Working People

The restaurant where we ate lunch at the Perfume Pagoda was huge and efficient.

A busy kitchen worker can still find some time to text.

We were taken to a family run candy factory in the Mekong Delata.  This young man is stirring some syrup.

At Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and his residence, the guards wore the cleanest uniforms I've ever seen.

This artisan is placing eggshells on a wooden plaque, in a lacquer-ware workshop in Hanoi.

This is one of our guides, Ha, in the cable car at the Perfume Pagoda.  He didn't want to take us there, because it's rather undignified: crowded, commercial, and totally not a show put on for tourists.  But for us it was one of the high points of our visit to Vietnam, because we saw the people as they are, eating dogs and porcupines, crowding into temples, and being themselves.

Back in the candy factory.

Some of the candy was made of puffed rice.  This young man is stirring the rice, mixed with sand, which they later strain out, to keep it from burning while it puffs up.