I just realize now that I have been scammed. For all my talk about being street smart, and being able to smell a scammer from a mile away, I somehow always end up being ripped off one way or another. I don’t get scammed big time, but I do tend to fall for small scams – which have a way of adding up.
Anyway, when I was in Saigon last month, I was hell bent on buying as much coffee as I could. I didn’t particularly like the mocha coffee that my friend brought home last year, but I knew that Vietnam had more coffee to offer than the kind I originally tasted. So on my last day, I went around Ben Thanh market to take a look at the plethora of coffee beans that they sold there.
I should have known – when I saw practically every stall selling “Weasel Coffee” – that the stuff was probably not the real thing. Still, I disregarded my instinct and bought bags of the “awesome” coffee anyway. I was thinking, this is Vietnam. Everything’s cheaper here.
Now that I am drinking my nth cup of Weasel Coffee, I think that I might have paid good money for a fake. Everywhere online, I keep reading about the elusive weasel coffee and how replicas are sold all over Saigon and Hanoi; how tourists are being scammed every minute. Unfortunately, I think I am one of them.
So how do I get my hands on the real deal? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Originally posted on April 19, 2010 @ 4:46 am