One of the great joys of my later life has been the opportunity to travel a little bit with work and to select the places that I go (speaking abroad for my work is not my business model, and so I don't need to keep doing it in places I don't want to go).
So far, some of the destinations I can count off are number one, 5 cities in 5 days in China.
Number 2, Cape Town and the Western Cape in South Africa.
Number 3, Muscat and the Sultanate of Oman.
Number 4, Singapore.
Number 5, Vietnam.
Number 6, Istanbul.
Each of these places is obviously entirely and completely different, but all of them come with extraordinary misconceptions of what they will be like when you hit the ground.
I wrote quite a lot about my trip to Oman and the similarities that I found there between where I live and where the people of Oman live and how staggering that was compared to how it was presented to me from my side of things.
My recent trip to Ho Chi Minh City was exactly the same.
It’s fair to say when I travel 6500 miles away on my own and step off the plane into the city that I've never been to, there's a certain degree of anxiety associated.
I'm entering into a communist country, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to find or what trouble is potential for me to get into.
What I found, though, sits entirely at odds with what I find back home when I walked through the centre of Nottingham.
Ho Chi Minh City is an extraordinarily vibrant place (at least from my experience), where everybody is moving, and loads of things are happening all the time.
The thing that struck me the most though (and I travelled around all of the districts of Ho Chi Minh City on the back of a moped) was the developing wealth and wellbeing of the people there that I could see.
Generally, people are healthy and vibrant and young, and absolutely committed to trying to make things better for them in the place that they live.
The young woman who took me around on the moped was so proud of her city and her country. I found myself thinking it was hard to believe that I could find so many people in my country at that age who felt the same.
I started to do a little bit of AI research while I was around seeing the things I did, and while it is very difficult to compare the United Kingdom with an economy and developing country like Vietnam, there are some ways you can make comparisons around the level of poverty or the level of opportunity.
And so, to be clear, one of the things that I found was that parts of the East End of Glasgow, which have a life expectancy of 67, are so much poorer, with so much less opportunity, than the people who live there, than the majority of people who live in Vietnam, that the differences are stark.
That is not what I would have expected; it's not what I would have believed.
There are rural and remote parts of Vietnam which are still very poor (although it tends to be there that the people are still quite healthy), but in general terms, in a city of 14 million, the health, developing wealth, opportunity, and attitude of the people in Ho Chi Minh way outstrips that of Glasgow or London or Birmingham or Manchester.
We were brought up in a society where we were told and where we thought we were really, really great.
We have some work to do to get back to where we were and even to get back on a par with some of these developing places.
Our society has to want it; we have to want to work hard; we have to be proud; we have to have a sense of working for all of us together.
As I say, much work to be done, and I'm not seeing quite yet who is going to do it.
Blog Post Number - 4591
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