Day 8

Today was one of our less exciting days. We had a Vietnamese history class this morning which I had a hard time staying awake in, and then we had our language class, in which we learned numbers.
Our site visit for the day was with CB Richard Ellis. The woman who spoke with us was from Wisconsin originally, and first came to Vietnam during her undergrad. After graduating she decided to come here to work full time. I thought her story was really interesting. She talked a lot about the 'palefaces' and 'expats' in Vietnam who are working here and how most of them are kind of forced to come here by their company so they are paid ridiculous amounts of money and get to stay in these incredible apartments in the nicest parts of town. I thought it was awesome that she chose to come to work in Vietnam, and she was really excited to tell us some secrets of the city, like a restaurant where you can eat scorpions. CBRE is a real estate firm, so she was also able to explain to us how the housing crisis in Vietnam was spurred by the credit crisis around the world, but not for the reasons we would expect. The Vietnamese actually mostly don't have bank accounts. Mostly, they keep their money in blocks of gold or straps of bills hid in their houses somewhere. So when they go to buy a house or an apartment, they walk into her shows with plastic bags full of cash. The reason housing prices skyrocketed in Vietnam is becasue the people saw what was going on around the world and were afraid that the properties they bought (or actually lease from the government) would depreciate in value like properties did in America, for example. It was an interesting perspective, and I think that she was able to explain what was going on economically in Vietnam really well.
For dinner we found this great place called Thai Express. I had honey chicken, which was so good! It was a cool restaurant, too, so I'm not sure why we were the only ones eating there, but we were. Regardless, it was one of the best dinners out I have had so far.