The incredible affordability of bowling in Vietnam

I complain a lot about certain things in my life here in Vietnam. I mainly complain about things like the constant beeping of horns, how there are so many people everywhere that you go, and that the construction noise is all-encompassing and never-ending.

I think it is important in life to focus on good things when you can, so I want to talk about something that I really love and how it is exceptionally affordable or damn near free here in Vietnam.

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I mentioned that my hair-transplant was a no-go because of my high blood pressure and that was a general annoyance but it is now behind me. I tried to focus on the good that could come from this situation and one of them was the fact that I now get to do basically the only thing I look forward to each week, and that is our weekly bowling group called DUMBO.

We have had tremendous turnouts lately, sometimes getting near 30 people at each outing that was bordering on us not being able to accommodate any additional "recruits" and started to have a cap on how many people would be allowed to bowl with us. The attendance fluctuates from week to week but this past week, which I wasn't even supposed to be at because I was meant to be recovering from hair-transplant surgery was 26 people and that was just amazing. It is right on the crux of the maximum amount of people that we can accommodate, and it was perfect.

When people turn up they need to come to my sign-in table and pay 100,000 VND, which is just over $4 per person. This includes 3 games of bowling (4 if you in a championship game) and shoe rental.

Here are the receipts from our around 2 and a half hours of taking up nearly every lane at the bowling alley.

This is the receipt for the singles matches. There were 26 people in attendance but on two of those lanes 3 games are played per person so it is a total of 30 games. The bottom one is the amount of shoe rentals and it is 25 because one of our members is a fancy-pants who has their own bowling shoes.

The grand total is 1,820,000 VND which converted comes in at just un $75USD

Next up we have the receipt for the tag-team bowling, which is one game played between two partners, so there are only 13 games total being charged for.

That is just over $18 for 13 games of bowling. Let's put the figures together now and we see that the total 2,275,000VND or exactly $93.64. Just under $100 for 26 people to go bowling for over 2 hours.

I was speaking to a friend of mine recently who goes bowling with his son in Illinois once a week and asked him how much it costs for him to go bowling. He told me that he has to go mid-week during a special time of day because it is the discount time of day. They have a promotion where you can get shoes and bowl two games provided it takes less than an hour for the total play-time and the discounted price for this is $20 a person. This isn't Chicago or some overpriced area either, this is some mid-sized town of around 50,000 people.

So if we went during that time to that particular bowling alley and got the promotional rate, it would cost us nearly $500. This is before we even factor in the tag-team portion of the day so I think it is safe to say that it would cost us $650 for us to do what we do here ever week at some middle-of-nowhere bowling alley in Illinois. Although I haven't lived in the USA for a long time, I would imagine that the cost would be about the same no matter where else you are in that country.

So even though I do a lot of bitching about this country, I think I need to step back every now and then and realize how extremely blessed I am to live in a place where things are so affordable. I absolutely love bowling and going in a big group makes it so easy for all of us to socialize and have a good time. It is the highlight of my week and I think that I speak for most of the other members when I say that it is theirs as well. The fact that we are able to do this for a mere $4 a piece, speaks volumes about how wonderful certain things in this country actually are.

I've been a bit of a pessimist about my time here in Vietnam but I think in order to achieve maximum happiness myself, and all other people should probably focus on the good things we have going for us, even if those things are something as trivial as the cost of bowling :)

Oh and I bowled like crap this past week and just couldn't make anything work. I regret to say that in my first game I failed to break 100 points, which is something I haven't managed to do in over a year.