A few days ago I was reading the Globe and Mail and an article jumped out at me: Asia’s millionaire population overtakes Europe. I’ve noticed, ever since I got to Vietnam, that there are quite a few really–like, seriously, filthy rich–rich people here, so I had to read on.

Booming Asia had more millionaires than Europe for the first time last year and is fast closing in on North America for the top spot, a report released Thursday said.

The Asia-Pacific region was home to 3.3 million people in 2010 worth $ 1-million (U.S.) or more, excluding their homes, an increase of roughly 10 per cent from the year before, according to the 15th annual World Wealth Report by Merrill Lynch’s wealth management division and consultancy Capgemini.

Alright, nothing too surprising there. The article later mentions…

The world’s wealthy were worth a total of $42.7-trillion in 2010. Asia’s share of that wealth amounted to $10.8-trillion, putting it in second place for the second year in a row, just behind North America’s $11.6-trillion.

Six of the 10 economies with the fastest growing millionaire populations were in Asia, led by Hong Kong and Vietnam, which each saw annual growth of 33 per cent. Others included Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore and India.

Before I got to this part, I was thinking, “I wonder if Vietnam will be mentioned in this article?” I guess this explains the luxury cars that I see around Hanoi every day. (I’ve seen more Bentleys, Mercedes, Porches, etc. in Hanoi than I ever used to in Toronto)

I think an important question to ask is, obviously, how did these people get so ridiculously rich? Most people here make their money (and they make it quickly) through real estate or stocks. But you typically need to have some money before you can get in to buying and selling real estate. I suppose some people just got lucky, and happened to have land that was their parents which went up in value very quickly. But other people that have become so rich.. it’s not clear about how they did it (or if it was at all legal). I had an interesting conversation with a taxi driver about this a few days ago, and his theory was that people start out by making some money through less-than-legal ways, and then launder it through real estate.

Another important question is, where’s my slice of the pie!?

PS, I saved the article here if you’re interesting: Asia’s millionaire population overtakes Europe

I keep thinking, “I should post an update already.” Next thing I know, a whole month has gone by already. Sadly, I don’t even have pictures of Jane to share, because I don’t have the little cable to connect my phone to my laptop with me at work. You’ll have to settle for a textual update — better than nothing, right?

Jane is getting bigger and bigger; she’s coming up on her six month birthday. She is increasingly interested in everything around her. She wants to grab onto anything in front of her (and then, of course, gnaw on it). She’s got a pretty strong grip, too! Hien and her mum have had their hair pulled quite a few times now, I’m sure.

She has also started eating a bit of baby food, which she doesn’t appear to be in love with. But I’m sure she’ll get over it soon, and once she can eat some more tasty things then she’ll be happy. Whenever it’s meal time for the family, Jane has her eyes on all of the dishes, rice bowls, etc. But she has taken a special interest in glasses of beer. It must be the colour that she likes so much?

Lately my daily routine (in Hanoi) has consisted of waking up at 6am to watch baseball (remember that 6am here is 7pm Eastern time!) and eat breakfast before going to work. Last week I even got to watch two Jays games! Because they were playing the Yankees, and ESPN shows lots of Yankees games. Too bad the third game of the series was an afternoon game — I didn’t feel like waking up at midnight to watch. They lost anyways…

And in other news somewhat related to my last post, the people of Vietnam recently performed their civic duty and voted for members of the National Assembly, and members of the People’s Council (at the municipal and provincial levels). It’s not the same as voting for members of Parliament in Canada, or voting for a President or Prime Minister (as far as I know they don’t get to elect people into those positions here) and I’m not even very clear on what the function of the National Assembly or People’s Council is — but hey, who knew that they organized elections here at all? The longer I stay in Vietnam, the more I will learn about their political processes, I suppose. As it turns out, every five (I think) years they organize elections for the National Assembly and People’s Council, and have been doing so for quite a long time.

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike

And what a fun ride it was! Here’s the story…

Over the weekend I decided that I’ve been lazy for too long–enough with my sedentary lifestyle!–and that I ought to do something about it. In Ha Tay I used to run in the morning and play badminton in the afternoon (on most days, at least). But in Hanoi I just.. drink beer? Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I don’t want my new found ambition to exercise to interfere with my beer consumption. Local businesses could suffer.

Anyway, I don’t really have any good places near home to run–not to mention I haven’t been such an early-riser these days–and I don’t have any friends that like to play badminton in Hanoi, so the most obvious solution was to retrieve my bicycle from Ha Tay and start riding it to and from work every day.

Getting my bicycle back from Ha Tay was fun! I asked some of the local bus drivers if they would take my bicycle (and me) back to Hanoi so I could avoid what I was worried would be a bit of a scary, 50km+ ride. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t take me with my bicycle, and the local taxis are even less reliable, so my only option was pedalling back to Hanoi. There’s a very nice new highway that I would have liked to take, but I was also worried about what I’d do if I got a flat tire or encountered any other sorts of problems. The new highway, as wonderful and easy to travel as it is, is in the middle of nowhere (in comparison to the old highway which has more homes and businesses built up around it).

I guess my ride from Ha Tay to Hanoi wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t great either. The old highway is narrow, dusty, bumpy, and filled with big buses and trucks (whose drivers don’t seem to care much about people driving bicycles and motorbikes). But.. I made it back to Hanoi alive! The worst part was my awful sore back. I wouldn’t recommend doing a 50km ride after having not been on a bicycle for more than a year and a half.

Now that I have my beloved bicycle back in Hanoi I’ve been able to fix it up a bit too. I replaced the drop (racing style) handle bars–I mentioned my sore back problems, right?–with a plain handlebar. This, of course, also meant that the brake handles had to be changed too. Now I have sort-of-cheap looking brake handles and big rubber handlebar grips.

I miss cork handlebar tape already! I need to get some better grips. It also feels weird using the handle bars because my hands are so far apart compared to when I was still using the drop handlebars.

Finally, I asked him to change my chain wheel, because my bike is just a single speed and the chain wheel was too small, making it too easy to pedal. I couldn’t go very fast at all. But instead of removing the old chain wheel and putting a bigger one on, he seems to have welded a larger chain wheel tothe old one. Surprisingly, even with this awful hack-job, the chain seems to be sitting pretty straight.