Today was probably our busiest day of our trip to Vietnam. It started this morning with a lecture about Buddhism at UEF. I found the lecture to be a very interesting lecture. I didn’t realize that Buddhism is considered to be a philosophy rather than a religion. Learning about some of the ideas of Buddhism and how it originated were fascinating. On our way to a pagoda, following the lecture, we stopped at a memorial that was made in the location where the famous picture was taken of a Buddhist monk who had lit himself on fire and died in protest of the South Vietnam Prime Minister during the Vietnam War. This protest was a result of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Prime Minister, killing and torturing monks. Shortly after the picture of the monk on fire made way to the United States, President John F. Kennedy had Diem caught and executed by the CIA. After our visit to the memorial we went in to the pagoda. The interior of the pagoda was beautiful, and it was cool to walk around and see the different rooms.
Following our trip to the pagoda, we had lunch at a food court, where I ordered a dish that had seafood with crispy noodles (which was amazing) and a mango smoothie that was probably the best smoothie I have ever had.
After lunch, we then went to VinaCapital for a site visit. VinaCapital Group is an investment company who are also the main donors for VinaCapital Foundation, which is a foundation created to help treat kids in poorer areas of Vietnam who are sick. The foundation is a perfect example of the development of Vietnam as a country. Less developed countries don’t have the funds for foundations like this and instead rely on outside aid. However, VinaCapital foundation allows for aid within the country and works very closely with the government. They are even at the stage where the government has been trying to convince the foundation to bring aid to Laos and help with development in that country as well as Vietnam. A less developed country wouldn’t be as worried about developing the countries around it, instead focusing on their own development.
Following our site visit, we then went to the Ben Tanh Market, where we practiced our Vietnamese as well as our negotiation skills. I’m not going to lie, I relied more on using English and typing numbers in to a calculator rather than my Vietnamese because I’m not the greatest Vietnamese speaker and it saved a lot of time. I had a lot of fun negotiating with the different sellers and used many different strategies, but I found the best one to be giving them the price I wanted and if they said no I would just walk away. Every time this resulted in them saying “Wait! Your price!”. I was able to get about 50% off the original price of everything I bought, which I think is some pretty successful negotiating.
As I said before, today was a pretty hectic day, but it was very enjoyable and I had a lot of fun negotiating at the Ben Tanh Market.