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Posted by Roger Keays, 28 March 2010, 3:46 PM Extract from The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality's section for Vietnam:
The girls are closely supervised by a matron under contract to the Pleiku Administrative Council. An American GI pays 300 piastres ($2.50) for a ticket, allowing him up to three hours with any given girl. Between 100 and 300 GIs visit the house each day, passing through a sandbagged guard post where they are required to show their ticket and have it stamped by a Vietnamese soldier. Fifteen percent of the girl’s earnings are deducted to pay for expenses at the center, but a hard-working and a popular prostitute can earn between 8000 to 15,000 piastres ($66 to $125) a month, a good salary in today’s Vietnam.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 27 March 2010, 4:41 AM I arrived in Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City on Monday. It's now Friday, so that means I have been robbed twice in less than a week. Earlier this week about AUD 80 mysteriously went missing from my wallet, and tonight I was robbed on the way home from the grocery store by a motorbike rider. At least the second time round I had learnt my lesson about carrying money, so I only lost about AUD 10. In fact, it was almost worth the money just for the thrill of trying to chase him down and getting cheered on by the locals. But despite all that triathlon training I still can't chase down a motorbike in busy traffic. Sheesh.
Being robbed is helping me understand Vietnam. I came here to try to figure out why the GDP is so low, when all of my Vietnamese friends are so smart and proactive. Online forums offer a few suggestions: the government misreport GDP; it is calculated wrongly; citizens do not report their earnings, etc etc. What I'm discovering is that Vietnamese people definitely ARE smart and proactive. The missing ingredient seems to be large scale cooperation.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 23 March 2010, 7:42 PM Woah, I am really surprised that Facebook is blocked here in Saigon. Since I know nothing about Vietnamese politics, I can't really comment on the motives behind this. Instead, I'm just going to share some DNS servers a passer-by offered me which include entries for Facebook domains:
nameserver 208.67.222.220
nameserver 208.67.222.222
The person who gave these to me knew them off by heart. Funny.
Cảm ơn.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 17 March 2010, 3:12 PM If you're looking for a cheap second hand bike in Singapore, you might like to check out this shop I found in Paya Lebar. I picked up a pretty good second hand bike there for just SGD 40. It got stolen from Little India the day before I left Singapore, so next time I'll make sure I get a better lock :)
Here are the a picture and details of the shop. It's a kilometre or two from the nearest MRT station, Paya Lebar.
New G Sports
330 Tanjong Katong Rd
+65 6348 1871
http://www.newgsports.com.sg
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Posted by Roger Keays, 17 February 2010, 3:56 PM Having a good merchant facility goes a long way to simplifying the accounting for your business. Here are some quotes I got from several Australian banks when I set up the merchant account for Sunburnt Web Solutions. They are separated into two types of accounts: gateway accounts, which can be linked directly to your website so all payments can be made automatically, and MOTO (Mail-Order, Telephone-Order) accounts, which let you login to the bank's website to process credit card payments manually.
The quotes I was given were based on volumes of 50 transactions / month with an average transaction amount of $100. You should definitely check with the banks for the latest prices.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 1 December 2009, 4:18 AM Japan is certainly a unique place. After collecting a long list of interesting and often bizarre quirks, I have managed with some difficulty to whittle it down to just these 10 observations which to me characterise Japan.
Let's start with number 10 deshou?
10
Japan is clean. The bikes, taxis, buses and shops are so shiny it feels like you are living in a computer generated city.
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