We returned back with very good experiences from my short vacation in southern Vietnam. I’ll talk about it in the next posts. For now I leave you with some Interesting facts about Vietnam.
Interesting facts about Vietnam
- Vietnam is the 13th most populous country in the world with 90 million inhabitants.
- Vietnam was part of China until 938 AD
- Việt was the name that the Chinese gave to the people who lived in that region and Nam means south. So Việt Nam would mean something like “the people of the south ” .
- The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (full name of the country) is, like China, ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam.
- In the North of Vietnam there are 4 seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer and autumn) while in the south only 2 (rain and not rain).
- Many Korean multinational companies (for example Samsung) produce in Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh City there is a whole neighborhood that has been built over the last 3 years to accommodate South Korean workers.
- While in South Korea, 32% of foreign workers are Vietnamese.
- After the Vietnam War, all Vietnamese who had fought for the south, an ally of the United States, were interned in reeducation camps for 1 to 3 years.
- Lê Đức Thọ was a Vietnamese diplomat who negotiated the Paris Peace Treaties of 1973. In that year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Henry Kissinger. Lê Đức Thọ rejected him, being one of the few people who has ever rejected a Nobel prize. Kissinger accepted it.
- In spite of being a very humid country with a lot of rain, in the south of Vietnam there are sand dunes in the style of the Sahara desert, they are in Mui Ne.
- Between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese are followers of a religion called Cao Dai, which is a strange mixture of Taoism, Christianity and Buddhism and was founded in 1926.
- In Vietnam there are more than 15 million motorcycles and almost no traffic regulations. It will seem as if they were all concentrated in Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi.
- In the crossings there are no rules, all motorcycles, cars and buses cross at the same time, and the only rule that reigns is that of chaos.
- In the Vietnamese spoken in the south there are 5 tones while in the north 6 . That means that the same word with different tones can have up to 6 different meanings.
- Chinese characters were used to write Vietnamese until the 20th century. Today Latin letters are used, while Chinese characters are only used by certain scholars and specialists.
- In Vietnam there is a desemplo of only 4.8% but an inflation of 13.89%. The GDP grew 6.8% last year.
- The currency of the country is Dong and the largest bill is 500,000 Dongs, which is approximately €
- The smallest ticket is 500 Dongs, 0.018 €.
