Vietnam Observations

I visited Vietnam for the first time and during the trip, I saw some “interesting” aspects of the country piqued my interest.

1. Motorbikes are popular

In Vietnam, it seems like there are a lot more motorbikes and mopeds than cars. Everyone drives motorbikes including students and adults. Motorbikes can fit up to 4 people (2 adults and 2 children). Some of the students driving the motorbikes looked pretty young, like in middle school.

I think one consequence of this is that the driving is a bit hectic. However, the people use honking as communication to let other motorists know that they intend to pass, which helps improve road safety.

2. Growing vegetables in countryside

While driving in the countryside, I noticed that the majority of the greenhouses have a roof with an opening. Imagine the roof is a semi circle – half of the roof has a different height than the other half of the roof, so the top of the building has a long opening. It seems like this may have something to do with air circulation. Another thing I noticed was that people set up makeshift gardens in their concrete driveways. They put out tarp on top of the driveway and then laid out dirt in rows. I couldn’t tell what they planned to grow in these gardens, but I suspect that they would be used to grow small vegetables, like baby tomatoes or small greens.

3. License plates have punctuation

I noticed that there are license plates that have dashes and decimal points. A few examples:

• ###-####
• ###-###.##
• ##-## ####
• ##-## ###.##

I’m not sure if there are meanings behind the dashes or the decimal points, but the dash only exists if there are 4 digits in the first section and the decimal point only exists if there are 5 digits in the second section. There is no indication for city or state as far as I could tell.

4. Pink hand soap

I feel like over half of the bathrooms I visited over my Vietnam trip had the same pink hand soap. I don’t know if they have a monopoly on the hand soap market or if this brand is just the cheapest option, but I thought it was pretty shocking.

5. Random animals walking around

During this trip, I saw a bunch of random animals walking around the streets and highway. Chicken, lizards, flies, mosquitoes, cats, dogs, oxen, and perhaps some more. Most of them seemed to just be chilling and trying to find food – these animals seemed to either be wild or stray.

Closing thoughts

I think Vietnam is a good country to visit. The food is tasty and relatively inexpensive. There are a number of activities for people to enjoy in the cities. The range of temperatures between morning and night can be large depending on where you are in the country, so looking up the weather forecast is helpful to determine how to dress for the day. One aspect I didn’t realize until this trip was that Vietnam is a large country in terms amount of land so traveling from one city to another can take a long time.

I have some more minor observations from the trip that I can talk about in the comments or in another blog post, but I think these 5 points are good enough for now.