We Don’t See That Every Day in Vietnam

Clay building bricks stacked on pallets and wrapped in plastic
Clay building bricks, neatly stacked on pallets and wrapped in plastic

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!

Bricks piled neatly on the ground at a Vietnamese construction site
Bricks piled neatly on the ground at a Vietnamese construction site

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.

In America it’s baseball. In Vietnam, construction?

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DANANG, VIETNAM – One thing we’ve seen again and again as we’ve traveled around Vietnam is a lot of construction. In Hanoi it seemed like there was a new building going up (or an old one coming down) on almost every block.

We saw the same thing on the Mekong Delta and up in the mountainous Sapa region. Even on Cat Ba Island in Lan Ha Bay, there was new construction galore.
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