Nguyen Vu Hoang Anh, one of Vietnam’s most talented and creative cake artists, has become known for his signature cakes shaped as miniature aristocratic dresses, complete with tiny creases and folds.

34-year-old Nguyen Vu Hoang Anh has long been known as one of the best cake artists in Vietnam, but while his stunningly realistic fondant flowers and flawless tiered cakes have always been impressive, it was his signature aristocratic dress cake that earned him a lot of attention and praise on social media. Made using a layered sponge cake base held together with buttercream and chocolate, the insanely detailed cakes are covered with a layer of colored fondant hand-molded into the shape of European-style aristocratic dresses inspired by the Baroque era.

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A Vietnamese restaurant recently went viral for launching a new dish – bubble tea beef noodles – in a bid to take advantage of the popularity of tapioca pearl milk tea.

There is no questioning the crazy popularity of bubble tea not only in Asia, but around the world. There is just something about the tapioca pearl-infused milk tea that has most people coming back for more, so it’s easy to understand why many businesses try to tap into this popularity to attract new business. The latest example is Yu Tang, a Vietnamese restaurant based in Hanoi that recently launched a new dish that combines milk tea, tapioca pearls, thick noodles and slices of cooked beef. Inspired by Taiwan’s popular milk hot pot, the new dish has been drawing a lot of attention online.

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Doctors at Hanoi’s Viet Duc Hospital recently saved a young man’s life by performing emergency surgery to remove a live eel that had bitten through his intestines and entered his abdominal cavity.

On July 27, a 31-year-old Indian national was brought to the emergency room of Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi with severe abdominal pain. Through moans and screams of agony, the unnamed man told hospital staff that he had inserted a live eel into his body through his backside shortly before he began experiencing excruciating abdominal pain. The Vietnamese doctors on duty had seen a lot of things in people’s bodies, but a live eel was new, even for them, so they didn’t believe the patient at first. However, X-ray imaging and ultrasound exams showed a horizontal radiopaque skeleton in the man’s abdominal cavity which turned out to be an actual live eel.

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A Vietnamese woman has been dubbed a “sleepless mutant” because of her alleged ability to shun sleep completely. She claims to have remained awake continuously for the last three decades.

49-year-old Nguyen Ngoc My Kim is known as “the seamstress who never sleeps” in her home province of Long An, a nickname she gladly accepts because it apparently suits her. Every time Miss Kim’s reputation attracted the attention of the media, she confirmed that she hadn’t slept in several decades, adding that the complete lack of sleep hadn’t affected her health at all. However, the Vietnamese seamstress has always been quick to point out that she wasn’t born with the ability to function without sleep, she conditioned herself to stay up late ever since she was a little girl. At first, she would lose sleep because she loved reading late into the night, and later, when she started working as a seamstress, she worked late in order to complete her orders. At one point, she didn’t feel the need to sleep at all, so she didn’t.

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A so-called blind dating cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has come under fire for installing a one-way window that allows men to see the girls they are talking to, but not vice-versa.

On June 1st, a blind dating cafe in Ho Chi Minh’s District 1 went viral for a controversial reason. According to multiple reports, Mina Cafe features two different rooms for men and women, separated by a glass wall. The controversy lies in the fact that the wall is advertised as a mirror when in reality it is only a mirror from the women’s side. The men’s room is dark and they can clearly see the person on the other side. Basically, the blind date part is only valid for the women, as the men can freely admire their potential partners like items on display.

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Vietnamese doctors recently saved a young man’s life by removing a live 30-cm-long eel from his abdomen, where it had caused intestinal perforations.

On March 20, a 34-year-old man was admitted to the Hai Ha District Medical Center in Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam, with severe abdominal cramps. Since the patient was in too much pain to be questioned about his symptoms, the hospital staff conducted an X-ray and an ultrasound which revealed a foreign body in his abdomen, as well as intestinal perforation and peritonitis. Doctors decided that the best course of action was to conduct surgery, remove the suspicious object, and try to mitigate the damage to the man’s intestines. Upon opening up the patient’s abdomen, doctors were surprised to find that the foreign object was a 30 cm live eel.

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A Vietnamese man who started experiencing throat discomfort and speaking with a hoarse voice discovered that he had a 6-cm-long leech sucking blood from his throat.

Ever wake up with a soar throat and a scratchy voice? Of course, you have, but you probably never thought it was more than a mild cold. A 53-year-old Vietnamese man suffering these symptoms thought the same thing until he started spitting blood, at which point he realized things were worse than they appeared. At first, he tried identifying the cause himself, by opening his mouth and looking in the mirror, but he couldn’t see much apart from what looked like a brown mass in the upper part of his throat. The man panicked and immediately sought professional medical assistance; that’s how he learned that he had a leech attached to his throat.

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A 75-year-old Vietnamese woman claims she has not eaten any solid food in 50 years, instead surviving only on water and sugary soft drinks.

Ms. Bui Thi Loi, from Loc Ninh commune, in Vietnam’s Quang Binh Province, looks in great shape for her age, which only makes her diet that much more surprising. The elderly woman insists that she has lived on water and soft drinks for half a century and that she never craves solid foods. It all started in 1963 when she was struck by lightning while she and other women were climbing up a mountain to treat injured soldiers during the war. She was knocked unconscious and although she survived, she was never the same after that. She didn’t eat anything for days after coming to her senses, so her friends started giving her sweetened water.

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A Vietnamese man who had been suffering from severe headaches and even loss of vision over the last five months recently learned that he had a pair of chopsticks stuck in his skull.

The unnamed man was recently admitted to the Cuba Friendship Hospital in the city of Dong Hoi, Vietnam’s Quang Binh province, after complaining of constant headaches, vision loss, and fluid discharge from his nose. When asked, the man revealed no possible cause for these symptoms, but a CT scan showed a tension pneumocephalus, the intracranial equivalent of a pneumothorax, as well as two foreign objects protruding from his nose into his brain. Upon thorough examination, the objects were identified as broken chopsticks…

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A 36-year-old woman in Vietnam has been raising a lot of eyebrows in her home country with claims of suffering from an insomnia that has lasted for over 11 years.

Ms. Tran Thi Luu, who works at a preschool in the city of Quảng Ngãi, has become the talk of Vietnamese social media after it was reported that she hasn’t slept in more than 11 years. In a recent interview, the woman said that her decade-long insomnia began with a bizarre crying episode. Tears just started flowing from her eyes for no apparent reason, and even trying to lie down and close her eyes couldn’t stop the trickle of water. The inexplicable crying eventually ceased, but so did her capacity to fall asleep. Try as she might, Luu couldn’t ‘log out’ anymore. Her eyes were tired, but her mind was fully awake, so for the last 11 years she has done little other than lie down with her eyes closed to relax while her husband and children are sleeping.

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Thai Ngoc, an 80-year-old farmer in Vietnam, claims that he hasn’t slept in over 60 years, since coming down with a fever as a young man. Somehow, this severe insomnia hasn’t affected his life.

Most people can’t go an entire day without a few hours of sleep, but one Vietnamese man claims that he has spent the last 60 years wide awake, without so much as a short nap. Thai Ngoc has been making news headlines in his home country for years now, ever since it was originally reported that he does not need any sleep to lead a happy, active life. Ngoc’s family, including his wife, children, friends, and neighbors insist that they have never seen the octogenarian sleep, and he insists that the complete lack of sleep has never affected him negatively.

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A Vietnamese architecture student and diehard fan of The Dark Knight spent six months building his very own Batpod with the help of a team of friends.

Born in 1998, Nguyen Dac Chung was just a child when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight hit cinemas, but the movie made such a big impact on him that he grew up dreaming of one day driving his own Batmobile and Batpod on the streets of his native Hanoi. He fulfilled half of that dream in 2020, when he built a functional replica of the Tumbler, Batman’s impressive Batmobile from the Dark Knight series, and earlier this month he completed his goal by unveiling a cool DIY Batpod as well.

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A Vietnamese man has become famous in his home province of An Giang for taking care of thousands of wild river fish who visit his house every day for food.

Muoi Phuc’s house in Long Kien, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, is a popular attraction for both locals and tourists. People routinely stop by to watch the man feed a school of wild fish that visits him daily. When the 52-year-old man started feeding the fish, it was just a handful of pangasius, but over the last two years, their number grew at a steady pace, and now thousands of fish stop by his riverside home every day for a bite to eat. The fish are free to come and go as they please, and others have tried attracting them by throwing food into the river, but for some reason, they only stop at Muoi Phuc’s house.

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An entrepreneur in Can Tho, Vietnam’s fourth-largest city, has been getting a lot of attention for his unique home, which is gilded both inside and out.

Mr. Nguyen Van Trung is a Vietnamese businessman who reportedly made his fortune in the real-estate business. After visiting many countries around the world, he decided to return to his home city and build a house with a real touristic appeal, and after speaking with a home decorator he decided to go for a gold theme. To say that he went a little overboard with the gilding would be an understatement, as you can clearly see in the photos below. From the walls to the furniture and the various decorations, everything looks like it’s made of gold or at least gold-plated.

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A Vietnamese woman claims to have given up solid food over four decades ago and survived on water spiked with a bit of salt, sugar and lemon juice ever since.

63-year-old Ms. Ngon is famous in her native Tan Trach commune, Vietnam’s Long An province, for her very unique diet. For the last 41 years, she has allegedly been living on water with a few grams of salt and sugar, as well as a bit of lemon juice, completely shunning all other nutrients. She not only appears to be in tip-top shape for her age, but she is in great health, is always full of energy and can execute Yoga poses that people decades younger than her wouldn’t even dream of attempting. She considers water vital to her health in the same way that watering is to a tree…

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