A bicycle passed by at the end of the narrow lane

Bicycle running at end of lane — Shot in the city of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

I was walking down a narrow alley in Ho Chi Minh City. It's a narrow alley just barely enough for people to pass each other. With walls looming on either side, I felt as if I was walking in a three-dimensional maze. What was different from a three-dimensional maze was that I was not sure whether this alleyway has an exit or not, although there are clearly marked exits in a three-dimensional maze. While I was thinking about that, I saw a big street at the end of the alley. I was relieved. I saw a woman wearing a hat ride across the street on a bicycle.

As the woman rode away, a sign now came into sight. I did not know what it said because it was in Vietnamese. Unlike other Southeast Asian countries, the Vietnamese language is written in Quoc Gu, an alphabet adapted from the Latin alphabet. It seems that this type of alphabet was adopted because the country was a French colony. However, there is no such movement in Cambodia and Laos, which were French colonies as well. Where did this difference come from? This may be because Vietnam once belonged to the Chinese cultural sphere and used the Chinese character for "chunom".

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