It doesn’t feel real how fast the days have gone by. Today was our last site visit at the Cat Lai Terminal and it was definitely different than the rest. I’ve never been to a shipping container shipyard before and it was interesting to see how the supply chain of imports and exports works. The shipyard was huge and I couldn’t believe how humans could possibly get all this done in such a short span of time. Imagining how efficient the shipyard has to be makes me really appreciate the efforts of the people who work at these kinds of places because they’re basically necessary for the things we use and buy in our daily lives. Although it’s very helpful to our lives, this seems like something that I would never do because I could never be out in the sun and heat for that long. Also, id much rather be doing things on the technical side since I’m more of a math guy and would like to utilize what I’m good at. After the port, we went to the American consulate and learnt about the economic situation between America and Vietnam. It went deep into the reasons behind the history of Vietnams recent economy and what’s affecting it now and how things might look in the future. When thinking about the tariffs set on Vietnam by America, it seems like they will be affecting actions at the port because it has to do with imports and exports. It might affect the wages the most since that’s something that can be easily changed, but that might upset the workers since they’ll be getting less money. Either way, the whole port business will be upset because something is going to be affected negatively.
Finally, we ended our day with a trip to the Banh Thanh Market. This was super fun for all of us because we’ve all been really excited to buy things and try to bargain. Something I noticed was that most of the people who were selling were women which is perfect cause I definitely would’ve been intimated if I had to bargain with me. Also, the older women were much easier to bargain with because they weren’t as stingy and were better with going to lower prices. Bargaining was really fun and it was a challenge with my friends to try and get prices to as low as possible. Overall, the day got better as it went on and I’m really sad that my adventure in Vietnam is almost over.
