At breakfast, a cook prepared me an omelette in about 1 minute by cooking the eggs on high heat. I always cook my eggs on low heat. A lot of stuff is done differently here.
The day's planned activities started with a bus ride to the north of HCM City to the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park (VSIP). It is a similar operation to Phu My Hung except that instead of converting rural land into a commercial zone, VSIP converted rural land into an industrial park. The need for companies to prepare economic zones to attract foreign investment is a direct result of Vietnam's weak infrastructure. By supplying reliable electricity, water, and land rights, developers can attract investors to Vietnam.
While at VSIP we visited a subsidiary of II-IV corporation. The company makes lenses for lasik eye surgery and laser hair removal, cooling components, and semi conductor wafers. One of the directors canceled at the last minute and we were not allowed to take pictures of the inner workings of the company. The tour of the company was an enlightening experience. Throughout the tour the odor of noxious chemicals was ubiquitous. Production at the facility was remarkably labor intensive. Women wearing face masks were responsible for examining every lens for imperfections in the polishing process and for assembling the other two products with small hand tools. The finished products are shipped to other subsidiaries of II-VI in Germany and the U.S. for assembly.
Lunch at the hotel was a culinary adventure. I ate small fish like popcorn, a slightly bigger fish excluding the spine and head, some tentacles of some sort, and some mixed meat stuffed inside a mollusk shell. I tried not to look at the stuff too much and just put it in my mouth.
Our final scheduled activity of the day was a visit to the third largest bank in Vietnam. They were incredibly happy to see us. They gave us sweets, took our pictures a whole bunch of times, spared time to answer questions from us, and told us to go around and talk to the employees. I tried to communicate to some of the bank's tellers verbally, and then by writing. Neither method worked very well but writing was marginally more effective. If I understood them correctly, they had the equivalent of 300 million U.S. dollars in investment capital available. This seemed like a very small amount to me.
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