As most of you know, my last great backpacking adventure was to South East Asia which included Vietnam. When I come back from these foreign adventures, I like to explore ethnic restaurants, neighborhoods, and market with my new found knowledge and appreciation of different cultures.

For years, driving along the San Diego Freeway (or the 405 as we call it), I would see an exit off ramp to Little Saigon in Westminster. I never really thought much about it except that it was probably like China Town but catered to the Vietnamese. Well, I decided to explore this ethnic neighborhood after my recent trip to Vietnam taking with me first hand knowledge of the country, the culture, the food.

Little Saigon is a vibrant community of Vietnamese culture located in Westminster, Orange County. Bounded by Westminster Ave. on the north, Euclid St. on the east, Edinger St. on the south, and Beach Blvd. to the west, it contains dozens of shops, salons, restaurants, and other businesses offering authentic Vietnamese goods and fabulous dining.

The best established and largest of the numerous Vietnamese communities in the United States, Little Saigon is less than five miles from other major Orange County attractions like Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and offers an exotic alternative for travelers in search of something off the beaten path.

Westminster was once a predominantly white middle-class suburban city of Orange County with ample farmland, but the city later experienced a decline by the 1970s. Since 1978, the nucleus of Little Saigon has long been Bolsa Avenue, where early pioneers who were refugees after the fall of Saigon established businesses. Other new Vietnamese-American arrivals soon revitalized the area by opening their own businesses in old, formerly white-owned storefronts, and investors constructed large shopping centers containing a mix of businesses. The Vietnamese community and businesses later spread into adjacent Garden Grove, Anaheim and Santa Ana

The main focus of Little Saigon is the Bolsa Avenue center (where Asian Garden Mall and Little Saigon Plaza are considered the heart), which runs through Westminster and the street has been officially designated Little Saigon by the City Council of Westminster in the late 1980s.

It is lined with numerous huge shopping centers and strip malls. As with many other Vietnamese American communities, competing mom-and-pop restaurants that serve Vietnamese cuisine especially Pho are abundant. There are approximately 200 restaurants in the area of Little Saigon. In addition, there are quite a number of Vietnamese supermarkets, small Vietnamese delis and bakeries in Little Saigon specializing in French-style coffee and baguette sandwiches - indeed, a legacy of Vietnam's turbulent colonial past. Food and authentic Vietnamese cuisine remains the forefront of attractions amongst non-Vietnamese visiting Little Saigon.

The two-story enclosed Asian Garden Mall was developed by the well-known and influential Little Saigon founder and developer Frank Jao (an ethnic Chinese born in Haiphong,Vietnam). Asian Garden Mall was opened in 1987. Owing to its fame, it tends to have the highest costs of rent in Little Saigon. Jao also developed another heavily-frequented Vietnamese shopping center across the street, and this center once contained a long court of Confusious statues as motifs, but frequently vacant storefronts in the rear of the plaza were cleared to make way for housing developments. Today, a few of the original statues remain.

After doing a little research, my primary stop was the Asian Garden Mall which did indeed have numerous jewlers and jewlery stores. But intermixed were some interesting shops and food court with traditional Vietnamese Food. After a stroll around the mall I ventured further down Bolsa Ave admiring the architecture and all of the numerous Vietnamese shops and cafes. There was no shortage of places to eat!

One of my favorite things to visit when I travel are the markets! Even here, I wanted to visit the markets. There were two major supermarkets and both were similar and proved to be a treat. One was T & K Foods and the other was A Dong Supermarket. Both had every imaginable Asian Cooking incredient you could want from rice to rice paper, noodles to tea, and of course exotic fruit. My favorite part of the supermarket was the meat deparment where fresh fish laid out and every imaginable type of meat and meat part (chicken legs, from legs, tongue, ox tail). I felt like I was back in Vietnam!

After shopping around and enjoying the smells and sights of the markets I returend to the Asian Garden Mall for lunch. I figured with a food court serving only traditional Vietnamese Food I would find something to remind me of my trip. I settled on three spring rolls and huge bowl of Pho! I even ate it all with chopsticks. After being filled with both food and culture it was time to end my day.

So if you find yourself in Orange County which is likely with Knotts Berry Farm and Disneyland, and you want to treat yourself to an off the beaten path treat for a few hours, Little Saigon is the place to visit. After having visited Vietnam and now Little Saigon, I can say…you can visit Vietnam without leaving Orange County!