The other day I was out walking somewhere and I came by this particular street that is known for the people who live there putting up signs of all sorts in English and Vietnamese. What makes these signs funny is that sometimes the people who have a building nearby or maybe just people that live there will put up signs that are clearly not official signs and they will have monetary penalties they are supposedly going to enforce if anyone violates it. I once saw a sign that said they were going to charge anyone who walked through this empty property, that didn't even have anything on it, $1000 for doing so. It was stupid because how were they ever going to get anyone to pay that and why was it in dollars when we are in Vietnam? People started walking on the land more frequently because of this sign and I was one of them. I didn't need to walk on the land and the footpath that was nearby was more convenient. We were just trying to make a point.
Here is the latest sign in that area.
You can see that the person put a fence on the vacant lot to prevent people from walking on it, which is what you should do in the first place if for some reason you want people to stay off of your land. The funny thing about this sign is that well, people shouldn't litter anywhere, right? And if they were going to litter, a stupid homemade sign certainly isn't going to prevent them from doing so. Also, Vietnam just generally speaking is terrible as far as littering is concerned anyway and that is something that is disappointing to me.
what is insulting to me about this sign was the fact that it is only in English and from all the foreigners that I know that are living here I can say that we are actually much less likely to ever litter than the locals are. Myself and my friends actually pick up garbage that we see instead of putting it there and are very likely to shame other people if we see them doing that. Yet this sign seems to be reprimanding ONLY foreigners for doing this very common act in a city that has a really bad problem with garbage just lying all over the place.
I think that this sign will not stay up for very long as I am not the only person that is insulted by this. I would be willing to bet that when that happens that it will be properly disposed of in a trash can as well, not just thrown on the ground.