Nguyen Viet Xuan Street - Countryside in the city

(Baonghean) -It is also interesting to come to the city on unusually cold and rainy days like this. Choose a small corner for a coffee shop, or sit and chat with the grocery vendor at the gate of the market with a strong rural character in the middle of the city... feeling like you are in a working class neighborhood with here and there brown shirts, long skirts, and many different aspects of the budding urban life. That is Nguyen Viet Xuan Street of Vinh City...

Vinh University of Technology and Education seen from Nguyen Viet Xuan Street.

Nguyen Viet Xuan Street is about 1.5 km long, connecting Phan Dang Luu Street (intersection with Phong Dinh Cang Street) and running straight down to the Lam River bank road at the intersection of Dung Quyet Street and Chu Huy Man Street. The road is almost a century old, from the time the French built the Ben Thuy - Truong Thi "industrial park". The roads are winding through the fields, both sides of the road are like old trails, the houses of farmers and workers are shabby, crowded on the sand dunes. Time has "flooded", changing many aspects of the villages and streets. However, there are still village features in the middle of the city.

It started out as a small market but almost no one knows its real name; it was only established a few decades ago. The market is located at the corner of Nguyen Viet Xuan Street and Phong Dinh Cang Street. Stepping into the market from the bustling street, you immediately have the feeling of being in a country market somewhere. Ignoring the "needle-thread-oil-lamp" stalls in makeshift stalls, there are stalls selling fresh food including fish, vegetables of urban women who have not abandoned their fields and gardens of the old Yen Dung Ha - Yen Dung Thuong farmers. The generosity of the fish and vegetable stalls is sometimes that, if you go down to the ponds of the farms at the end of the road, catch a carp or a roe, and when you return to the market, ask the ladies to scale it for you, even if you don't know them, they will still enthusiastically help you, and also advise you on green bananas, betel leaves, sour star fruit... they will sell them and use them as spices to braise delicious fresh seafood dishes from the countryside....

All over the street, services have sprung up meticulously, with most of the space being shacks and small stalls opening up densely. That influence is thanks to Vinh Technical Pedagogical University, the predecessor of Technical Pedagogical College 3, which since its multidisciplinary development has attracted children from the whole North Central region to study. Before the land fever, when square meters of village land were converted to urban land, the price was in the millions and tens of millions depending on the terrain, many "original" households, energetic and skillful, lived off the spending power of students, and gradually became rich. Ten years ago, when the gravel roads were upgraded to asphalt roads, many people from other places came to buy land on the street, and like many other places in the suburbs of the urban center, the "original" people gradually moved into the inner alleys. But the street did not become truly urbanized overnight. When the new urban projects had just arrived at the end of the road with land fund, they encountered a crisis of unfinished degradation, so ponds were still ponds, rice fields were still rice fields. Some families with money came to buy Nguyen Viet Xuan street, built big houses with big gates but could not take advantage of business, closed the gate and rented another place to do business...

A rural market on Nguyen Viet Xuan street.

Nguyen Viet Xuan Street used to have a club for young people infected with HIV: Song Lam Xanh Club. Forgiveness and empathy brought them closer together, sharing and encouraging each other to live better and more meaningfully... The street also witnessed the rhythm of time of a small person who came and went due to serious illness; and he, a journalist with film scripts that spoke for the feelings of life, and in our opinion, without being ambiguous, if he were not here - a place that gave him space for contemplation - he would have had products with artistic trends that could "stand" in the colorful cinematic life. This street also "accommodated" a veteran who was used to bullets and arrows, and even his dreams of almost becoming a hero on the K battlefield; about creating a farm that used the land of his hometown haunted by poverty to get rich. He built a farm at the end of the street to come back and build a villa in the middle of the street; creating jobs for his relatives: the people who take him to the market to sell fish, the bunches of vegetables that he grows and cares for every day. He beautifies the appearance of the city with his hands and mind, constructing blocks of a poetic space just to say that he loves this land, this street so much...

Nguyen Viet Xuan Street is currently under construction, the entire eastern half has been planned but there are still weeds and bewildered ponds, two-crop rice fields. There are scattered villas springing up, but in the morning or late afternoon they look lonely like old brick kilns? That is impatience, but it evokes a heartbreaking rusticity in the middle of the city. From the gate of Vinh University of Technical Education to the end of Nguyen Viet Xuan Street on the Lam River bank, there is an open space. And surely, the truly "talented and dedicated" investors will multiply the worries of today into the pride of the future. No one is waiting, but if possible, the people in the street all say that they will not allow anyone to be willful and destroy the soul of the street, which is the enduring vitality for future generations; but, that opportunity is for planners like Nguyen Viet Xuan Street in Vinh, there are not many left!

Sam Temple