatballs to my soup, the stall lady quickly remedied the situation by dumping the meatballs into the soup for me.

As this frenzy of activity was taking place (and frenzy is really the only word for it), we decided that this must be one of those situations where you pay for what you eat. If you don’t touch the dish, how can you possibly be charged? When we had finished eating maybe 25% of the various offerings, I quickly gestured for the check.

The total: 200,000 dong. That’s $10US, a crazy sum of money for lunch in Vietnam, let alone at the market where the most expensive thing on any menu is 15,000. In fact, it’s the most expensive meal we have had in Vietnam. We got completely and utterly scammed.The entire transaction took place in such a rush, the old lady pulling out a 200,000 note from a Ziploc bag and waving it to us to indicate that’s what she wanted. Since there was no printed menu (the Sharpie board was now almost 20 feet away and not within view), and all the uneaten food had been tainted with sauces and condiments, we were stuck.

Should I not pay for the meatballs dumped in my soup even if I didn’t eat them? Should Julie have spit out the sausage? And how do we navigate this conversation about what we ate and didn’t eat in Vietnamese? We only know a few words – ‘bia’ is beer and ‘ga’ is chicken.

We paid the bill. Our egos in shambles, we walked out of the market in a complete funk. We just didn’t see it coming. We thought we were doing the smart thing, going to eat where the locals eat, taking a chance on some unknown food, being as un-Western as possible, and look what happens!

We decided as we walked back to our hotel to drown our sorrows in rightly cheap beer, that this will one day be funny. We tried to comfort ourselves with the thought that you haven’t really ‘done’ Asia until you get swindled by someone, since there are hustlers on literally every corner. At least we can now consider ourselves fully-fledged travellers!