Last Night in Mui Ne

Having breakfast at Wax in Mui Ne. Just past Sunny Resort on beach side. It's a bit more expensive than Lam Ton but nicer. The breakfast is more like $1.5 instead of $1. It also has a pool table. The place is hidden away from the main street. I heard that the Wifi was fast but it's not working at all. The manager says it's on but I'm pretty sure he has no clue. Update: It's working now and I'm getting really fast speeds!

Looks like we're not going to have morning wind today. So much for the prediction from WindGuru. Yesterday was great though. My best day ever of kite surfing. I'm now able to consistently get up and head down wind for 20 meters or so.

Last night we had drinks at Beach Break Bar on the strip. They make a pretty decent Mojito and they are 2 for 1, which means 50,000 vnd ($3). I ordered my second Mojito just as the taxis arrived to take us to dinner. I asked that they make mine to go. They put it in a little baggie with two straws and a rubber band holding the bag closed, very cute.

We then went to a local restaurant that specializes in goat. They cook the soup at the table in little pots. You get to put in your own veggies and noodles. It was pretty good. They also kept refilling the beer glasses. Since they put ice in the glasses, I poured the remnants of my Mojito into the glass; mint, lime, and all. This was actually pretty good. The beer here is very light, kind of like Corona, so a lime and some mint mixes pretty well. We probably had 40 people last night. The crowd as bigger than normal. It was kind of a going away party since a few of the folks who had been around for a week or so were heading out.

I met a Polish guy named Derek who is from Alameda. He's a finance guy and has been here for a couple of months. For some reason he started talking about 'the singularity' and Kuzweil's web site. Strangely enough, I had a copy of Charles Stross' Glasshouse with me, which is set in a post singularity future. I showed him the book. The back cover promotes Singularity Sky and another Stross title.

After dinner most folks went out to the Pogo bar. I was zonked from kite surfing, Mojito's, goat soup, and beer so I decided to head back to the hotel and get some sleep.

Mui Ne Beach

This is the view from Wax, a beach bar, where I'm having breakfast.
Man it's pretty great here!

New Office Under Way

Originally uploaded by adamb90

It seems we're making headway on the new office. The balcony doors have been ripped out. The drop ceiling is gone. The bathroom is almost bricked off from the rest of the room.

If we're lucky, this will be the week we move in.

Niveau Riche

Nouveau Riche taken to a whole new level.

When I went away to college as a young man, I remember being accused of being nouveau riche. This was startling to me since I came from a small town where there were almost no rich people at all. Sure, we were on the upper end of the scale and I did have some issues growing up and being known as the rich kid in town. Being accused of being nouveau riche was a little confusing. I had never thought about different wealth categories since I had only been exposed to one.

Now I find myself in Vietnam, where the whole nouveau riche thing is taken to another, astronomical, level. I met a Scot recently who was blaming a lot of the local problems on the fact that Vietnam today is the result of what happens when a bunch of peasants suddenly become rich. (Imagine what might happen if the entire trailer park won the lottery!) Presumably there are a large number of multi-millionaires in Vietnam. I've heard of clubs that cater to the local rich, where they can go and show off their new wealth. There are stories of local Vietnamese going to the newly opened Louis Vuitton store and buying 40 handbags or $4,000 jackets. What's most striking is the rapid rise in wealth. It's not so much the level of wealth, but the delta change in wealth over such a short time. On my first trip to Vietnam in 1995 the roads were equally crowded with bicycles and motorbikes, with the odd car here and there. Today bikes are as rare as cars were in 1995. Today motorbikes and cars are about equal in terms of the traffic volume. The overall traffic is just going from bad to worse.

What does this mean for the future of the country? It seems the future is bright, but there will continue to be growing pains. Communism might actually help keep things in balance. In India today you see slums right up against shiny new high tech buildings. The social unrest from a gross economic divide seems to be coming to a head over there. It's possible that in ten years Vietnam could find itself in a similar situation. It's also possible that the communist government here will be able to keep things in balance better than the Indian democracy has done to date. Only time will tell.



One of the things I love about this place is how industrious it is. Capitalism is thriving. Almost everyone has a business, no matter how small. The street vendors are a great example. You can see any number of Rube Goldberg food carts being pushed, pulled, and ridden all around the city. My favorite are the bicycle squid vendors. The standard seems to be a bike outfitted with a rack of hanging translucent dried squid, lit from above by a battery powered florescent light bulb. Under the squid is usually a hand cranked grinder bolted to a piece of wood and a selection of spices. After dark there is a Burning Man like surreal quality to these bicycles. Apparently you select your squid and the vendor will grind it up for you, seasoning it to your taste. The result looks a bit like light brown snuff or a pile of short strand cotton candy. My kids love this stuff, I'm still undecided.