For rained-on (or snowed-on) friends
With fellow-feeling from rainy Hanoi - well, not just now it's not, but last week it was, so here are two pictures from a rainy day.
A corner of the market, the tail-end of the morning.
and:
Cat, seeking shelter in a back-lane gateway.
The weather is just the way I like it right now, actually, when it's not raining. It's good walking weather, and I had a couple of great walks over the weekend - but I felt it would be more fitting, in view of the wild weather elsewhere, to post pictures of last week's rain. :)
The COVID-19 quietness is still evident, and all Hanoi schools are now closed until next week, but businesses are generally open - big places have hand-sanitiser dispensers at the entrance.
It is interesting to see from this very mild exigency what systems a rapidly growing city needs to develop, to meet population shifts. I was told most seriously by workmates that fruit was in short supply (the government has put healthy eating, including fruit, as one of the ways to boost immune systems, hence they were eager to buy up) but I could see plainly in the markets, shops and streets near my place (neither a wealthy nor a poor area) that there's an abundance of all sorts of fruit. Thinking it through, the problem is (it seems to me, not a rigorous analysis here!) that the apparent scarcity is in the new high-rise apartment blocks, which have their own smallish supermarkets on the ground floor; those supermarkets haven't established really robust supply chains (and warehousing/transport systems?) and maybe weren't used to much in-house demand for fruit, and so were vulnerable to a sudden rush from the high-rise's residents.
A corner of the market, the tail-end of the morning.
and:
Cat, seeking shelter in a back-lane gateway.
The weather is just the way I like it right now, actually, when it's not raining. It's good walking weather, and I had a couple of great walks over the weekend - but I felt it would be more fitting, in view of the wild weather elsewhere, to post pictures of last week's rain. :)
The COVID-19 quietness is still evident, and all Hanoi schools are now closed until next week, but businesses are generally open - big places have hand-sanitiser dispensers at the entrance.
It is interesting to see from this very mild exigency what systems a rapidly growing city needs to develop, to meet population shifts. I was told most seriously by workmates that fruit was in short supply (the government has put healthy eating, including fruit, as one of the ways to boost immune systems, hence they were eager to buy up) but I could see plainly in the markets, shops and streets near my place (neither a wealthy nor a poor area) that there's an abundance of all sorts of fruit. Thinking it through, the problem is (it seems to me, not a rigorous analysis here!) that the apparent scarcity is in the new high-rise apartment blocks, which have their own smallish supermarkets on the ground floor; those supermarkets haven't established really robust supply chains (and warehousing/transport systems?) and maybe weren't used to much in-house demand for fruit, and so were vulnerable to a sudden rush from the high-rise's residents.