Briefings, briefings, briefings

The day was filled with briefings -- three, to be exact -- and they were surprisingly interesting. The best of the day was at a securities firm, where we got a terrific overview of the Vietnamese economy, delivered by an Irish securities analyst who has been working in Vietnam for the last several years. He was an excellent teacher, and through his explanation of the country's two very young stock exchanges, we learned about much broader topics. An intriguing factoid: right now, approximately 150,000 Vietnamese individuals and institutions are allowed to buy and sell stock on Vietnam's stock exchanges. (One has to officially register in order to trade, so the government has a good handle on the numbers.) Only 2,000 foreigners are registered to trade -- of that, only a handful reside in the the US, despite the rapid growth in the economy. One of the delegation members manages a mutal fund for the Heartland Fund, and he clearly was intrigued by what he heard.

We had lunch with about 8 members of Hanoi's American Chamber of Commerce, all of whom have been working in Vietnam for a number of years in a variety of situations. There was a Motorola executive, a long-time physician who now trades in ethnic Vietnamese artifacts, the local Ford Foundation program officer, an advisor to museums and the film industry, a former US Army officer who began to do high-level translation work after the war and never returned to the US, and a visiting guest from Rockwell Automations China operation. We had a question and answer session over a wide range of topics -- everything from Vietnamese attitudes toward the US (surprisingly positive) to the reasons that few US women are working in Vietnam.

We spent the afternoon at the Judicial Academy -- the law school charged by the government with turning out 17,000 lawyers by 2010. The law training course is only 6 months long, in order to produce enough graduates to meet that quota. The professors at the school asked our delegation (which includes the dean of Marquette's law school) some intriguing questions about legal ethics and malpractice insurance!

These activities, though quite enlightening, weren't exactly photogenic. So I've included photos of flower arrangements at two of the briefings. They represent the floral beauty we see everywhere -- wonderful varieties of fresh flowers available for sale on the street, as well as elaborate arrangements in many settings. The birds of paradise were at the Judicial Academy -- which is located in a very run-down building on a narrow alleyway.