Virtually everything in Da Nang, and almost the entirety of Vietnam is a rather boring, cement rectangle. I'm not judging the Vietnamese because what else are you supposed to do with urban land? There aren't a lot of options actually. Most houses are simply rectangles of some sort as well. So that is ok.
It does end up being a bit of a blemish on the landscape though when every single building is a 4 meter wide shop-house with apartments upstairs. I mean every single one of them is.
But something is opening soon where the owners have tried to do something a bit different with their land and given the fact that this land is in some pretty prestigious part of town, I am guessing they must own the land and are not renting it.
The building really stands out and the red rain guards, which is something I have never seen before on any building anywhere, is a nice touch that makes it stand out among the other buildings in the area.
now the main question remains though: What are they going to put in here? I have seen nice looking buildings go up in the past only to have them open the joint and it is something that we already have 30 of in the area such as a coffee shop or a Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) restaurant.
There seems to be a real lack of creativity here in Da Nang as far a new business ownership as most places just open a carbon copy of something that the neighborhood they are in already has a dozen of, then everyone looks so surprised and confused when the new place doesn't succeed.
I didn't try to get any closer than this because this street has a bunch of cement trucks coming and going all day long and what a joy it will be once all the local jobs are finished and we can walk in peace around here. I keep hoping that the latest job will be the last one but there always seems to be a "next one."
Another thing I really like when I saw on my walk today was that a rather nice sidewalk area that surrounds a gigantic church complex was actually clean today. It appears as though someone put in some effort to make this place look nice.
Someone, or some groups of someones, have really put some effort in this time to tend to the gardens, clean up the trash, and even sweep up leaves that normally cover the footpath.
This is a nice touch but I wouldn't bet the farm that it stays this way. Most footpaths like this get turned into motorbike parking lots for half of the day and I don't know what it is about motorbike drivers but they seem to be completely uncaring about where they discard their trash. The MO seems to be "dump your trash where you bike was, then move on."
They cleaned up and cleared out everything except for these stupid remnants of when they tried, in vain, to make these streets into a walking street. That orange metal monster there is a replica rickshaw and when they stopped doing the walking streets like 18 months ago, the decorative bicycle taxis (that the town doesn't even have or allow anyway) were just discarded on the side of the road. Anything that can be recycled is taken away and recycled in Vietnam but these have remained for ages. I'm thinking that none of the recycling dens will accept these things because they are so obviously the property of the city.
I wish the city would just put out the memo that it is ok for the scavengers to go ahead and recycle these.
Does your city do stuff like this? Just discard something on the side of the road that the city owns and just leave it there, for years?
Nuts.
Anyway, I do a lot of complaining about the lack of cleanliness in this city so I want to celebrate this small victory in this small part of the area I live in. I'll be watching it closely to see how long the clean aspect of it lasts. I'm betting a week or so.