The downsides of living in such an amazing place like I do

I am very happy that I moved to Vietnam, and more specifically to the beach city of Da Nang. It is a truly epic place with a damn near perfect beach with the most spectacular perfect near white sand that is such a rarity in the world. I mean, the sand it just perfect.

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Also, while the beach is very popular it seems to only attract the locals in the very early hours of the morning and in the evening just before sundown. This might seem strange to all of the westerners out there but one thing I have definitely noticed about a majority of Vietnamese people is a strong desire to stay out of the sun at all costs. This was also true in Thailand.

During the day, the beaches are damn near empty all the time

The evenings are a different story and for the most part I can't imagine a place I would rather not be than on a beach with 10,000 people all vying to get in the water. I, and almost everyone else that i know that lives here, stays away from the beach altogether during these hours.

So that all sounds vunderbar doesn't it? I know a lot of people that are very jealous of the fact that I get to live here, but it isn't all fantastic and I am going to detail the things that are pretty awful about living here because every place has a flip side, right?

Traffic is insane and relentless

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I quite enjoy getting around by bicycle: When I lived in Chiang Mai 5 months ago it was my primary method of getting around even though I did also own a scooter and taxis cost next to nothing. It was a wonderful way to get some exercise and also see some things that you probably wouldn't have noticed if you were whizzing by on your motorbike.

In Da Nang this is a pretty stressful situation though because traffic never stops until you go down some allyway that has nothing in it anyway. The intersections don't have stop signs for anyone and even if they did I don't think anyone would stop anyway. There seems to be this system of whoever honks their horn first gets to proceed. I don't see many accidents so this system does appear to work but on a bicycle, you have no horn and no one would care if you did. So mostly I don't enjoy riding my bicycle here, which is a damn shame.

Booze

I am a borderline alcoholic... or a functioning one. I have lived here since February 22nd and there has been only 1 day that I didn't drink. Most of them, I got drunk.

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Every day I tell myself that I am not going to drink but honestly, the only way I can accomplish this is to stay away from everyone that I know and that is a shame because they are fun people. I don't know anyone that doesn't drink but that is my own fault.

It would be ludicrous for me to blame this situation on Da Nang because no one is making me drink the beer but the fact that there are exactly zero restrictions on when you can purchase alcohol (24 hour bars are allowed and do exist) and that even in a bar a bottle of suds is less than a dollar (my happy hour spot features 2 beers for $1) and you have a situation that is difficult for me to resist.

It's pretty f**king dirty here

There doesn't seem to be much emphasis placed on sanitation or proper waste disposal anywhere in the city. When I take my dog for a walk I don't bring a plastic bag with me to pick up her doo doo because I know that i will encounter 20 discarded bags on the ground during our walk to her preferred poopy spot.

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The thing that I dont understand about this situation is that unlike Thailand, there are bins or trash cans all over the place. I have never been anywhere in this area where I was more than say 20 meters from a bin so I really don't understand why there is trash literally everywhere. It is very common to see groups of construction workers sitting somewhere for lunch and when they get up, everyone just leaves the garbage on the ground, even though a bin is just steps away.

Thankfully the city seems to do a pretty decent job of keeping it off the beach and out of the ocean, but I really think they could be doing a lot more. Much of this garbage will end up in the sea when a rain comes.

Vietnam is recognized as one of the top offenders in the world as far as plastic pollution is concerned (particularly when it comes to how much of it ends up in the sea.)

Construction noise is everywhere

I used to have a running joke when I lived in other parts of the world that i would say "oh this is a lovely place, or at least it will be once they finish building it."

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It really doesn't seem to matter what part of the city you go to, there is construction noise and when something is being built out of cement and tile, that is the loudest kind of construction noise.

Just yesterday I went to a new restaurant with some pals only to eat my food as fast as I could and get the hell out of there because there was a team cutting giant pieces of tile with a rotary saw directly across the street from us.

Da Nang is a recent metropolitan area and particularly over on the beach side of things where I live, the building just keep getting torn down and made taller. You can travel in any direction from where my condo is and you will pass dozens of construction sites where they work well into the night.

A big marketing strategy for real estate agents is for them to find the "quiet" condominiums but many times, I have traveled over to those places only to find out that "quiet" simply meant that the construction was a block away, instead of next door. It is extremely rare in this city to have any silence ever and this is very annoying.

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All in all, I still really like it here and am glad I moved here. I will have to learn to live with the "problems" that I stated above and as far as the boozy one is concerned, that is all about willpower and I am just going to have to find some of that.

It is very easy to live very well here for under $1000 a month (probably much less if you were really trying to save money) so in that regard I should just shaddup about it. I just don't want to pretend that it is all sunshine and rainbows here because it definitely isn't.