Company visits on company visits on company visits. We started off at Saigon Newport Corporation. SNP is the largest port in Vietnam and is responsible for almost 80% of Vietnam's exports and imports. There is no port of that size and magnitude in the United States! But the most interesting part was that SNP is government owned and managed. It is run by the Vietnamese Navy. This means that the government controls 80% of what Vietnamese imports and exports. I could only imagine what would happen if the United States government attempted to do that. This is one of the very few instances where I noticed the communism state of the nation. Like the U.S. consulate said, the Vietnamese are not very good at being communist. While we were there, we were shown the control room. From the control room you pretty much had a view of the whole port... it was very big. Next we were taken on a tour and shown how large the port truly is.
After a quick lunch at the UEF canteen, we headed to the Quang Trung Software City. QTSC is similar to VSIP except it's specifically built for software companies. I was not very impressed by QTSC. VSIP was much more organized and better put together. QTSC also gave me the impression that it was relatively empty. After a quick tour of QTSC we drove to TMA Solutions. TMA Solutions is a software outsourcing company that provides research and products to larger technology companies. One of the many projects they are working on is an upgrade of the Android iOs. The list of companies they service is very impressive and include some of the biggest techonology companies in the world. Once the visit at TMA Solutions was over, I realized that it was our last company visit. Our adventure in Vietnam was almost over... I don't want this to end!
Tonight, we went to another street vendor. This time we had Vietnamese ice cream. It tasted very good! It was very similar to American ice cream but I am positive that it is a lot more healthy than the ice cream I have here. In the ice cream there were parts of Chom Chom, my favorite Vietnamese fruit. It was very delicious. In the street vendor place, we finally got to sit in the tiny plastic chairs that everyone is always chilling on! I had been waiting for this moment for so long... I had almost reached complete Vietnamese chill status. Then we went to get dinner at Kichi Kichi, which is a Hot Pot restaurant. At Kichi Kichi, you order a spiced broth that you want. They bring you the broth in a pot and you put it over a hot stove. As the broth is brough to a broil you take plates off of a conveyor belt that is moving in front of you. On the plates there are a ton of different things. There is ham, bacon, pork, beef, crab, fish, prawns, squid, noodles, and tons of different vegetables. Some of the things were very unsettling... I thought at first that the prawns were alive. I could not eat something where I could look into its eyes. But My seemed to love the prawn... I was very impressed even though it was probably delicious. In my pot, I put crab, ham, pork, and tons of noodles. It was very good! Although I thought the restaurant was a brilliant idea, it would never have passed regulations in the US. Having raw food moving around on an open conveyor belt would not be considered sanitary. After a jam-packed day, it was back to the Victory Hotel for a short night's sleep.
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