We have rapidly found that no meetings will be scheduled from noon – 2:00. While not everybody takes a lunch break of two hours, the opportunity seems to be there. Matt feels it is a vestige of more rural, pre-A/C days to allow people to nap in the middle of the day’s heat. The basic workday is 8 – 6 M-F, plus 8-noon on Saturdays, but it is usual to see people at their desks by 7:30 and staying until 7 or 7:30. The national government made a push several years ago to encourage businesses to only work M-F, but that endeavor has obviously failed since even this 51% government-owned bank doesn’t follow that dictate.
I am still getting used to the early nightfall…sunrise is about 5:30 and sunset about 5:45, so it is twilight by the time we typically leave the office for the 5-minute walk to the hotel. There aren’t a lot of streetlights, but lights from vehicles and open storefronts is perfectly sufficient.
We haven’t experienced much rain so far…two nights when it poured all night but relatively little during the day. If there is rain, it does seem to taper off as the day progresses. Just after Matt got here in late July, a typhoon hit and dumped over 20 inches of rain in one day. We are entering the drier part of the year, expecting maybe three inches of rain per month through November.
Traffic is all it was cracked up to be, and more. It can literally be wall to wall motor scooters during both rush hours, more so in the evening rush because it is more compacted. Once of these days I shall create a video and upload it to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Even better, the next time we need to take a taxi around rush hour, I’ll try to get a video through the windshield so you can see how expert, or foolhardy, these drivers are. BTW, we met a fellow expat from our Baku project last night at his hotel (he’s in town on yet another project with a separate bank), and the taxi fare on each 3 km. leg was just under a dollar.
I encountered my first episode of overt government censorship earlier this week. I have been unable to post to this blog directly from Hanoi, but figured I was just forgetting some instruction. But, no, in a Skype call with Nancy she figured out that the resident censors are overriding the instruction buttons on my version of the blog, so I can read what is posted but do nothing else. Obviously we can get around the block or you wouldn’t be reading this right now, but the futility of censorship can be really annoying (and we’ll see if the censors take offense to those comments real soon, won’t we?).
Matt, Howard, and I were caught offguard in a meeting Wednesday afternoon when the Chairman, in a brief stop back here in between weeklong trips, decided to summon us (yes, that is the correct word to use) to meet the project team. A cordial but perfunctory individual. He was gracious, and left each of us with a small statue of a pair of carp as a gift. But, we have been summoned to a presentation for him on Sunday afternoon, October 2, to update him on the project…something we had not been planning until later in the month. We will, of course, bill the bank as a full work day for that presentation, but none of us had been planning to give up a weekend afternoon. The choice is not ours, as IFC is sending their Vietnam officer in from Ho Chi Minh City to also attend.
Food is a constant aspect of our non-work lives here. Monday, as we were going among branches to meet with calling officers, our interpreters took us to a popular German restaurant…the first time I had ever had an entire pig leg accompanied by a papaya salad. German beer also seemed to be flowing heavily among the locals. Wednesday night was a visit to an authentic Viet tourist trap restaurant just around the corner. Despite being overpriced, the full dinner was only $8 per person, and tomorrow night I’ll be returning with my team leader and his wife & daughter. Lunch today was the low point of eating – Highland Coffee, the local equivalent of Starbucks with tolerable sandwiches. OTOH, lunch Wednesday was at a native dive (one rapidly learns it’s OK to eat at the open air dives with benches, but not those bunched around a fire on the sidewalk and furnished with low plastic stools). This proprietor only makes two dishes a day…we got there too late for the pork pho, but there was plenty of chicken pho left. About a pint of broth, chicken, rice noodles, chives, and scallions for less than $1.50.
It’s closing in on midnight, and I’m trying to get the flight reservations for Armenia nailed before the weekend hits in D.C., so it’s a good time to close. Tomorrow I wander on my own, back to the Hoam Kiem Lake area to check out the merchants, sample some dive food, view Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, and hopefully catch a water puppet show. Sunday, our interpreters have promised more adventures.
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