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Monday, July 4, 2022










Old woman selling lottery tickets on Le Lai on 7-4-22--Vung Tau copy






She's selling lottery tickets. I'd see some old people doing this, but today, I saw a girl of about eight walking around to sell lottery tickets. Such a sight was very common +20 years ago, but extremely rare now. Inflation has become a problem, though, like everywhere else.


3 comments:

Martin said...

When I went to Spain for the first time in 1979, I remember that the lottery ticket sellers were mostly blind men who passed their day standing on street corners in the middle of ancient cities advertising their tickets with a deep, guttural, repetitive, pronouncement. I saw these men in the 80's too, but not so much, if at all, these days in Spain.

Anonymous said...

The lottery ticket sellers on the streets of Vietnam is a distressing sight, a brutal display of how poor and desperate some people are in this society. There are armies of them in some localities. These people are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They walk all over the city and enter every cafes and restaurants trying to sell the tickets. Sometimes you cannot sit in peace for a moment because these sellers will come at you one after another, only minutes apart. They are people displaced from somewhere and they come into the city trying to earn a living. They walk the streets all day in all kinds of weather, then at night they will converge in a rooming house somewhere in a neglected part of town, sharing a sleeping space, maybe ten to a room, and repeat the routine the next day, day after day. There are now increasingly young men and women among them, as opposed to not too long ago, this "job" is reserved for only old and maybe handicapped people. They are seen as not much different from beggars. This is almost a social issue that needs to be looked into by the authority.

Linh Dinh said...

Hi Anonymous,

I agree, but it was much, much worse 20 years ago. The relative disappearance of children under 10 selling lottery tickets was much welcomed in recent years, but with Covid economic disruption, and now alarming inflation that promises to get much worse, this army of lottery ticket sellers may yet return.


Linh