Working extra hard to get it wrong
Posted: December 8, 2011 Filed under: Reflections, Stories | Tags: design, printing, vietnam 2 Comments »
It was all fun and games before we noticed the typos
There’s a moment after you receive newly printed documents here when your heart sinks as you notice a typo.
“I could have sworn I checked and double checked that,” you say to yourself.
Then you see another, then another, then another.
“How could I….” you start, before you realise you hadn’t missed these mistakes, someone has re-keyed in all your words and got them wrong.
It happened on several occasions while we were readying signage and menus for the new Cart. I found nearly 20 spelling mistakes on the menu signage.
When I asked a friend, who’d worked locally in the hospitality industry, if it had happened to him he replied: “Every single menu we ever had printed”.
Like us he always sent over the computer files with the instructions just to print it as is. Every time they re-keyed it with added mistakes.
“One time,” he said, “I stood over them and watched them re-key it while all the time they were telling me they don’t do that”.
Cutting corners I can understand. But this seems like making extra work for yourself while also ensuring the end product is of no use whatsoever. Though obviously we’re missing something.
The obvious answer is we are sending it in the wrong format. But with one sign they finally relented and gave us our original computer file blown up as we asked for – and it was perfect.
And if the file was really wrong then why not ask for it in another format? Or at the very least why not cut and paste the words from one file to another?
It’s a common experience and no one appears to have come up with a reason why it happens. And this wasn’t something lost in translation – this was Vietnamese to Vietnamese with my wife making the arrangements
Also in this area, see printers of passport photos that airbrush out distinguishing features.
A passport photo without distinguishing features is really missing the point.
Development Working
Posted: October 18, 2011 Filed under: change, environment, Hanoi, ho tay, Reflections | Tags: building, development, Hanoi, vietnam 1 Comment »
I always took the word “developing” from an NGO point of view to be something of a polite euphemism.
After all, “developing countries”, was a phrase that was coined to replace “third world” which had little suggestion at all of any positivity. As a kid watching Bob Geldof plug Live Aid the Third World to me was starvation and flies.
So “developing” for the most part seemed like doublespeak. Surely the whole point was that the third world wasn’t developing – that was the problem.
The year I spent in Cameroon saw a country not so much developing and unravelling.
But Vietnam, as ever is different. Even the people who introduced the use of “developing”
couldn’t have imagined anything like this.
My wife’s family home is in a small suburb on the outskirts of town. It used to be in the countryside but urban sprawl caught up with it. The footprint of the house is about the size of a badminton court and there are four floors which housed, at one time, seven of them.
As people do in Vietnam they built their own home – or rather saved for, oversaw and organised its construction. Until recently I had always assumed that the fairly grand house I saw was how it had always been.
Later I learned that, little more than a decade ago, they all lived on the ground floor. So did all their neighbours. There wasn’t one two-storey house in the neighbourhood. Beyond that toilets and washing facilities were external and often shared.
What’s amazing is not how their family has prospered but how all the families have prospered. All houses are now several stories high. Beyond that houses are now being extended further.
The location out beyond Big C is a huge growth area so the neighbourhood is ringed with high rise tower blocks.
Multiply this on a grand scale and this is what is happening in Hanoi. Relentlessly upward and outward. Coping with migration to the cities coupled with a population explosion.
A colleague tells me that, as a kid, Westlake was like the sea. They couldn’t see the other side simply because there was nothing to see. They couldn’t view it from any height because there were no tall buildings.
Development in Vietnam really means development.
Support Carl Bart
Posted: September 16, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Hanoi, hanoi rock city, support carl bart, thailand, vietnam 3 Comments »
…and so we find ourselves in this awful predicament. Our darling son is hurt in a road accident, we have no knowledge of how it happened, just that he has serious brain injury, we have to get him home, but the cost is immense. How on earth we find the money, God only knows. There is no help from the Government, not even in the short term, and the state hospitals don’t have the facilities for his condition, so every day he stays in the private hospital costs £1,200. He won’t be well enough to leave for some time, and then there’s the air ambulance home. If he is well enough to come by stretcher on a scheduled flight we are looking at £35,000 to £45,000, so with the hospital fees of at least £30,000, that’s a lot of money to find. If he isn’t well enough for a stretcher flight and we end up arranging an air ambulance that will be £100,000.
We have managed to raise £60,000 by re-mortgaging our house, but we will be unlikely to ever pay that off, being now 59 and 60 years old, so we will have to sell at some point. We have pooled all our credit cards to raise another £25,000, so if all stays as planned we sort of have enough. The problems start though when we have to start repaying, so absolutely anything that can be done to raise funds to help will be great and truly appreciated.
Hanoi Rock City, Saturday 24 September.
Vietnam: The Next Generation
Posted: September 3, 2011 Filed under: change, Reflections | Tags: age, children, environment, growth, vietnam Leave a comment »
With Friday a national holiday we made the frankly ridiculous decision to visit Vincom Towers. We arrived, realised our mistake and got out.
Yesterday was also the seventh anniversary of me arriving in Vietnam. Back then it felt like there was teenagers everywhere. The sheer youthfulness of the country gave it so much of its optimism and vitality.
Now, looking around the shopping centre, it felt like those teenagers had become parents and it was their toddlers which had become the dominant age group. An altogether different dynamic.
Vietnam’s population has doubled since the end of the war. Their parents were the first in generations not to suffer war. You’d hope the majority of these kids won’t suffer poverty.
So what of the next generation?
It’s hard to guess whether the good news continues or whether they’re the ones who’ll start to pay for the growth of, well, pretty much everything.
Nghi Tam 90210
Posted: May 7, 2011 Filed under: Westlake | Tags: architecture, change, Hanoi, ho tay, house, modern, nghi tam, tay ho, vietnam, westlake 7 Comments »
Been meaning to blog this a while – this house recently appeared, seemingly overnight in Nghi Tam.
It was Tet when I first noticed it and by that stage it was ready to move into. I rather like it. There is underground parking and lots of lovely open planness. Considering the tall and thin nature of most local houses the fact that this is more spread out almost appears like a decleration of wealth. Building upwards is for poor people.
Anything negative I could find to say about it would only be jealousy. Nice job.
