Apartment update

As you can see the construction work on the building in front of my apartment has made it to ground level in a manner of speaking. Currently the workers are laying down the boxing and the mesh in readiness for the next big concrete pour, which will be ground level. Two interesting points of note are the women who now work on the site and the way the mess is laid. Construction work on this side of the world may well be male dominated, but it is not an exclusive male domain. Women work on building sites in Vietnam. As an aside I remember seeing the women in Kathmandu carrying huge loads of bricks in baskets on their backs, supported by straps from their heads, or baskets of soil. ON my building site women are involved in the laying of the reinforcing mesh. In NZ one would purchase mesh in sheets already pre-made. Here in Vietnam long steel rods are delivered and are carried and placed in a grid like pattern, by the women. Where the rods intersect, the women join/ tie them together to create the mesh. Women also labour at other jobs, laying out wet sacks to keep the newly poured concrete from going off so quickly in the heat. They sweep, they carry and are general gofers involved in the lighter work. One day this week the concrete trucks will arrive all through the night and the concrete will be poured. In NZ the concrete is dispensed out of the mixer by a very long elephants trunk which is capable of reaching extensive distances. In Vietnam the concrete is dispersed out of the mixer into a smaller machine which pushes it down long smaller pipes erected around the site. While progress was slow to begin while the foundations were dug out and erected, building the floors is quite quick in comparison, probably one floor every 3 weeks. By those calculations, 15 weeks and they'll be outside my old apartment windows, Scary thought. Watch this space