Selling foreign currency

In a proposal submitted to the city, the metro operator, the HCMC Management Authority for Urban Railways (MAUR), said it has agreed with the metro consultancy, NJPT, a consortium led by Japan’s Nippon Koei, that the chief expert would be paid 2.5 million yen a month and the rest 2.35 million yen.

It said these are the lowest salaries for the jobs as set in the contract.

They are comparable with the salaries agreed for the mass rapid transit project in Jakarta, it said.

Vietnamese experts involved in training engineers will be paid differently, but the details have not been disclosed.

In January a school that was training 58 engineers for the metro announced it had put the course on hold citing non-payment of its fees by MAUR.

The 15-month training, at Hanoi’s Vietnam Railway College in collaboration with NJPT, had begun last July. The trainees, including one woman, are aged 21-35.

It appears that payments to teachers and the school can only be made if appendix No.19 to a 2007 contract between MAUR and NJPT is signed, and that requires the city to approve the engineers’ salaries.

The contract envisaged completion of the line in 2015.

Numerous setbacks that caused delays have pushed the project’s completion to next year.

The long delay also forced the two parties to add 19 appendixes to the contract.

The 19.7-kilometer route from Ben Thanh Market in District 1 to Suoi Tien Theme Park in District 9 will have 17 Japanese-made trains operating.

To cost VND43.7 trillion ($1.89 billion), it has seen 82 percent of the work completed against a targeted 85 percent.

MAUR has blamed the delay on Japanese and European engineers installing the tracks being unable to enter Vietnam last year after international flights were suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The product labelled as ‘Vietnamese Pho’ at the Dutch chain

Albert Heijin (AH), the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, had to remove products labelled as ‘Vietnamese Pho’ from its shelves after negative backlash from customers.

A customer said the supermarket provided chicken thighs, while the ingredients of the “authentic” pho are sliced beef or chicken. She wrote a letter to the AH board of directors and expressed her feelings about the “so-called Vietnamese pho”.

Vietnamese pho is a dish famous all over the world and people, if wanting to learn about it, just need to look it up on the internet.

In 2020, Pho King Bon, a well known restaurant in Montreal, Canada also triggered anger among netizens when naming some dishes in a way that outraged Vietanm.

The pho dishes in its menu had the names ‘Pho Kyu’, ‘Pho Kme’, ‘Pho Kit’, ‘Pho King Good’, which, if misread, could make people think of swearing in English. The restaurant guided customers to spell ‘bun thit nuong’ (vermicelli with grilled meat) into a phrase which means genitals in the French language.

After facing criticism, Guillaume Boivin apologized, saying that the naming was not intended to offend anyone and the restaurant will change the names that led to the misunderstanding.

Vietnamese banh my has also been counterfeited. The word ‘Vietnamese banh my wrap’ was seen on the package, but the shape and materials used to make this product are different from the original Vietnamese banh my.

What made people angry was the way the banh my was processed and shaped. Its crust was very thin, rolled into an oval shape, covering the stuffing of pickled carrots, soya cheese and brown rice.

In another case, Peja Krstic, the chef of a restaurant serving Vietnamese style dishes in the US, faced strong criticism from netizens when misspelling the word ‘banh my’ into ‘bahn mi’ when introducing the Vietnamese dish in the menu.

Burger King apologized and removed the ad thought to mock Vietnamese culinary culture with images of a western man struggling to eat ‘Vietnamese Sweet Chili Tendercrisp Burger’ with chopsticks.

Banh my and pho are well known dishes favorite by many foreigners .

Pho was officially included in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary published on September 20, 2007 in the US and UK. In 2011, banh my was added to the Oxford dictionary as a proper noun.

Thu Ky