I don't know if it is because the country is experiencing a rapid expansion over the past few years or what but for people that live in Vietnam there is one thing that is going to be a constant annoyance in your life and that is the fact that it is almost impossible to get any sort of peace and quiet.
It's especially bad where I live in Da Nang, because the "island" where all the condos are that 90% of the expat community lives didn't really exist 20 years ago. Prior to tourism, there wasn't any sort of economically viable reason for buildings to be over here. I have only been here for close to 2 years now but the construction noise is almost never ending and it really is annoying.
This isn't really so bad looking in itself but you would need the audio in order to get the full impact of the level of annoyance that we deal with basically 17 hours a day, every day. The thing that made this particularly bad is the fact that even though there are rules about how early or late that these crews can start making insane levels of noise they are largely ignored and may as well not exist in the lawbooks. Today, these clowns were banging away at just past 5am, which is just criminal.
I understand that this sheet-metal housing has to come down but the way in which they are doing it is without a care in the world as far as how much they are disturbing the people in this area just shows they truly DGAF about the area they are working in or other people. While I am a rather heavy sleeper, there aint no sleeping through someone slamming on a hollow metal structure with a sledgehammer at the ass-crack of dawn.
There are many other condos around here where all of the residents moved out because the construction crews installed night lighting so that the crews could work around the clock. As much as I hate being woken up at 5am it would drive me absolutely insane if this pounding and grinding was going on even when it was dark.
This also has a obvious negative impact on said residences because there is no chance that anyone is going to move into a place when while they are looking at it considering moving in that they have to shout in order to speak to the landlord.
I really hope that karma bites the property owners in the ass and the same thing happens to them once they are finished building their properties. I would be willing to bet that they would be the first people to call the police for violation of noise ordinance even though they were doing exactly the same thing for a year.
I often say to people that Da Nang is a lovely place, it will be a lot nicer when they are finished building it. Sadly, I don't think that day will ever come because since most of the land is already built upon, people simply come by and demolish and existing structure to build another one in the same place.
Peace and quiet is so rare in this city / country that when it does happen it is a truly majestic experience. So now it is 10am and I am sitting here in my living room with headphone is playing some Enya trying to keep my rage at bat. I honestly don't think there is anything worse than construction noise.
Here's a cute picture of Nadi to help me get back into my Zen state
