Today we went to Cat Lai Terminal. This was one of the 16 terminal ports operated by Tan Cang. Tan Cang is one of the biggest shipping companies in Vietnam with another 5 deep water ports, 7 feeders, and 4 barging terminals. Until now I did not have a full grasp of how big shipping operations were for a country. Tan Cang has over 17,000 employees at all of their locations and they ship between continents and up and down the Mekong Delta. I was intrigued to learn about the Vietnamese trading partners. It made sense that most of their imports came from China, which made sense to me, but the second largest imported country is Korea. This surprised me but I can understand the proximity makes it easier to ship. The exports of Vietnam fir my preconceptions mostly, with China and then the US being the countries Vietnam exports to the most.
On the tour I think it was very cool to see the size of the port as we drove around in our little golf cart bus. We saw a ship being unloaded by 3 cranes at once. Even at 81 crates/ hour, it can take 18 hours to unload the ship. We also got to see their rice barges unloading their bags by conveyor belt.
One of the ports seemingly most customer ease of use beneficial was the E-port. They developed this system before covid which allowed customers to check in virtually and submit what their cargo was. Customers didn’t use this until COVID made it critical for shipping to reduce contact. Now most of their customers use the online system instead.
After this visit we went to the Banh Thanh street market to do some shopping and haggling. I thought this was a very interesting place, but it seemed there were like 7 stalls that just were repeated across the market. There were the watch stalls, the wallet stalls, the trinket stalls, the t-shirt stalls, the clothing stalls, the tailors and then the underwear stalls. My first experience with haggling was when I was looking at a wallet that I wasn’t super interested in and wasn’t planning on spending much money on so I started to walk away after hearing the asking price of 950,000 Dong. I got about 5 steps away when the woman working the stall called out that she could make it 500,000 for me. I turned around to listen to her and came a little closer to consider it but then I turned and left again. After reaching the same point she said 350,000 so I again turned to hear what she said better but still didn’t want to pay that much for a wallet that I wasn’t in love with. SO I turned away from her again and then she pulled out the 250,000 price point and at this point I decided, why not. Upon reflection I could have attempted to haggle further but she had done the work all on her own and I am unexperienced so I took the 700,000 reduced price.
