We'd just finished licking the juice from our lips when we reached the Women's Museum down the road. Henry and I sat down to watch a short video, entitled "The Daily Life of a Street Vendor".
One woman explained how she rose at 2am to get to market to buy her fruit. On a good day she'll have sold it by 5pm, on a bad day it's 7pm. Every fortnight she hopes to escape the city to return to her local village, and give the $18-20 she may have earned to her husband and children.
I attempted the sums in my head, gave up, and did them with a calculator back in our room. 5,000 dong is about 25c. About 0.3% of my salary. About 5% of hers. Yes, yes, yes, I do realise that her living expenses will be a fraction of mine. But a 17 hour day is a 17 hour day, whatever part of the hemisphere you live in. So if the street sellers do rip you off, it figures.
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Only eight hours to go. |
John
It's easy to fall into that trip of feeling you're being ripped off when in reality it's such a tiny amount of money! I think I ate pineapple every day in Hanoi (it's my favourite fruit) and I took great delight in buying it from the same woman each day as she seemed to look out for me to go by!
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