‘I don’t want to pay’: Tourist refuses to pay for photo at Vietnam café, faces backlash
A tourist was filmed repeatedly asking staff at a Vietnamese café to take her photograph at a popular picture spot while refusing to pay.
A tourist was filmed repeatedly asking staff at a Vietnamese café to take her photograph at a popular picture spot while refusing to pay. The tourist sparked a heated exchange at the café in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which is famous for its flower-filled pond.

The garden-style café in Vietnam has a pool filled with hydrangeas where visitors can sit in a clear kayak and take aesthetic photos — for a small fee.
Footage shared widely online shows one particular tourist refusing to pay for the experience while sitting in the kayak in the middle of the pond.
“I don’t want to pay”
“Excuse me. Excuse me? Hello? Can you picture me please,” she was heard asking a cafe worker. “You don’t understand. Can you photo? Can you photo?” the woman tourist was filmed saying. “Can you picture me?”
The tourist was told that she had to pay before someone would click her picture, which she refused to do point-blank.
“You can pay here,” the worker tried to explain, but the tourist responded sharply by saying, “I don’t want to pay.”
“Nobody wants to picture you,” another woman then told the tourist, adding: “Because we all pay here.”
The tourist continued asking people standing around the pond to take her picture, despite being told repeatedly that she had to pay for the photo.
“I’m from Israel”
After facing repeated rejections, the woman brought her national identity into the picture. She tried to insinuate that people were refusing to take her picture because she is from Israel.
“Why you don’t want to help me? Because I am from Israel?” the tourist asked, leading the exasperated cafe worker to answer “Yeah. You know right.”
Footage of the incident has been shared widely across social media platforms, leading to criticism of the tourist’s behaviour. Many slammed her as entitled and disrespectful.
“The lack of shame, that's what always surprises me. Anyone else would feel ashamed to get called out for not paying,” one X user said.
“How cheap do you have to be to not pay for a photograph in Vietnam of all places!?” another asked.
“Skipping the ticket then treating staff like personal assistants is wild entitlement,” an X user added under the video.
ABOUT THE AUTHORSanya JainSanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience - from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trends, entertainment and global affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trends and looking for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation. She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amuse social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsmakers and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers. When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spends a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.Read More

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