I’ve spent my last two days in Vietnam in Saigon swimming at a small 25m pool, and taking a stroll with my aunt and cousin at a lotus park close to where my hotel was. The last few days was also spent eating a ton of delicious food and figuring out what we’ll do when I come back in mid-August for my second stint of Vietnam before I fly back to SF. Vietnam is truly a robust country with plenty of developments happening. I hope that in a period of ten to twenty years the country will be even more developed like some of its Southeast Asian neighbors. There are two metropolis in Vietnam: Hanoi in the north and Saigon (i.e. Ho Chi Minh City) in the south. The streets to my surprise are very clean for big cities like this. While there is somewhat a lack of garbage cans, people put their garbage out responsibly and there are collectors who pick them up throughout the day. The only problem that I have seen so far is the amount of traffic in the city. There are too many two wheelers on the streets which can cause bad traffic congestion during rush hour. While the pollution is nothing compared to India or China, many Vietnamese are aware that they do not want to be breathing in fumes and so you will have a lot of people wearing face masks when they’re riding their scooters--personally, I’m not too sure how effective they are. Vietnam now is also building overpasses which I hope will alleviate the congestion. What I would like to see more are buses and investments in mass transmit.
As far as I know, the food is hygienic. Vietnamese for some reason are concerned where their food comes from and what kind of water they are drinking. My relatives are not a fan of the Chinese food industry and I don’t think that Vietnam import much food grown from China due to our fears that it might be contaminated. I read in the news a few months back that officials found 16,000 dead pigs in the Shanghai river and just a few weeks ago some people were arrested for lacing rat meat into pork to maximize their profits. Vietnamese are aware of all that, hence when I was in Vietnam I preferred to eat more of seafood than pork. In terms of water, we don’t have crazy water shortage like there is in India. I took at least six showers a day in order to cope with the high humidity--that’s a luxury that is not available at all when I stay in India. In many parts of Pune, water supply is cut off after 10 in the morning and will not come back again, and so most residents have to fill up a 20 gallon tub of water that will last them for the entire day.
Vietnamese people get their drinking water from 10 gallon bottles that are distributed from water companies, rarely will household use tap water due to the fear of contamination. Our rice fields and the green vegetables that Vietnamese grow abundantly and used in so many of our dishes are probably organic too. I guess it’s what you would expect from countries before the whole agro business industry that changed and distorted the mindset of people and their relationship to food. It was somewhat strange to see chickens ranging freely since I’ve been so accustomed to seeing them in cages in India. The chickens that I saw were small to medium sized and come in a variety of different colors and not the plump and sickly varieties that are all pale white found in India. But the one thing that I am concern about is the fact that we have too much pork in our diet and I didn’t see any free-ranging pigs--heck I didn’t see any pigs at all for that matter.
The one thing that I don’t like so much about Vietnam is the way how we construct our houses. I’m sure there are better ways to build houses so that it doesn’t trap the heat and make it feel completely stuffy and unbearable. The vast majority of the houses are build as if it is a slim tower with lots of depth, but lack all sense of spaciousness. It’s hard to describe the actual structure and to add insult to injury, Vietnamese are obsessed with building gates and fences as if robbers are going to break into their house and steal all their possessions. But I’ve seen some really beautiful mansions too, hopefully that will be a sign of what’s to come. I’m very excited about Vietnam’s potential in the future. On this trip to my homeland, I feel more connected to the country than I did last year. What ties me to the country is the shared language and the delicious food with its subtle differences in different parts of the country. People are friendly to each other but a little reserve when it comes to foreigners, unlike Thailand which is probably the friendliest country that I have been to. In many ways it was simply amusing to hear people making witty and sometimes sarcastic remarks about life and other people. It was such a relief to observe my countrymen taking a very light-hearted approach to living.
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