I’m horribly behind in posting.. We’ve been so busy! Making the interior for an eco-lodge while also trying to manage the expectations of six different local companies is no easy task. To relax, and to research other hotels, we’ve been to Mui Ne last week. It’s a tiny fisherman village with loads of resorts. The signs in Russian made us expect the worst, but luckily it’s low season at the moment. Continue reading
Transportation in Ho Chi Minh City mostly happens by motorcycle. When you’re in Rome, do as the Romans do (I quote my father), so we’ve rented motorcycles to scooter around. Last week, when we went to visit a company named Truong Thinh, we got lost. Impossible to find on google (they don’t have a website for fear of their products being copied), they were also hard to find in the real world. The journey was long, dusty, hot and a good opportunity to take a few pictures of (to me) surprising aspects of Vietnamese traffic.
I never expected to see people wear gloves in the tropics. Yet the Vietnamese ladies do. Gloves, long sleeves, jeans, face mask, sunglasses and helmet are the regular outfit for scootering. I’m sure I would suffocate if I had to wear all that, but the Vietnamese ladies do everything to prevent sun tan.
Scooters are allowed on the high way, just like bicycles, cargo scooters and pedestrians.
And there’s a lot of them: crossing a road is like crossing a human motorized river. Imagine the congestion when the biggest dream of all those motorbike riders comes true: to possess a real car..
One of the things I’ve come to realize after two weeks of factory visits is this: the distance between consumer and the person who makes the things we buy is big. Really big. Even I, a designer supposedly trained in knowing how and where things get produced, forget the origin of products once they’re on display in a regular shop at home. Somehow, unconsciously, I always assume that it’s some robot counting the screws that come with my ikea closet. Or some elaborate packing machine that puts the plastic wrapping around. Well, it’s not. It’s a person, or actually a whole bunch of people that make, finish, count, check and wrap almost all products that you can buy. I’m not sure yet what my opinion is on this, after all they are making a living and they don’t seem to be unhappy at all. However, I do think it is important to be conscious that somebody, in a far away country, spent some portion of his or her life on making the things that are in your home.
Scary statues.
Tourists photographing praying visitors.
Turtles in a tiny cage.
A lazy dog.
A safe.
A lot of incense smoke.
And me, trying to take everything in without choking on the smoke and disturbing the people offering oil, food and incense.
This weekend we visited another factory to see if they could be a partner in the SPIN project. A bit further away this time, about a 1,5 hour drive out of the city. Nice, because I got to see rice fields and a rubber plantation for the first time in my life. We didn’t stop to take a closer look though, so I’ll just add that to my list of things that I want to show you at some point. But, I do have interesting pictures of the factory.
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Today we visited one of the factories we will be working with, here’s a dusty corner of the bamboo factory. Note the typical vietnamese brushes made from a bundle of some grass-like plant, they’re very elegant I find. We went there by motorcycle, over the highway through the tropical rain, quite an adventure. I’ll spare you the details, because I want to show you some of the sketching and modelmaking that we did.
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First impressions: Vietnam is actually quite clean. Traffic is busy but no more chaotic than any other western metropole. The food is very very good, I almost contemplate living here after just one meal. Turkish Airlines did a bad job caring for my luggage (they didn’t which is why this post is only text and no pictures). Internet is working. The governmental facebook block is pretty amateuristic. The first pictures of the hotel we’re designing the interior for seem cool. The pictures of the different companies we will be working with too. Vietnamese is impossible to understand. It is readable but still unintelligable. It is warm. We’ve got a swimmingpool. The roof of the house can open by pulling on a rope that hangs through the staircase four floors down from the ceiling. Cycling is possible. I’m seriously addicted to internet since I’ve spent at least two hours checking mail/FB/ and whatever the minute internet started working. The jetlag is doable. You don’t need to win the lottery to become a biljonaire and the neighbours have chickens.
So I’m going to Vietnam. Tomorrow. For three months. With complete strangers. Or at least, almost complete strangers because I’ve met three of them once. Have we got a plan? Well, actually, I don’t. But Shauna does, and so does the European Union and the Technical University of Delft. To be short: I will be working for a project called SPIN, which basically aims to bring more knowledge about sustainable product innovation in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. It also aims to build longlasting relationships between ‘western’ designers and vietnamese craft companies. One of the results of these quite ambitious goals is that Shauna (who does a PhD on this) set up a three month temporary design studio, Future Living Studio, to design a sustainable interior for a small eco-lodge called Bamboo. The products that we (Thomas Pleeging, Connie Yeh, Nguyen Thanh Tan, Tran Thi Kim Yen, Trinh Ha Giang, Shauna Jin and myself) design will be made with the help of local crafts companies.
I must admit I’m a little nervous right now, my bag is packed and waiting for me to pick it up. I will do a yogaclass just before I leave and then the next post will be from Ho Chi Minh City. I sincerely hope that my design adventures in Vietnam will be interesting enough for you to follow them and maybe, occasionally, comment on them. See you!
