Report from Southeast Asia

I recently returned from a trip through Southeast Asia.  Some places, like Laos and Cambodia, are very different from the United States in every way, although I couldn't believe how often I saw a Lexus SUV in Siem Reap.  We also saw a floating village in Cambodia, where people lived in shacks on rafts, which moved around season by season.  During the monsoon months, the waters would pull them all to another place.  Laos had bridges across the Mekong that needed to be rebuilt every year, for the same reason.

  In Vietnam, Hanoi is growing by leaps and bounds.  It now has a population quickly approaching that of New York City!  And there are four million scooters, with traffic that also rivals NYC, making scooters a better way to go.  It was common for the first story of a building to be relatively similar to something we might see here, but with increasingly shoddy construction on each successive floor going up.  Often, the first floor was commercial, with the remaining floors looking as though they were residential.  With mild weather all year, the need for good insulation is not the same as it is here.
The Vietnamese economic growth outstrips ours, so that they seem more like a capitalistic society than a communist one, except for the propaganda spouted by the tour guides.

Hong Kong, although now a part of China, still seems like another big financial center, with people living in tiny apartments and space at a premium.  There are skyscrapers designed by almost every famous architect that you can name, and there are many high-rise residential structures perched on hillsides, but on big bases (they still look scary to me, though).  Many people who live up in the hills travel to work on big public escalators, which change direction by the commuting times.

 Buyers of property, which is all owned by the government, bid on it at auction.  Just before we went, one parcel of three-quarters of an acre, located in the prime downtown area, sold for the equivalent of $3 billion U.S. dollars!  And, bear in mind, that's cash up front. Often buyers come from the mainland, where they can't buy what they want to with their new money.

 Residential transactions take place at equally dizzying prices, with apartments in good neighborhoods transferring for sometimes more than $2000/sf, and with car owners paying $500/month to garage their cars.  No wonder the birth rate is so low there now.

It's always good to get the perspective on home that travel brings.  The world has many different market conditions, governmental structures, and customs, and I got to see a bunch of new ones this month.