Brother and his wife are going to Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand for two weeks.
Is there anything particular you would have them bring back if you were in my place? Anything particularly unique or inexpensive??
On the flip side…is there anything to shy away from???
Avoid street food, unless you’re forced to out of diplomacy. Me and my wife are partial to cloths. Batik from Indonesia (hand-drawn, not the stamped kind), Chinese qipao, raw silk from Thailand, Piña (pineapple) cloth from the Philippines.
Best you can hope for is like a hand painted plate or a 2014 calendar.
Got to be more use than an impressionist model motorbike made out of motorbike parts,
or an artillery shell ashtray.
Currently in SE Asia, I always bring back seashells, which I adore. I’d look for 100% cotton, batik sarongs, which I also adore and can never get enough of, and are disappearing in favour of the crap rayon ones you see at every festival. If you like tea, consider a box of Boh tea, my favorite, I always come home with a couple of boxes in my bags!
Silver jewellery is another good choice, there is lots available, in unique designs you mightn’t see in the west. And, of course, all things Buddhist, statuary, heads, trinkets of all sorts. As long as it’s not antiquities you’re fine.
And if, like me, you’re more Asian sized than western sized, it’s a great place to buy clothes! Most everything fits!
Bring back a ladyboy. Best of both worlds.
Watch out for jewellery scams in Bangkok. Your taxi driver offers take you to a shop which is only open on this particular day and offering fabulous discounts on stones which you can take back and resell at home for enormous profits. Tourist duly drops a few hundred dollars on what when he takes them into a jeweller at home to be appraised turn out to be no good as anything but very small, very shiny paperweights. Yeah, I know it sounds obvious, but so many dupes get stung by it.
eta: link
Filipina wife for you.
Vietnamese coffee is fantastic. If you do get some, don’t forget to buy a few of the little metal baskets that rest on top of the cup while the water drips through.
Surprised to see you recomend avoiding street foods, IMHO SE Asian street food is amazing and I never got sick from eating it, but obviously they’re not bringing that back as a gift.
Sometimes you can find interesting handmade toy cars, etc. in SE Asian markets painted garish colors. Those are fun.
I’ve long lost interest in foods that tend to grow stone cold, exposed to sun, dust and smog. In my experience, one gets a country’s best eating as a solid guess in a house, with the food prepared by friendly hands in a hearty bust-your-belly style. Hate those minuscule servings with eye-popping price tags you get in restaus.
Opium!
No, maybe scratch that. It’s so 1980s anyway. Today’s smugglers are all carrying methamphetamine anyway. Really!
I agree with Vietnamese coffee, it’s among the best in the world. (And don’t by Starbucks, which recently moved into Vietnam. Talk about taking coals to Newcastle!) It’s so hard to say what to take back from Thailand. I’ve been here so long that I can’t think of what’s unique. We’ve been to all those countries, and looking around the place, all we’ve got are the usual knickknacks and such from those places.
Just look around and see what catches your eye. Local fabric maybe, which you could have made into an outfit. I do have a very nice ceramic opium pipe with a tiger design I picked up in Cambodia, and that should be legal.
Be careful about buying Buddha images. By law in Thailand, if it measures 5 inches or more, it could be confiscated by Customs as you’re leaving unless you have obtained an export permit. I’m not sure how strictly this is enforced. And this is for Thailand – dunno about the other countries. More information here.
Local jewelry is a good idea, silver and otherwise. There are some innovative designs.
There are two types of antiques – real and fake. The real ones come with high price tags, but knowing if it’s really real is often a problem. But many vendors will cheerfully admit their wares are fake, they just look neat, so going with that is often good.
As for eating street food, I’ve lived here literally decades and know enough to avoid it. I passed through my street-food phase years ago. The stuff really can be unhealthy. I recall one cook at 1am on Sukhumvit Road taking a big ol’ monster leak in the shadow of a Skytrain station near his stall on Sukhumvit Road. You think there were any facilities for washing his hands? It’s a good way of getting a case of Bangkok Belly. For just a little more money, eat in a regular shop and avoid the street if possible. Sometimes you just have to, but I avoid it in general.
Come to think of it you know what I brought home, one time, that was a big hit, and got lots of use?
A rice server. It’s a difficult thing to describe, if you’ve never seen one. But they are quite lovely, uniquely Thai, come in endless size variations, are not terribly expensive, and endlessly useful if you cook a lot of Asian food, as we do.
And, every now and again, should a Thai/other Asian be there for dinner, they’ll definitely be impressed. If you regularly eat rice consider it!
(Wish I could show you a photo but I truly wouldn’t know what to google!)
Be careful of this. If it’s shells you collect yourself, ask a local about regulations, and definitely declare them at customs. As far as buying shells from local vendors, well, here’s what one museum says about it.
I wouldn’t buy ivory or rhino horn or even antelope horns as souvenirs. Why should marine invertebrate products be any different?
I never buy seashells, and only collect from beaches where they appear by the thousands. But if you visit enough beaches you can get a good variety. Mine are not large, perfect, or near museum quality.
I have never declared them when returning, and never seen any information at customs to indicate I should. My bags have often been examined and no one has ever shown the slightest interest in my small hoard of tiny shells. Of course I wasn’t collecting in California, either.
<On the flip side…is there anything to shy away from??? >
An STD. Temptation is blatant and everywhere. Use a condom.
By any chance, do you mean a sticky-rice basket? Even if you don’t, that’s a nice thing to have. Good for storing stuff in too. Those little baskets with the lid attached by a cord.
Here are some photos. They’re meant for sticky rice – although I’m not all that familiar with the funnel-shaped ones, which look like they’re holding regular rice – but no one will call the rice police if you use it for normal rice. (They might point and laugh though.)
Close… opium pipes. I’ve got a couple of really cool decorative ones that came from Singapore and Thailand. I brought a really neat brass one back and was amazed that I didn’t even raise an eyebrow coming back through customs. They are definitely great conversation pieces.
I bought lacquerware, a tea set, a Buddha head, a singing prayer bowl and silk lanterns in Vietnam - there’s a lot of dross but you can find some lovely things if you look (avoid anything that could be a real antique though). I bought clothes too but wish I’d bought an Ao Dai instead, although where I would ever wear it stumped me, which is why I didn’t.
In Cambodia I bought a carved wood wall hanging, silk scarves, small bamboo christmas decorations, a silk dragonfly mobile, a silk tablecloth and this seasoning sauce I found everywhere and got addicted too.
Above all I took lots of photos and those have been the best decorations, I have then in displays all around the house.
No Sam, not a basket for sticky rice, an etched (?), aluminum regular rice server! When you see them for sale they unfailingly have every size from ‘for two’ to ‘for twenty two’, it seems. They have two handles and a lid, with a slot for a serving spoon.
Perhaps they are not strictly for rice, but that’s all I’ve ever seen served in them. Darn it, I wish I could show you, I know you’d recognize it in a second! I’d wager you have one at your house!
Anyway, I love mine and it sees lots of use. I’m thinking of bringing one back for a friend, as I’ve been unable to locate the exact Tshirt she fancied and specifically requested.
I’ve seen similar shaped item in Indonesia, Malaysia, S’pore, but the Thai one is the prettiest by far! (If I was at home, I’d take a photo of mine!)