Vietnam – Where are you?

I’ve been writing about Vietnam and its culture. However, it’s my mistake didn’t show you where Vietnam is. May be some of you are already familiar with this country, but I’m quite sure that some of you don’t even have any idea about my small country. So, where is Vietnam on the map?

As I have mentioned in the previous posts, Vietnam is an Asian country. Ok, let’s take a look at Asian map

One more hint, Vietnam is in the South East Asian area… I think you can see Vietnam on the map now. Yes, this is my country… Let’s take a closer look…

This is the map of our mainland. You can see our capital, Hanoi, in the North. And Saigon is located in the South. We share the border line with Cambodia, Laos and China. However, it’s not everything we have. We have some islands, you can see on the above map one of our island “Phu Quoc Island”. We also have Hoang Sa Island, Truong Sa Island in East Sea. Moreover, there are so many small islands is located around the mainland.

The map of Vietnam looks like charater “S”. And here is some information about my country:

Area: 331,690km2

Population: 85,789,572

Currency: đồng (VND)

1USD ~ 19,000VND (you would say woooooooowww)

Timezone: UTC +7

Crazy tips for freelancers

I’ve been working as a freelancer for nearly 4 years, I got everything on my way to earn some money as a freelancer, and my way is crazy. But it really works, at least in my case. Therefore, I’d like to share my crazy tips for those who’d love to take the freedom and be challenged as a freelancer.

As a freelancer, my major is software development. When I started 4 years ago, I had no clue where to start and what should I do to get the project. It was such a nightmare of finding a client and building the trust with them. If you ever pretend that you have a project and you want to hire a freelance software developer to get it done, how can you believe that he can do it, will he make it on-time, will he/she provide us what I want… There’re so many questions. I was trying to answer these questions, even and I’m not outsource any project to freelancers at that time. But these answers could help me to build the trust with my client.

So, I started!

Don’t ever think about the profit first!

You would ask yourself, what is the purpose of doing business -> minimize the cost, enlarge the profit! And now, I’m telling you that don’t think about your profit, am I crazy? Yes, I’m crazy!

What I mean by that is you should never think that you can earn big amount of money right at the time you started with the first projects. No way! What I did is simply build up my freelancer’s portfolio. The projects you have done when you were working at company A, company B don’t help a lot. The best thing to show is what you have done as a freelancer. However, how can you build up your portfolio without projects. This cycle becomes bigger and bigger. As a result, you must find a way out.

I started to write technical blog to share my programming skills, experience, projects… Yeah, that’s cool! But how people know that you have a blog to visit??? Another question is raised. One of my best friends ever, Google, helped me a lot on that. I started to google for the technical communities where I can contribute. CodeProject is the first community I started to write something. Everybody knows that these communities is free for everyone to read. So, what is the income from that. I have to say, there is NO profit at first. But your contribution is in an invisible way builds up your name, more and more people can get to know who the hell you are.

What I have done in the technical communities is strongly serious. I did invest a lot of time, I did brainstorm for a good topic and helpful information. This is the only way to call the attention for your articles. People get to know you naturally when they feel interested in your things. They would absolutely introduce to other people to read, leave some comments, discuss more on the issues. Some of them would say that “hey, you can actually do something for me, can we discuss for a project?”. That’s the destination!

My friends sometimes told me that “Thang, you are crazy, you are doing things for free. Don’t you want to make money?”. They kept telling me that until I got a project from my articles. His name is Raj Chaudhari from Mumbai, India, he was the founder of XtremeBiz. When I was writing a new article, I got an email from Raj in my inbox. He would like to chat with me on Yahoo Messenger for some thing needed to be done in C# .NET. I started my first project with him, and the second, and the third. And do you know what? What I have got is not only a client, but also a friend. Raj Chaudhari is still my best friend besides the cooperation. You can get his testimonials about me on my website.

Go everywhere, let’s someone hear your voice!

That simply means keep being cool on the communities. It’s not only the matter of writing articles, but also contribute on others’ content.

As a hobby, I spend hours per day to go around, read articles. One side, it helps me to gain more knowledge about technologies and programming skills, and much more… On another side, it let other people hear my voice. I don’t go around and just spam the topic with the comments like “hey dude, it’s such a nice article, keep going on your good work”.  That’s the different thing! I’m trying to be helpful to contribute on the topic. I would practice on the article, I would get an error why I try his/her codes which I don’t know how to fix it, I would leave a comment to ask if anyone had the same thing and how did you fix such problem. It would help other readers, if they get the same error, they don’t need to ask again, they know exactly how to fix their errors. And may be the writers can enhance their articles to clear the potential errors.

Feel free to deny!

I will deny a big project right away if I estimate that I can’t do it, or I can do it, but I can’t do it in the requested time. I would be said like “I don’t want to take that risk to lose my face”.

Building the trust is difficult, 10 successful projects can improve your prestige slowly. But one failed project would send you to hell. May be I’m blowing up the issue. But it would happen and break the trust between the clients and you.

That doesn’t mean that I deny every big project. But I would rather take time for the estimation. I will take the project when I feel really confident to manage the risks. Otherwise, I don’t regret to deny and get another opportunity. Along with the deny, I will explain to my client why I can’t take it: I don’t want to break your business opportunity!

Work hard as long as you alive

Unless you die, keep working hard on the projects you have got. Deliver the best quality application on-time.

Be positive to the change requests

Of course, the clients would ask you to change something after the delivery. May be they would ask for a change after the payment. Some freelancers would give their a big NO on their face. Instead, I would analyze the change request. If it is such a minor change, I would explain to my client how I change it and how long it takes, without and extra charge. If the analyze says that “it’s not a minor, dude, don’t make it for free!”, I simply do the same sequence: explain to my client how I change and how long it takes. Moreover, I will explain clearly to them how much it cost for the change and why should they pay it to me. My clients will be very happy to pay something they know!

Moreover, I try to be very active and contribute on their project. In some cases, I would tell my clients that “why don’t you save this functionality for the next version? because because because…”. It brings them a thought that this freelancer is really living with the application and he doesn’t just need to get money out of the project, and he is proposing for a long-term cooperation.

It works real good in my situation!

One more time, I would like to remind you that these recommendations is my own experience. I don’t mean that it will work exactly the same in your freelance career. But I works in my case, that’s why I’m sharing to you. If you feel that they would help you to get more clients, earn more money, just apply that!

Did you get anything out of universities?

This morning, I took a morning coffee at LA Cafe, which is owned by a friend of mine. It’s very crowded on the street to his coffee shop, I realized that today we have universities’ entrance exam. Every year, after the high-school graduation, the Education Department of the Vietnamese Government hosts an exam for whom like to study in a university. I don’t remember how many pupils join the exam every year, it must be millions. And probably  30%-40% of them will pass. They become students, study in a university for at least 4 years, graduate… it’s normal… but they problem is “what they are doing after the university-graduation?”… it’s still a myth!

In Vietnam, I have idea if it is a culture or tradition or something like that, almost parents are so proud if their children study in a university that they will force the 18-year-old children to take the entrance exam, no matter which university you take, no matter what is the major, it’s must be a university. To them, “college” is not good, it would never be a good choice. Their children would rather stay at home until the university entrance exam next year, or the following years…

So, what is the point here?

As you might know, Vietnam is a agricultural country which used to be very poor. The old Vietnamese generation was growing up in poverty. They lived in the war. Because Vietnam is still a young country. The war ended in 1975, we have been living just 35 years in peace. And they will never let their children live in the same environment. What should they do? Kick their children on the ass to keep studying hard. If you don’t sleep, that’s fine, let’s study something!!! As a result, Vietnamese pupils and students are studying real hard, real real hard, because studying hard is their mission, their duty and this is the only way to avoid ass-kicking.

Is there anything bad if you are study in a university?

Of course, studying in a university is a dream of everyone. However, the point is what can I get from the university! There are weakness and mistakes in every system of every countries in the world. And the Education System in Vietnam has no exception. I don’t want to go deeper inside of the system because I can do nothing at all. What I am going to share with you is the output of the system.

I had some great experience on that. I used to be a co-founder of an IT company, we were doing softwares and technology advertising. At that time, we need to recruit more software engineers for project. And we decided to give the opportunities for the last-year student or who just graduate from the universities. We’ve got so many applications. And we’ve got nearly 10 candidates to interview after filtering. My friend and I are both university dropped-out guys. And what made us really surprised is the output from the best university in Information Technology. Approximately, 80% of the candidates couldn’t pass the technology exam. It seemed like they have no idea about programming languages in real life to full-fill our needs. What should I do if my software engineers can’t develop a software for our clients? What should I do if my employees can’t communicate, they just want to work alone? They don’t want or they just have no idea about cooperation and team-work. How can I make the best software quality individually. There were so many questions I had in my mind. Who were those people who just graduated with a good scores from the university. Weren’t their major is Software Engineering? Didn’t they study state-of-the-art programming languages & technologies in the university?

So many questions… We have 2 choices (1) invest to train those people to be professional (2) or spend more money to hire trained people… Both solutions cost much money…

I decided myself to visit the students who are studying in the university. I pretended to be a student in campus. After chit-chatting with some students, I was really surprised, again.

What I’ve got from 10 students for the question “Why do you study in the university?”. Six of them gave me an answer that they would like to make their parents happy. Two of them had no idea.

And jumped to another question “Do you have any idea which jobs you will take after the graduation?”. “uhm…ahm…” is what I have heard!

This story is 4 years ago. They are changing now. I don’t know if the university’s program has changed, I don’t know, really don’t know. But they changed the output a little bit is from the student-side. It’s not applied for every students. What I see at the moment on the recruitment market, there’re more people can fit the job! Actually, it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t good employees in the past, but difficult to get one. And it’s easier now.

The major change is self-studying. The outstanding Vietnamese students realized that they can never bring exactly the academical knowledge to their jobs, they have to build more skills. Some of them know their weaknesses, and try to improve. They are going to improve their English, soft skills, professional skills, to prepare for their jobs in the future. Practices make the master! That’s right in every cases.

In my opinion, it’s already a good movement to change the whole thing. Nothing can be changed overnight, it takes some times. If any Vietnamese students read my article, I hope you will work hard to change it. That you have to do by your own, don’t wait for anybody. May be the Education System will be change to support you guys, but don’t wait, be active, because it’s your life, it’s your future!

Different accents in Vietnamese language

Remember my first visit to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam which is located in the North, I really had some problems with the languages, even we are all speaking Vietnamese.

Like other languages, we have different accents in different regions. Moreover, people from other regions would use different words which could causes some misunderstanding.

When I was visiting Hanoi, a friend of mine called me, he wanted to go out with me for a beer. Yeah, it’s cool! After a long conversation, we decided for the meeting. With the same word he used, I thought that we would meet on the day after the day after tomorrow. But he actually meant the day after tomorrow. Fortunately, I met another friend after the call and asked him to join with us on the selected day. Do you know what? We have a serious argument about the “selected date” that I had to go checking with other local guys to realize that I was wrong in that context. It’s such a good experience for me about my mother language.

The problem is that, the language we are using in the South is like following:

– tomorrow: ngày mai

– the day after tomorrow: ngày mốt

– the day after the day after tomorrow: ngày kia

But in the North, they use in a different way:

– tomorrow: ngày mai (the same thing)

– the day after tomorrow: ngày kia (as I use for the next day)

That’s the whole problem and argument between my friends and me. He would like to meet me on “ngày kia”… Thanks God that I could figure out the issue before the meeting.

It’s really funny…

Regarding to the accents, there’s too much differences between some regions that you could understand nothing. Yes, it’s true sometimes. In another hand, I prefer not to understand to misunderstand 🙂

Vietnamese Family

My German friend asked me “hey Thang, why are you still living with your parents?”. I didn’t what’s wrong to live with my parents in the 20-age. And it also seem to be strange to a 22-year-old German guy.

It’s one of the differences between a Western family and an Asian family. I don’t like to write widely in the asian range, because I am not sure if you understand clearly enough about other asian countries’ cultures. But a Vietnamese family may shock a Western person who has never been to an asian country before.

Culture?

Yes, it is a part of our culture to live together. Even there’re more and more young people are moving out nowadays, the tradition is still there in the families.

To the old Vietnamese people, they like to live with their children, as well as grand-children. That’s why we have a lot of multi-generation family in Vietnam. Some people are living with their parents, or grand-parents, or even the parents of their grand-parents… When they have their own children, there will be 4 generations living together in a house.

Marc Benedicter, a friend of mine from Germany for a training after his college graduations, gave me so many questions about Vietnamese family after his self-made tour on his birthday. He decided to spend his birthday alone in Saigon. When he was walking around the city, he was asked to visit a Vietnamese family who are very poor. The Vietnamese guy who invited him was so nice that Marc couldn’t deny the invitation. “I was so scared”, said Marc.

At the end of day, he was very impressed and happy with his visit. Marc met so many people living in a very small house. They live together, they eat together, and they sleep together. They share the house, they share the air, they share the foods, they share everything they have.

Position of each family member

One thing that makes Vietnamese language complicated is how you call other people. There’re very clear rules, and you have to follow no matter you like it or not. There’re more words than you are using in English or other languages.

For example:

1. Older Brother: “Anh”

2. Younger Brother: “Em”

3. Older Sister: “Chị”

4. Younger Sister: “Em”

5. Father: “Ba”, “Bố”, “Cha”, “Tía”, “Thầy”…

6. Mother: “Mẹ”, “Má”, “U”, “Me”…

7. Older Brother & Sister of your Father: “Bác”

8. Younger Brother of your Father: “Chú”

9. Younger Sister of your Father: “Cô”

…

Complicated??? It’s not even half of them. It’s such a nightmare for me to remember these all words when I was young. And another strange thing in a Vietnamese family that you have to use the right word to the right person no matter with the age.

For example if you are much older and your god-brother, but in fact you have to call him “anh” if he is the son of your father’s older brother…

OK… OK… I will stop talking about this… Otherwise, you will get crazy…

I just want to show you how complicated it is in a Vietnamese family.

Advantage?

Of course, you will get supports from other family members. You can meet them every day, chit chat all the time. It makes fun somehow.

Disadvantage?

Some of my friends who are so addicted in his family that he doesn’t know what to do to take care of his own family when he moves out. Because when he was living with his parents, grand-parents, they took care of him very carefully, and he didn’t need to do anything by himself.

However, this is not applied for every people who used to live in a traditional family. It depends on how well you prepared for your private life in the future.

Modern society

Vietnamese people are keeping the culture and this tradition. However, in some cases, young people don’t want to live together like that, or they simply can’t do that.

In the modern society, sometimes, we need to move to another city to study or to work or for any reason… There are more and more cases like that, they moved to Saigon or Hanoi or other big cities to find their own opportunities.

In conclusion, culture is something we can’t say that it’s good or it’s bad, because it’s the culture. But there’s no rule that you have to follow exactly the culture and the traditions. No, there’s no MUST!

Vietnamese Coffee – Not only a drink!

Vietnamese people don’t drink a coffee just because they need more energy to work or because they are thirsty and need something to drink!

NO!!!

In Vietnam, to Vietnamese people, it’s how they enjoy their life… Vietnamese coffee is not just only a drink but enjoying a coffee cup with a Vietnamese person is an ART.

Am I blowing up the issue here? Let’s start to see how we make the coffee first…

As you know, Vietnam is a tropical country where the temperature is mostly hot. Therefore, people have to grow the coffee’s trees on high-lands, such as Long Khanh, Buon Me Thuot, Dak Lak, Gia Lai…

This is how a coffee farm looks like

After months, you can see the coffee’s flowers (I guess many of you have never seen a coffee’s tree or flowers)

The coffee’s flowers are white and taste very sweet. When I came to my wife’s hometown in Gia Lai, I saw the coffee’s flowers for real. I was very curious, because I actually have never seen coffee’s trees before. I tried to taste a flower, it’s really sweet.

At the end of the growing cycle, you will have some beautiful things like this…

Isn’t it wonderful? I love to see the coffee’s trees in this period of time.

After all, the coffee will be sent to the factories for the industrial processes before selling to us.

If there’s the reason to differentiate Vietnamese coffee to others, it’s nothing special. But what makes the taste is how we mix everything to enjoy… In Europe or America, you put coffee into a machine or buy at StarBucks, drink it while you are driving or working at the office. We do this mix in another way. We don’t use any machine.

There’s tool, called “phin” in Vietnamese to make a cup of coffee. It looks like this

In these pictures, you can see how simple a “phin” is! It’s usually made by aluminum or steel and very cheap. You can buy a “phin” in every local market.

And one more thing to make the Vietnamese coffee different is, that we usually use a glass (no matter it big or small). We put the “phin” on top of the glass (cup), put the coffee in the “phin” with pressure by the filter, fill boiled water into the “phin”, close it and wait!

It takes sometimes until you can drink your coffee, because the boiled water has to go through the filter, to the pressed coffee layer and drop slowly down into your glass.

As a culture, Vietnamese people often gather together to drink coffee. We drink coffee almost every morning to start a new day. While the “phin” works, we chit-chatting, reading newspaper, smoke a cigarette or thinking about life or whatever.

The secret of Vietnamese coffee is the “phin”. The way it works make our coffee very dark, smell & taste very good. The professional Vietnamese coffee drinkers are very strict in choosing their coffee, making their coffee, the environment to drink a cup of coffee…

You can choose how you drink your coffee (1) with or without sugar (2) with or without milk (3) with or without ice. It often takes hours to finish a cup of coffee. We drink very slowly to feel every coffee-drop.

It would be never enough until you have an opportunity to enjoy one.

Coffee shops

Some people like drinking self-made coffee at home. Some others like drinking a coffee with friends in a coffee shop. There’re many kind of coffee shops in Vietnam. You can see coffee shops everywhere in the country.

The most popular coffee shop is the simplest one.

This is this kind of coffee shop, there’s no table, no comfortable chair, no air-conditioner, nothing but a plastic chair.

It’s simply like that. Or it can be simpler with no chairs, you can sit on the ground, or you can sit on your shoes, or on your motorbike, or whatever you can sit on…

The price of a cup coffee in these coffee shop is much cheaper than in the others. However, it doesn’t mean that this kind of coffee shop is only for poor people. It’s not the matter of money anymore, it’s the matter of culture and style. Actually, this is my favorite coffee shop, unless I need to meet up with a customers or serious people.

When I sit in this kind of coffee shop in the early morning to drink your first coffee of the day, think about what you are going to do… It’s just great…

Beside that, there’re many more coffee shop. I can’t count how many coffee shops we have in my city. There are well-equipped with air-conditioners, comfortable chairs, wi-fi connection, foods… And of course, they are designed in many styles…

traditional design with bamboos, woods…

outside with gardens, sunshine…

creative with the owner’s hobbies…

These are an overview of Vietnamese coffee. There’re many style, many ways to enjoy a coffee.

But this is how do enjoy our own…

It’s typical Vietnamese!!!

Languages to use in Vietnam

When I plan to travel to any country, the first thing I worry is language. What’s the language they speak? Can they speak English? How about the accents?… These questions just fly around and make me confused.

Yeah, it’s such a nightmare without communication. In my opinion, every fight & war comes from miscommunication and misunderstanding. I think that’s is one of the reason Vietnam was voted to be the most peaceful place in the South East Asia for traveling, living, working or investing…

Of course, we have our own language. We speak Vietnamese. Remember I had a friend from Germany. We were sitting together on a taxi from the airport to his booked hotel. After a while, he just asked me a question “hey Thang, don’t Vietnamese people speak?”. I didn’t understand what he means. He just laughed and said “I just hear you guys singing in Vietnamese, doesn’t sound like you are speaking… your language is amazing”… I laughed loudly and proudly… Yeah, he must be true, because Vietnamese language has so many tones, it goes up and down, up and down. There’s a rhythm in the language. Don’t you believe me? Let’s watch this video…

Do you agree with me?

However, there’s a good news for you that Vietnamese speaks English as a foreign language. Nowadays, there’s more and more Vietnamese people speak better English, especially the young people. Therefore, you should not worry if you have no idea about Vietnamese language.

In this video is a 60-year-old man who is selling in the local market speaking English

What do you think about him? I was very impressed when I first watched this video about him. A 60-year-old man learns English by himself and he speaks very well actually.

And in this video is a young Vietnamese speaking English…

You would be impressed to speak English with a 6-year-old child on the street.

On the other hand, there’s also more and more foreigners learn Vietnamese and they speak very well too. These videos can prove that:

Joe is a Canadian guy who is working in Hanoi (in the North of Vietnam). He speaks Vietnamese very fluently with slangs, idioms… So that he is now very famous in the TV shows

Now you can listen to this guy singing wonderfully Vietnamese songs

This is Lee Kirby from England

And an American

Impressed?

In conclusion, if you are planning to travel to Vietnam, go ahead! Welcome!