Vietnam - first week impressions

After one week in this bustling city, what can I say? Well, firstly, it’s hot. Not unbearably hot but just hot. Hot enough to prevent you from walking to work, hot enough to make you wake up if you air-conditioning turns off due to yet another blackout in the hotel and hot enough for you to actually sweat between your toes. They say that it will get even hotter in January, wonderful.

My gripe about my hotel accommodation continues as the lady doing my laundry has a rather annoying habit of writing my room number on the tags of my clothes in blue ink. I am sure she means well, you know, so she doesn’t get the clothes mixed up…but please…use some some common sense…use pegs or something but don’t write on other peoples clothes. Anyway, work has found me a rather nice one bedroom apartment that I can move to at the end of the month, so hopefully that chapter has been sorted

The other, most striking feature of Ho Chi Minh City is how busy it is. For those of you who have been to London, think Oxford street during the weekday but replace everyone with motorbikes. For those of you in Melbourne, um…think boxing day sales at Chadstone….times two and then replace everyone with motorbikes. Those little Honda’s and their cheaper Chinese competition are everywhere, going in all directions. They are on the footpath beeping for you to get out of the way and also blocking the footpath causing you to walk on the road. Although, as one of my directors said, you know if you are in a 3^rd world country if its safer to walk on the road than the footpath, and he is right. The footpaths in Ho Chi Minh City are terrible, totally uneven, lots of slippery patches, full of holes and loose bricks. So word to the wise, it is safer to walk on the road, but go against the traffic (well the majority of it).

This brings me onto one aspect of Ho Chi Minh City that keeps getting repeated, the concern about crossing the road. It is well founded...to a degree. The zebra crossings on the road are NOT, and I repeat NOT pedestrian crossings. They don’t mean a thing. These cause so much confusion that the British Business council has petitioned to get rid of them due to the number of foreigners getting swiped by bikes on them. The only way to cross the road is follow these simple rules

1. Always wait until the cars and buses have gone
2. Wait for a gap in the sea of bikes, if there is not one, look for a thin spot
3. Check for bikes going in the opposite direction of traffic, then walk across slowly
4. The bikes should go around you…if you see one coming towards you and the idiot is on the mobile or looking the other way, its advisable to walk a little faster
5. If a bus or car suddenly appears, also walk a little faster

Once you make it to the other side, remember to watch out for the idiots on the footpath or stay on the road.

The other point to note is the food. Yes it is cheap, but surprisingly it is also rather good. Not good for the price but actually rather good irrespective of the price. The coffee too is brilliant. I’ll cover the food in more detail later, hopefully with more pictures if I remember to bring my camera along, but I can say that I am impressed with the food here.

What’s it like working here? Well, its only been 4 days and I haven’t done any work at all so I can’t comment yet. However, what did take me by surprise was what happens at lunch time. I come back from lunch and see about a dozen bodies slumped at their desks. Holy crap I say to myself, is there a gas leak? Nope, they just take a nap during lunch time. Brilliant! I like this place already. There is also a room called the K-Zone, it’s like a recreation room with sofa’s and a big TV. I prefer to call it the birthing room due to the large number of pregnant ladies asleep on the couches during lunch time. It’s actually a funny sight so I may take a picture of it one of these days.

Vietnam - Day 1

First day. I woke up to the sound of little Honda horns blaring away and looked at the time....6:15am. Oh boy.

Anyway after surfing the net for 2 hours or so I had a tim tam (actually 2) for breakfast and a glass of water and decided to hit the town. Well truth be told, I tried to have a shower first but there was no water pressure so I gave up.

The street I am on is called Le Thanh Ton, it has lots of restaurants and is very central. I wandered down and saw PHO 2000. It was supposed to be a famous PHO chain that Bill Clinton ate at when he was in Vietnam. So I went in. The PHO here is twice as expensive as the ones on the street but the servings are also twice as big. So it evens out.

It was rather nice I must say. Not quite as good a Melbourne Pho, but still rather tasty. At 29,000 DONG for the large serve (less than USD$2 or 90p in my currency) it was pretty good. It also passed the stomach test with flying colours.

I wandered around town for a bit and was chased, well not really chased by a persistent man on a Honda offering to take me around the city for USD$3 per hour. He even produced a written testimony from his friend "Chris" from Tokyo/Japan/Melbourne saying how good he was. Nice try buddy...





Anyway, after wandering around a bit, the heat got to me so went to the Tax Trading Centre and bought some DVD's for a buck a piece so I could retire to the hotel and watch em in air conditioned relative comfort.

Vietnam - Arrival

After relaxing for 2 weeks in Melbourne with family and friends, I set off on a 10 hour plane ride to Ho Chi Minh city. The flight, on a Vietnam Airlines plane was very smooth, full credit to the pilots. However, the in-flight entertainment, for want of a better word was a little lacking for the 10 hours. By about the 4th hour, and I had only been awake for 1 hour, I was getting really bored. Not being able to understand the Vietnamese TV that was being shown, I resorted to the drastic. Talking to the guy next to me. Never managed to catch his name, but he was a really nice Vietnamese bloke who lived in Melbourne and was going back to Vietnam to visit his relatives and retrieve his elderly grandma who had been there for 4 weeks. We chatted about the usual things, the weather, what to do in Vietnam, how cheap everything was and then about each others lives. He was an interesting fellow, married with 2 kids, lived in Paris for 4 years and worked in a bank. Never really caught the name of the bank but then again, I only caught about half the conversation, but that was enough. Surprisingly, we managed to talk about rubbish for nearly the entire flight.

Anyway, after lumbering through the airport, I was met by Mr Gioi, the driver of the KPMG van. It had a HUGE KPMG logo on the side and front, so it was not hard to miss. We plodded on through the sea of bikes. You will never appreciate the sheer number of these noisy little Honda's until you experience it for yourself. Like a swarm of ants, these little things dart around seemingly chaotic trails, yet manage to get to their destinations in one piece.

We arrived at my apartment to discover it was a hotel. I had a small room, with no cooking facilities to speak of, no iron, a really hard uncomfortable bed and a that's about it. Very student like I believe is the word. I am not sure that I can live here for 3 months. Words need to be had with the authorities I believe.


Not being able to cook my Indomee, I gave up and went to bed at 8pm feeling rather annoyed.