Rice Noodle Factory

Wednesday January 9th, 2013

We got off our motorboat for a little side trip down a few alleys to a rice noodle factory.
First, the rice is soaked in water for 20 minutes. Then it's ground into flour in a grinder and mixed with tapioca (in the big sacks) to give it more elasticity. After that it's cooked over a fire made with the rice kernels, the charcoal from which (the black pile) is then used as fertilizer in the garden. The rice is cooked in what looks like a big fishing camp frying pan with a lid and then rolled out with a bamboo roller into a thin circular shape that looks like about a 2 foot diameter thin pizza crust. After that it's put on bamboo racks out in the sun to dry. After it's dry it's stacked by a cutter and cut into rice noodles, kind of like using a big paper shredder.
That's the basic process but it's accomplished in a factory that looks like something that came out of a book by Charles Dickens. When we arrived there was a guy laying on the waiting bamboo racks by the cooker, smoking cigarettes. The other women working there were sitting at a table chatting. It looked like nothing had ever been washed. Out in the yard under the racks, the chickens and ducks wandered around doing what chickens and ducks do. Everything is on a dirty concrete floor or on actual dirt.
It seems that people in Vietnam work long hours. Sometimes they're working very hard but there's also a lot of standing around waiting for something to happen. Because they're working with such poor equipment on a small scale and because labour is so cheap, it seems like everything is very labour intensive. We saw men unloading a boat full of crushed rock by carrying it in baskets on their shoulders up a gangplank.
Also, in HCMC at least, there are an enormous amount of people employed as security guards for motorbikes at every shop and restaurant. So, basically, they stand around for about 90% of the time waiting. All of this leads to very low productivity per person. We understand why it's like this but coming from Canada where we're so concerned about productivity, it's very different.
After the rice noodle factory we started out for Rach Gia on the coast in our van. No doubt there will be roosters crowing wherever we go. Anita is convinced that the same rooster is following us from HCMC. I don't think so. As they say here, "Same same, only different" (quote by Dylan).