Vietnam may have its share of rip-offs, but not at beer halls, where it's always good!

We’re at WoWasis are always happy to get mail. Here’s an email we received this week:

Dear WoWasis, We surfed your website and the information you give about annoyances in Vietnam was very helpful to us. Just one thing: you mention that touts and rip offs in vietnam are as common as in Greece or Egypt.
We want to protest there: my girlfriend and I have been to Greece several times and never made any experience of that kind. In fact, as Greece uses the €uro scams and rip offs are much harder to organize. Maybe you can correct that bit of information? Thank you very much, Gregor & Anna.

Dera Gregor & Anna,

Thanks for writing. Obviously, you had a different experience in Greece than we did. What we found pervasive in Greece was the tendency to charge us more than the posted price. We generally caught it by counting our change. And we always had to count our change. We had to watch each item we bought as it was bagged or boxed, because goods would often be switched. Even in restaurants, we found that occasionally old food would be scraped from someone else’s plate and put on ours. We loved Greece, but found tourist rip-offs there to be common (a Greek friend of ours later told us that ripping off tourists is the Greek national pastime!) 

Bottom line, we think, is that no country is perfect, and every country has its good points as well as less-than-stellar aspects. As with Vietnam and Egypt, we’d gladly go to Greece again. But we’d still keep an eye out for the issues we encountered there. Being prepared for the occasional rip-off in any country will ultimately result in a more satisfying trip.

– The gang at WoWasis