Vietnam is a very densely populated country. I thought it was higher up on the list but out of nearly 200 countries counted in the world, Vietnam is ranked number 30. This is very evident when you are in the larger cities such as Saigon, Hanoi, and Da Nang, which are the 3 largest cities.
I moved away from Hanoi because I got frustrated at how many people were crammed into a small space. Da Nang keeps getting bigger though and I fear that we have kind of run out of places to put things and this becomes a source of real frustration when you are trying to go anywhere.
Keeping in mind that the pics I am about to show you would be considered a "good" situation because this area is heavily monitored by the police and various security guards. But there are other places where it is just a free for all and if you are walking, you are probably going to need to walk in the street.
This is extra annoying because there are too many cars and motorbikes as well and you are certainly going to get honked at by taxi drivers that are just as frustrated as you are.
Nothing seems to be off limits because people will just park their cars on the sidewalk with no penalties possibly because it is too heavy for the police to do anything about it.
In other situations, like the one you see in the distance behind that car, people will angle their motorbikes specifically for the diversion of foot traffic away from the front of their building. This is of course illegal but I have seen people that try to move these bikes or plants or whatever and the owners will come out and shout at them.
The sidewalks here, just like anywhere else, do not belong to the property owner behind it but they don't see it that way. Sidewalks / footpaths are public property but almost everyone simply claims it as their own with plants, benches, and of course the ubiquitous motorbike parking lot.
Anytime there is construction they plop down all of their building materials on the sidewalk as well and just like the cars and the plants and the seating, this is illegal. On the building site above I find it particularly egregious because there is a large plot of land right next to it that they aren't even using. This is pure laziness on the part of the workers who are looking to dump off their palatte of bricks as close as possible and do the least amount of work. When officials do come by what exactly are they supposed to do? Confiscate the building materials? Fine the workers who have nothing to do with the policies?
What they actually do is nothing at all, unfortunately. You just have to walk in the street.
My own apartment building is guilty of this and the way it works is that every now and then the government will come by and just take everything that is on the sidewalk without talking to anyone. You just wake up one day and everything is gone.
This is why the seating out there, which is meant purely to prevent other people from using it, is made of solid cement. It is too heavy to move and therefore the officials just keep on moving to the next spot when the time comes to remove all the materials.
It's a real shame, because this city actually does have really nice sidewalks. It's just a shame that this gets taken over by the people who own property nearby.
I know a solution but it isn't going to happen: The government could tell everyone that nothing can be put there anymore and then actually enforce this. Idle threats the likes of which we currently have, don't really mean a whole hell of a lot to the people who are violating this policy.
Come here with patience if you do come here. There are a lot of annoyances like this in daily life in Vietnam, that's for sure.
