What's over there?
DANANG, VIETNAM – I’ve been seeing red this past week.
No, I’m not angry.
What I mean is I’ve been seeing red flags all over.
They’re not the figurative ‘red flags’ you see mentally when something seems amiss.
No, I’m talking about literal red flags, as in the national flag of Vietnam. The simple bright red banner with a brilliant yellow five-pointed star in the center.
DANANG, VIETNAM – A while back I read a story about the ‘money game’ described by an expat living in Mexico.
It was all about the challenges of acquiring and keeping enough small-denomination bills to be able to shop in local markets and stores.
We play that same game here in Vietnam.
DANANG, VIETNAM – We awoke Thursday morning to sunshine and blue sky… a welcome change from the challenges of Wednesday’s typhoon.
Continue reading “Riding The Storm Out: Our Typhoon Close Encounter”
DANANG, VIETNAM – Here’s an unusual sight from today’s morning shopping excursion. No, not the construction site… those are seemingly everywhere around Vietnam.
What’s unusual about this scene is the row of palletized building bricks. Neatly stacked on wooden pallets and wrapped in plastic for easier handling. We don’t normally see that.
The typical construction site scenario around here goes like this:
A large stake-bed truck pulls up to the site, piled to the top with red clay bricks, neatly stacked right on the truck bed.
Several laborers, who rode in on top of the load, hop off the truck and drop the stake sides. They then proceed to unload the thousands of bricks and neatly re-stack them on the ground… brick by brick!
And since the bricks had been stacked directly on the truck bed, you can probably guess how they originally got there.
That’s right; the laborers back at the factory (probably the same ones who rode out with the load) stacked them there… brick by brick.
So Vietnam scores extra points for “full” employment.
Efficiency? Not so much.
DANANG, VIETNAM – We’ve crawled out of bed before dawn plenty of times to catch an international flight. But getting up at 5 a.m. to drive less than 10 kilometers up the road? That seemed a bit much.
With most international borders still closed, our near-term travel plans now feature so-called ‘staycations’ and short trips to places closer to home. Last week we joined a few expat friends to do just that.