I've lived in Vietnam for years. I've never seen an accidental power-cut

One thing that my friends who live in other SE Asian countries complain about on a regular basis, and in particular in Thailand, is that the power grid is horribly unreliable. I had heard about this before I ever moved over here and it was something that really concerned me since I work online and this is something that could seriously interfere with my ability to make money. Here we are, many years later and aside from planned power-outages where they were performing maintenance or upgrades on the electrical grid, the power has NEVER been out.

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I've seen pictures from other parts of the country where their power is supplied by a crazy and chaotic looking mess of overhead wires. I think part of the reason why I have never experienced power outages is because this part of the country that I live in didn't really exist 30 years ago and there are almost zero historical buildings on this side of the river. You see, the area near the beach didn't have much purpose other than an Air Force base and fishing in the past, and basically nobody lived or worked over here until recently. Therefore almost all of the wiring is underground and very reliable.

I don't know exactly what they did correctly but it works for me!

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_{almost none of this was here 30-40 years ago}

In addition to what appears to be an incredibly reliable power grid, the city, and perhaps the country, has a building code that any building with an elevator/ lift must have a generator capable of powering the building. I have lived in a building with a generator in it for years now, but prior to that I lived in a building that did not have one of these and even then, outside of planned outages that were announced by the landlord well before-hand, I have never had a power outage that lasted more than a second or two.

I think that many times people in the west probably look over here and think that it is 3rd world. I don't think that is true. In many ways I would say that the utilities are actually far more reliable over here than my memories of it in the West. Add in the fact that our electric bills are generally so small that they are almost meaningless, and you have yourself another fantastic reason to at least have a go at living in Vietnam.

Now we just need them to sort out the visas so that people can actually legally do that.