Meeting 1: basic info about Vietnam

Today Elisa (from Finland), Nghi (from Vietnam) and I started our Each One Teach One meetings according to our schedule. The first meeting was about Nghi sharing with us Finns some basic info about Vietnam and the Vietnamese culture. I had little prior knowledge about Vietnam so I was eager to learn anything about the country.

I had heard about the war in Vietnam, but hadn’t really realized that after the country got independent in 1945 it was in a war for decades before the peace treaty was signed in 1975. There are roughly 90 million people in Vietnam and in the largest city, Ho Chi Minh City, alone there are more people than in Finland. The country has basically one political party, the Communist party.

Nghi told us that Vietnam is a developing country and that it is developing at a quite quick pace. Nghi was born in the countryside in 1992 and it was interesting to learn that her family didn’t have electricity available at the time and that they only got access to electricity in the late 1990s. This shows how different backgrounds we come from and makes sharing information really useful in broadening our view of the world.

Nghi is proud of the beauty of her country’s nature and told that there are many natural and historical attractions. However, she feels that Vietnam is not taking full advantage of its potential when it comes to attracting international tourists.

I found it interesting that Vietnam has as many as 54 ethnic groups and that the northern parts of the country have four seasons whereas the southern parts have only two seasons, the rain season and the dry season.

Here I have mentioned only few of the interesting things about Vietnam that I learned today. This type of learning is nice because I had the chance to make a lot of questions about the things I wanted to know more about and also the chance to get more personal answers that I could get from any official source of information.

Comments

I learnt a lot from this post, thank you! – Taru

Taru Owston

9.3.2016 14:42

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