Interesting fact about Ho Chi Minh City: For every 1,000 people, there are 675 scooters and motorcycles. For comparison's sake, in an Indian city like Chennai, it's around 175 or something. Other than taxis and trucks, people don't really drive cars here. It's basically Mario Kart in real life. Except this is no rainbow road... Anyway, today Julia took me on her scooter to dinner! It was really fun; I hadn't really done anything like it since my cousins used to take me out as a kid in India and Garrett got a great picture of it (will post later). Dinner was a little disappointing because I love Asian food so much and we went to a quasi-French American place. I also realized my stomach has already grown accustomed to super light Vietnamese food and was not prepared to eat salmon cheese (salmon with cheese sauce, but I thought how it was listed on the menu was funny). We went to a karaoke bar after dinner, which was really fun. It's an interesting concept: You and your friends reserve a private room and can dine inside the room with your own TV, mics, speaker system, etc. We were all really tired, so we called it a night kind of early so I hope we can do it next week!
There were two company visits today, more up my alley as an engineering student. We visited the first Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park, located ~45 minutes outside of HCMC and one of the factories in the park, run by the laser optics company II-VI. I really enjoyed touring the factory (so much electrolysis, I was proud to say I could understand what was going on) and seeing the product (basically a semi-conducting ceramic and ZnSe sandwich) in its various stages from beginning to end. It was exactly like a show my dad and I watch called How It's Made. I seriously could have filmed it and submitted the tape. It was also very interesting to learn about the professional culture in Vietnam and the relationship between internationally-based companies and the Vietnamese government. I especially found it interesting that they regularly take naps during the lunch break. Sounds great to me!
We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the Binh Duong. Lots of seafood--the fried octopus was especially good. It neighbored a former ceramics factory (now a small mall) where we could look at some porcelain figurines and such... Some of them were hilarious(ly weird). Tons of Disney ones. I was so exhausted when we got back, I passed out for two hours before dinner. All in all a good day--we visit Glass Egg tomorrow (the company I researched) so I'm pretty excited! Chào bên!
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