So much for the benevolent central planner...

It was a quiet, mildly rainy day that started a little before 6 AM. We were planning on going for a run at 6 in a stadium that is located just half a block away from our alley. On our way out of the house, we bumped into a small magical moment. The landlady was kneeling in front of a small altar that is placed on the floor, by the stairs that lead to the guest rooms. She was holding five lightened incense sticks, while bowing towards the altar in some sort of ritual. The family is Buddhist, like a large part of Vietnam’s population. But you would not see such prayers in other Buddhist countries (Widhar, a Buddhist himself, wasn’t familiar with them), as Vietnamese Buddhism is different than other types, focusing more on ceremonial rituals that on meditation. Thus, it is not infrequent to see small altars, just like the one in our house, in many places around the city… We remained silent for a moment, and waited until she had finished and left the still-burning incenses in the altar before heading outside the house.



We found the stadium right away, and headed right into the racetrack. The first thing we noticed is that it was made out of a seemingly very expensive synthetic material… quite an investment in sports infrastructure, arguably a bit too much for a country with many others evidently unmet needs… Talking about this we started running, among the locals who frequent the place to jog, practice Tai-Chi, or just to hang out and enjoy the open space. Everything was going just fine until we ran into a house.

Yes, well read. A house, right in the middle of the racetrack. The only way of continuing our jog was to go around the corner of the house and resume the track on the other side. Again, the images tell more than a 1.000 words, so check out the pics. What happened? How in a socialist system, where decisions are allegedly centralized, can something like that be? I guess the central planners, benevolent as they may be, were either not such good planners or not as centralized as the name suggests.





Meanwhile in the world, Barack Hussein Obama landed on Saudi Arabia, a visit that is mean to signal that we are living a totally new era in the US foreign policy, which includes new ways of relating to the Arab World…. I love the guy, and I think it is a bit unfair that we stopped paying so much attention to his whereabouts once he made it to the White House. So far, he still seems to be fighting the system, at least some hairy ugly parts of it… way to go.