A Full Load
I was so tired last night that I managed to fall asleep with my glasses still. Never the less I was awake bright and early at 6 am, and to be honest it was completely worth it!
Today we headed down the street from out hotel to a local park to enjoy the early morning activities. After successfully braving another street crossing the first thing I noticed was there were tons of badminton players. By the way, when I say players I mean fierce competitors, I never knew badminton could be taken so seriously, but apparently so.
There were several people walking around the park so I joined them until I got to the…for lack of a better name… morning exercisers. There were rows upon rows of people doing dances to music with various exercise moves. I was hooked, as they always say “When in Rome…” so I jumped in and you can see the results in the video from the previous post.
After a bit of exercise Jason, Sarah, Dr. Nishikawa and I approached some of the locals playing a hackey sack type of game with an item made out of bottle caps, straws, and feathers. We joined in and after being shown up by several local children we were given one of the so called “magic shuttes” as a gift to practice with. The final sight in the park was the bird airing. It may sound crazy, but people literally bring their caged birds to the park for fresh air. There are hangars for the cages and the people enjoy a drink or cigarette while their birds hang in the fresh air.
We returned to the hotel for breakfast and a short relaxation before heading out for the day’s activities. First stop, Things cafe to speak with Melissa Merriweather, an architect who specializes in green buildings. It was an amazing talk about a lot of interesting issues. One of the most obvious but interesting is the fact that 90% of transportation in the city is motorbikes. Not only that but private transportation numbers are expected to double by 2015 while public transport is expected to remain the same.
It’s crazy that in such a populous city they haven’t implemented a larger public transportation system. It seems like common sense to use public transport. Not ony would it limit carbon emmissions, but also would help traffic conditions and speed up commutes.
Melissa was also instrumental in developing LOTUS, the Vietnamese version of LEED. LOTUS is an easier certification to reach than LEED, but still maintains a lot of prestige. One key aspect that I thought was interesting was the category for community. LOTUS awards points for businesses communicating with and involving communities with their building projects, something that isn’t required by Vietnam law.I won’t bore you with more details, it was a truly great talk that covered way more than I expected. It was cool to see what Vietnam is doing in an attempt to become greener, as well as the social and business climates and ramifications.
We then proceeded to lunch where we enjoyed the famous Vietnamese Pho (pronounced fuh) which was absolutely delicious!
It is a noodle dish with beef, a variety of herbs, and sauces, and was really tasty. The other cool part of this restaurant was that it actually served as the headquarters for the Tet Offensive. In the front was the noodle restaurant as cover, and then in the back and up a few flights of stairs was the one room communist HQ for planning and executing the Tet Offensive.
Our guide Tung then took us to the Reunification palace (formerly the Independence Palace). This was where the South Vietnamese president lived and ran the Vietnam war. It was a huge beautiful building built by the Frenchwhen they occupied Vietnam. It would be
impossible to describe in this short space, but trust me it was amazing.
For our final activity of the afternoon we visited the Ho Chi Minh City zoo. The first thing that was notable was the price. It cost a mere 8,000 dong (approx. 40 cents USD). I can’t imagine what Vietnamese people think when they come to the US and have to pay at least $20 to get into our zoos. The zoo was a beautiful place that was spread out and didn’t feel cramped or crowded at all. As for the animals, there was a gigantic hippo, actually more like a cross between a hippo and Godzilla, so that was kind of scary.
We also got to see lions being fed which was cool, and some Porcupines to finish off the tour (We saw more than that, but for the sake of time and space that’s all I will mention).
For dinner we met up with Vanessa Hurst from the number one advertising firm in Vietnam. She talked to us about the differences in advertising here compared to the states. One of the biggest differences being that you can’t say someone else’s product is bad or that your product is better. You can simply talk about how good your product is. This seems to narrow your strategy choices down a lot, and in my opinion would make competition a lot tougher.
One question I posed was “How has Heineken established such a dominance on the imported beer market?” No matter where you go you can always find the local beers and Heineken, but nothing else (for the record Tiger beer is the best I’ve had so far). According to Vanessa this isn’t due to ads or popularity, it most likely involved Heineken cutting deals with the government early on to cement it’s place here. I guess that’s part of what you get when you don’t have the pure free market economy of the US.
As you can tell today was jam packed, and there are so many details I was forced to leave out. I simply don’t have time to write them all, and you probably don’t have time to read them all. Just drop a comment if you want more information on something, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more posts soon.