Our map identified an attraction about 10 miles away called the Bamboo Chopsticks Factory, which sounded interesting.
Actually, it might sound every more interesting in Vietnamese: “Công Ty Chế Biến Nông Lâm Sản Đạm Mai”. Definitely not trying to pronounce that!
If you want to see more pics than mine, you can find some in this link.
The ride was on small roads along a river valley which is home to rice paddies. Very picturesque.
I found the factory, looking for piles of bamboo on the side of the road and then followed a couple with a Vietnamese guide into the parking lot to watch a little. It’s all open air. There’s no tour per se…but no one stops you from looking and everyone was super friendly as usual. There’s some sort of machine that we didn’t see that splits out the actual chopsticks and you can see a video in the link above.
After all that excitement, I stopped in town for lunch, seeing a place that sold Bún chả which we ate the other day. Hard as I tried to say Bún chả correctly, no one understood what I wanted, but I saw someone with what I wanted and pointed, to smiles and me getting what I wanted. Problem solved. Lunch and beer was $2.
The entire restaurant was amused by my failure to pronounce the words correctly, and everyone laughed as the words Bún chả were repeated across the restaurant quite a few times in good humor. At least I got beer right, since it’s spelled bia in Vietnamese, it sounds basically the same in both languages. How exactly I messed up Bún chả I am still not aware, but Chris and I have not completely successfully said the words for Thank you in Vietnamese yet. We’ve said them many times, but most times we get a blank stare since we haven’t gotten it quite correct. Vietnamese is a tonal language which is famously hard for westerners to learn. So, we’ve progressed from mangling Māori words to Vietnamese ones.
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