I am Lucie Spillebout and I just finished my two months internship at What’zhat Agency in Ho Chi Minh City. So I wanted to write an article about this internship and about living in Vietnam for 2 months in the economic capital city.

On the one hand, I wanted to come here, in Vietnam. I don’t know-how, how many time, when or with who? In the beginning, I thought about coming here to travel as the backpacker’s style. But I come here as an intern, this enables me to both discover the culture and have professional experience.
I also have the project to expatriate myself during a few years after my studies, and more precisely in Asia. So, doing my internship was the occasion to get professional experience and discover the Asian lifestyle.

First, Vietnamese people are amazing, they are always smiling. So not everyone but ¾ of them are smiling every time, for the other, it is normal to be bored to see tourists all the time.
The cutest is when little children shake their hands when they see us or come to us to say hello. I remember cycling in Can Tho and to see people in their house, the bigger part of them say hello when I pass in front of them.

After, here people aren’t stressed like in France. People are calm and don’t run everywhere whenever. Like at the restaurant, for example, we all haven’t our meal at the same time, but the waiter ain’t stressed and don’t listen to people grumbling.

In order to move here, I took the grab scooter, Grab is the Asian Uber. But here the course is by scooter. I don’t rent a bike because I never drive one before and here the way of driving is so different than in France… I don’t know how to drive as I do it on Mario Kart in reality. The most impressive is after a stoplight, all the scooters start together and in every sense.

Their driving is noised, they don’t use the light of their scooter but they use a lot their klaxon! They use it to prevent when they’re turning.

I test the typical food here, for example, the “Phở”, “Bún chả” “Bún thịt nướn” the spring rolls, and a lot of meal based with rice, noodles or rice noodles. Rice noodles are made with large rice pasta and cut in form of noodles; I visited a rice noodles factory in Can Tho in the Delta Mekong.

I tested the fruit here too, like the dragon fruit, the little banana, the mangosteen, and many others But I didn’t test the durian because I found the smell too strong.

Here we can command a lot of food on websites or applications like grab or vietnammmm. We eat at the What’zhat office all together it was a good moment of exchange together. When we eat together, we have our little address like the Hue Corner in Thao Dien or we command at 999.

During my internship I lived and work in the district 2 in Thao Dien district, it is an expat district, there is many French, American, South African and Irish people 😊
I don’t learn many Vietnamese words; I only know how to say hello it is “Xin Chao” and thank you which is “Cam on”. Thao Dien isn’t a walking place, it is difficult to walk here because there isn’t sidewalk, so we have to walk on the street with all the cars and scooter, and when it rain there is a lot of pool of water, and cars drive into quickly and we receive all the water on our foot when we are lucky, when we aren’t we can take a free shower thanks to the cars .
But Thao Dien is a very nice district, we can find many types of food and it is calmer than the District 1.

In the district 1 you can find everything, there is many street foods, you can find this strange at 1st view but it is a cheap way to eat and the food is good.
We can find many markets like the Benh Tan market which is well known but there is a lot of tourists or expat, so the prices are more expensive than in the District 10 for example.

I wanted to write this article for two reasons: the first is because it is the first time I work abroad even if it is only for 2 months and the second is because I think I will never work in this condition and atmosphere in France.

So, working here: I worked in an agency named What’zhat, the founders are French and young. I worked as a business developer and in the marketing field here for 2 months, my mission was to find new contacts and promote the agency on different websites.

We are 3 in an internship in business and there are 2 others in design, so we are in a little group and all the 7 we eat together for lunch. It is a way to cut the day and talk about our weekend, about Vietnam what we can do next weekends for example.

• My main mission was the business developer part, I use LinkedIn as a work tool, I research profiles who can need design and communication services and I talk to them in order to discover their needs and their desires. After we have a phone call to discuss what What’zhat can offer them in the function of their needs.
• My second mission was to reference What’zhat website on the referencing website, this is calling net linking, more referencing website What’zhat is on, more it will receive visitor on is own website. So, I was charged to create this spider web to increase the visibility of the agency. I analyzed the website in order t be referenced in a good one.
• And at least, I was charged to increase the follower’s numbers of What’zhat Instagram page. We, me and another intern, tried some technique to get followers. We test the technique, analyzed them and explained them to our boss when we found a good one.

I worked in autonomy, this way of work was new for me, indeed I just enter in the work world. I really appreciate this way of work; indeed, I organized my calendar in the function I preferred doing in the morning and in the afternoon.

Every week, we have our weekly meeting in order to talk about what we did, what we will do the next week and how we feel at work and in the team.

I find this proximity between the intern and the boss important because we can talk about what we want to do, discover or if something is wrong.

How about you, have you ever been working in another country? Share me your feedback in the comments below.