planningtravel

Will be in the following cities on our upcoming trip to Vietnam:-

Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Can Tho and HCMC.

I know it's not uncommon to find many tour agencies or businesses with similar names once a particular place becomes well known.

Looking for some guidance on where we should look for:-

An evening cooking class in any of the cities we'll be visiting.
A Water Puppet show in any of the cities we'll be visiting,

Is there a particular advantage in doing the cooking class or water puppet show in any specific city?

Thanks in advance.

crellston

Water Puppet shows are probably best seen in Hanoi.

Thang Long is the old quarter is one of the oldest and most famous http://thanglongwaterpuppet.org/

Vietnam Puppetry in Thanh Xuan district Hanoi is also worth a look Nhà Hát Múa R?i Vi?t Nam, múa r?i, múa r?i n??c, múa r?i c?n

I think you maybe lucky to find an evening cooking class as, IME , most are morning, afternoon or all day affairs and often include a trip to a market to go shopping for incgredients which is fun. Vy’s Market, Morning Glory and Green Bamboo are some of the more famous but there are literally dozens to choose from including a few out in te countryside or on the smaller islands.

Just an observation, but do try to spend some time out of the cities and in the countryside where the true beauty and culture of Vietnam is to be found.

memejs

It's been several years since my trip to Vietnam (2012), so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. We did a cooking class in Hoi An at Green Bamboo Cooking School and absolutely loved it - Home Page. There's also a restaurant in Hoi An called Morning Glory (which is fabulous) that I believe offers cooking classes. Here's a cut and paste from what I wrote in my trip report:

This was one of the few activities we booked before leaving on the trip. I had read about Van and her Green Bamboo Cooking School in an online trip report. After booking, Van sent us a list of dishes and we each got to choose one that we wanted to make. On the morning of the class, Van picked us and another group (a Canadian mother and her two young adult daughters) up from the hotel and took us to the market. There she told us about the market, introduced us to typical Vietnamese cooking ingredients, and identified and let us try fruits that we were unfamiliar with. Once we finished up the market shopping we went to Van's house to proceed with the cooking class.

Van's house is beautiful; she has a kitchen with a huge island, perfectly outfitted to conduct a cooking class for several people. I'm guessing that her family - which includes her Swedish husband and two children - is probably one of the more well-to-do families of the area. Van had two assistants to wash and prep some of the ingredients, but we were also put to work chopping, slicing, and grinding. We got along well with the other women in the class and had a great time chatting as we prepared the food. Van told us that Vietnamese dishes try to incorporate many flavors (spicy, sour, sweet, bitter, salty) in order to create a balanced and satisfying meal. We spent a couple of hours prepping the dishes - which sounds like a long time, but it was really fun - and then everything was ready for final assembly about the same time. While we had done some sampling along the way, we took the final dishes out to the table for a sit-down lunch. Although we had each chosen our own dish, we ate a bit of everything, and there was waaaay more food than we could eat. We made vegetable curry (my selection), beef salad, pumpkin soup, fish barbecued in banana leaves, some kind of shrimp, beef stir-fry, Vietnamese crispy pancakes, and green mango salad.

We had such fun with the cooking class and left feeling that we were all old friends. Van sent us away with a cookbook of all of her recipe options, cooking chopsticks, and this neat grater/cutting tool that was really handy for chopping vegetables. The class was $30 each and totally, completely worth the price. There are a lot of cooking classes in Hoi An, and while I haven't experienced the others, I really like the class we did because it was small and completely personalized. Plus, we were in a real home, which added a degree of comfort to the experience. Van even gave us plastic ponchos to wear since it was still pouring when the class finished.

Tdiddy12