For the most part I really enjoy living life in Vietnam and I also really enjoyed when I lived in Thailand for over a decade. I also spent a bit of time (around 4 months) living in Singapore and that was ok, but if you haven't been to this part of the world Singapore is VERY different in that it is as expensive, perhaps more expensive, than most of the western world. It almost feels like you left Asia for a while because everything is in English and it is very modern and very expensive. That is why I only spent 4 months there because if I wanted to live in New York City I would go ahead and do that and never have to worry about visas.
Mostly life is pretty damn great over here if you can manage to get a job where you can work remotely, but there are certain things that while you maybe don't even realize it at the time, make things that you might want to do extremely difficult if not impossible.
For one thing, the country you are in caters (as you would expect) to the people that are citizens there and certain things that you and I must just feel is normal, is something they don't even use at all.
Take this thing for example. This is exactly what it appears to be, a measuring cup.
Ever since I started cooking for myself at home more often because I am trying to be more healthy, more and more recipes I encounter ask for very specific levels of certain liquids. I can “eyeball” them for the most part but when something asks for a quarter of a cup or 30ml of something, they are being very specific on purpose and if you deviate from that you are going to mess up the entire thing.
After making a couple of things completely wrong I finally decided to stop eyeballing and get an actual measuring device.
I went to two separate stores that could be considered housewares only to discover that they didn’t have any measuring things at all.
So I figured, that Lazada (our version of Amazon) would have these things in a very wide variety but alas, that was also wrong.
Unless the world has become wildly different while I wasn't paying attention, something like the above would be available for extremely cheap at virtually every grocery store or Wal-mart or Target in existence.
On Lazada (again, our Amazon) there were almost no results for the search and the things that did pop up were crazy expensive. The first image was from said search. I think all of us have one of these things or can remember it being in our cupboards as children.
That thing, was available for me to order but it was 1.5 million VND. This is around $60... for a standard glass measuring cup. To put things into perspective, I recently purchased another mobile phone that I use only for 2FA on my desk. That was 1.5 million VND as well.
There is no way around this and these are some of the very trivial trials and tribulations that you have to deal with when you are a stranger in a strange land.
To me though, it makes me wonder what the hell all the restaurants and especially places like bakeries are using if they aren't using measuring cups? Are they just extremely skilled bakers who can look at a bit of milk and know exactly how many cups or ml it is? Even if that is the case they would have had to gain that skill over time by using measuring cups, wouldn't they?
I'm not going to pay $60 for a glass cup that has to be imported from Korea. I guess I'll just add this to the list of things I need to bring back with me the next time I go across the Pacific which will be later this year after the hoopla surrounding the World Cup