DA-LAT - A romantic city growing pain.

After a few days rest in Saigon and visited Kathy's relatives, we ordered bus ticket for another trip Da-Lat, back to Kathy's home town to visit her father, who went there couple days ahead of us. The trip ran into 2 snafus: first, it was the bus's air condition for some reason didn't work, so the bus driver stop by the company main's garage and took more than 45 min. to fix it before we on our way again. However, as we get closer to the Bao-Loc pass, about 90 km outside of Da-Lat, we get stuck for another 30 min., waiting in a long line of convoy ahead of us. It turned out that there was a construction on the mountain pass that temporary prevented automobile to either go up or down the mountain until the construction crew making sure the road is safe for large or heavy vehicle to go through.



As usual, I get up early in the morning to walk about the street, to capture the street life at neighborhood, which of course - many people already beat me to it as they often wake up even before the ray of light started to peak on the horizon. You see below as the street light still on, which means it wasn't even 6 AM yet, and the street "Sanity Engineers" like this working women in the picture below.



I sit across the street to take the picture above while drinking coffee and chatting with two other motorbike drivers, who waiting for their first customer of the day. When I asked how the world financial crisis has impacted their life during last couple years and they both say a same thing: even when I see the Dalat city's landscape is improving every year, but life is getting tougher for many - especially the poor, and the migration from the North & Central - who came here and steal their livelihood job has made is worse.

The city cabs is waiting while the drivers drinking their morning coffee and reading newspapers

I wandered down to Ngoc-Lan hill and turn right at the end where the alley name "Anh-Sang" that most of people from Quang-Nam, Quang-Ngai provinces from Central Vietnam before and more after the 1975 came to live here. There is a city plan to uproot these people and move them somewhere else so the local government can "beautified" the city, by building more villa, condo complex or high rise hotels. Even before such planning existed, just like in Ha-Noi - many old existing communities will be replaced with new housing and business centers, especially in and around many major cities - I wanted to capture as many images as possible just for souvenir and sentimental reason.

Above is the local rice noodle "manufacture", already open for business.

I had never spend a single Christmas in Da-Lat before so this year we decided to stay and enjoy the cool and romantic Christmas's eve for a change. It turn out that the Christmas eve was even warmer than we expected and the street was already packed with people, more than triple than before 1975, when the sun started to fade out and the street light turn on. We went out for together with our in-law's cousins, nieces and nephew at one of the coffee shop on the Hoa-Binh slope and later mingle with the crowd walk around the mountain city, which of course - I took plenty of snap shots for later enjoy at our own home, to re-live the moment we spent here.

A little beggar boy

The little boy above is from the North, recently moved to Da-Lat with his parents for a better life, and talking to him, he said that even his parents did not aware nor allow, but he wanted to help them out by sitting here on the busy traffic on Christmas Eve, with hope many will open their heart (and their wallet) to give him some spare change.