I really enjoy living in this city. but every silver lining has its cloud as they say - or something like that... but one thing that I really dislike about this place is that on the side of the river that I am a majority of the expat population live, is under constant construction and the noise that comes along with this is basically unavoidable. If you live over here and you don't have any construction noise near your place, just wait a while - because you will.
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While most of this noise is created by private industry, there is a lot of municipal noise that goes on constantly as well. They spent the past month turning a particular street into a "walking street" only to have cars and motorbikes continue to use it as they always had. This street was filled with noise for a month and many of the businesses on that street were condo operations that saw many of their tenants move away because of it. Now it has been a few weeks and the road, although it does in fact look better, isn't even being used for what it was purported to be. it is just a different looking street.
Now they are digging up another street nearby to put in a sidewalk and the pointlessness of this just boggles the mind because literally no one ever walks on that street anyway and the addition of a sidewalk isn't going to change that. What it does change is the ambiance and one of my favorite bars is over there and now it is essentially unusable because of the constant influx of digging machines, cement trucks, and various power tools that are being used to build this needless addition.
This is out my living room window and the banging, drilling, cutting of tiles fires up every single damn day at 7 am or so and carries on until 5 or 6 pm. On a couple of nights they rigged up lighting so that they could continue to make noise well into the night.
I understand that construction makes noise but the crazy thing about this building is that there was already a building there previously and it was torn down (which was a lot of fun noise for 2 weeks) and so far it appears as though they are putting back essentially exactly the same kind of building that was there previously.
I chose to live where I do because of the fact that on 2 sides of my block there is land that is owned by the nearby Catholic church and churches don't normally sell off their land anywhere in the world. This was going to protect me from the potential of construction noise and for the most part it has been a great success.
The good news about that last picture is that it appears as though they are finished going up so perhaps the noise will be coming to a close soon.
Don't get me wrong, I love this city. I get to live in a seaview condo for just a little over $200 a month. Don't get too worked up about this notion of "seaview"
Can you see waaaay into the distance there? That is the ocean. The only real benefit I have is that I can get a nice ocean breeze in my windows but because of the construction noise and sometimes even construction dust, I normally leave the window shut.
Life is a tradeoff I suppose, but I have said from the start when I first moved here that "Da Nang is a lovely place, it'll be even better once they are done making it." Sadly, I don't think that time will ever come since once they finish building one thing, it seems they get to work on tearing an adjacent one down and then putting a new one right back where the old one was.
I suppose if I had to choose between living somewhere quiet for $400 or living with some noise that will hopefully will end soon for $200, I would still take the latter. When I speak to my friends that live in all the surrounding countries other than Laos, it seems to be the case pretty universally so I suppose there isn't anything particularly unique about Da Nang in this regard. However, I did discover that the rapid expansion of the Da Nang peninsula over the past 20 years has had a very negative effect on the wildlife as you would expect. In just 20 years the nature of the peninsula has almost been completely wiped out.
I moved here though, so I guess I am part of the problem.