The staccato hammering of shuttering has stuttered to a halt on this massive development of apartment blocks!The cranes haven’t moved for at least ten days!
Saigon is like a ‘Ghost Town’ (The Specials 1981 – Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? We danced and sang, and the music played in de boomtown.)
Vietnam is not particularly well known for it’s ceramics but there are villages in the Central and Northern provinces that have been producing for hundreds of years. Below is a series of pictures from a roadside retail outlet.
Covid has recently decided to descend on Ho Chi Minh City. The mutated Indian strain known as the ‘Delta variant’ seems to be more virulent than earlier incarnations and highly transmittable.
We live on the 7th floor of an apartment block in the general Celadon City area Tan Phu. In the last twenty months our floor has experienced 3 male deaths from non-covid sources and now has a covid contaminated apartment.
This has resulted in a total lockdown of our floor, two of the four lifts being cordoned off and a twenty four seven police presence. Rubbish/garbage is not disposed of down a shute as normal but segregated into separate bins. Food and drink are ordered by phone / apps and delivered to your door.
Police Officers stationed outside the two functioning lifts
The occupants of this floor have been required to provide three tests using nasal swabs that, depending on the operator, can be quite uncomfortable.
These compulsory tests of apartment block occupants in the area of Celadon have probably produced positives that would have most likely not have been revealed. People may have had mild symptoms which disappeared after a few days using self medication. The revealed figures adding to the surge in infections within the city.
Dedicated testersCompulsory testing of two apartment blocks
There is no doubt that Covid is changing our world. Technology allows us to become more introvert, more isolated, more suspicious of everyone and everything. I have a friend in UK who quarantines every single thing that comes into his house for at least 7 days before anyone touches it. Maybe he’s right! Who knows? It means you have to factor into your food/ clothes/ daily requirements a delay that may become permanent. Now we have to think carefully about any social engagement, meeting a friend accidentally and having a coffee is now stressful or to be avoided. It certainly isn’t relaxing and fun. Smartphones are essential, QR Codes are the fast track into a supermarket we just used to wander into. Netflix is our entertainment, not the cinema. Spotify and Amazon music have long since replaced the CD. They’re just a few clicks or touches away. You don’t need to go out to buy anything. A world where virtually anything and everything is possible. Literally a virtual world.
I am lucky, I’ve played marbles in a gutter, collected cards from ‘fag’ packets, played in a school playground, had a catapult, an air rifle, a fishing rod, a bike.
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