The photos for this posting are here. They jump around a little.
We are exactly twelve hours ahead of Toronto. I watch the TSX open at 9:30 in the evening and do any trading just before I go to bed. When I wake up eight hours later I check to see how the market closed, and what may have happened through the night...er, day...my days feel upside down.
We will leave very early in the morning for the Mekong Delta, where we'll spend two days meandering on our way to the border of Cambodia and then on to Phnom Penh.
Right now we're in the "backpacker's hotel" area of District 1, within steps of travel agents, interesting restaurants, and many of the main tourist attractions in HCMC. We're in a nice, relatively quiet hotel with a large $20 room, with a private bath and nice tile throughout. It's not the cheapest private double one can find, but not expensive, and it has an elevator to our room on the third floor. Single dorm quarters here are only $3-$6 for young backpackers. In this part of the city there are many backpackers, especially from Australia: independent travelers but also tour groups, older bachelors, and older couples like ourselves.
Saigon is so busy it boggles the mind. It is packed like Disneyland with people and stores, with goods of all description. It's more interesting than you can stand, sometimes...stimulus overload. But our room is comfortable and we can rest well here. I felt out of sorts late this afternoon, but the sight and smell of a coffee suddenly made me realize what the problem was: I haven't had any coffee for a few days. Some strong black Vietnamese coffee, the first I've had since we landed, (as odd as that was to realize), fixed me right up. We had a lovely supper, and came home with a 4 litre bottle of water to make sure we stay hydrated. We'll try to get used to living like Vietnamese people: we'll get up early, trot around in the morning, nap through the afternoon, then go out in the evening for a nice walk and a meal or maybe to see something in the nature of a performance, like the famous water puppets.
Dec 4th. We toured the Reunification Palace (a.k.a. Independence Palace) yesterday morning, and got a good history lesson to remind us of the events of the "American War", culminating in the collapse of the puppet government in the south.
In the evening we watched the water puppet performance, followed by a Vietnamese buffet. The water puppets were fun. They are an ancient entertainment invented in the north. Puppeteers manipulate the puppets from below the surface of water about waist deep, using bamboo poles and strings.
Vietnamese people do have a good state of mind about themselves. They are confident and energetic, and eager to become one of the leading nations of the world economically. They did not lose the war against the world's superpower, and in spite of the brutality of a sheer deluge of bombs, napalm and dioxin, they are psychologically unbeaten, and proud of the fact that they ultimately managed to counter the efforts of France and the U.S. to split their country. Their explanations for the hows and whys of the conflict may differ in a few ways from those of western political historians - indoctrination can be a double-edged sword - but after all is said and done, they are slowly entering the world stage as eager and energetic equals.
They take tourism seriously. They are gentle, kind, helpful and for the most part, honest, although there is some minor snatch-and-grab sort of thievery, and taxi fare fraud if you go with the wrong company. Vendors are only too happy to charge foreign tourists triple or quadruple a Vietnamese price for items in the market, for example. You can purchase clothing in the local "Co-op Supermarket", at much lower fixed and posted prices.
The young people are curious and friendly, and appear to look forward in many cases to being able to travel to foreign countries themselves. English language schools abound, in addition to the compulsory English classes in the schools. Joe Truong suggests that the ones in public government schools aren't very good because the teachers are all Vietnamese and haven't themselves mastered the language, especially the pronunciation. So there are lots of positions in private company schools for young foreigners to fill, as I did a few decades ago myself in Japan, and our young friend Adam Sortwell has done in Korea for the past decade.
We toured the HCMC Museum, which isn't huge, but has some items of interest, and a small garden. About two hours is enough to see it all. Like other museums in Vietnam, it also has a heavy overlay of obsession with the war and reunification. I've included a few photos in my album but I've done my best to post only the more interesting photos, and save the rest for our private collection.
Tam offered to meet us for lunch at a restaurant which serves the kind of food indigenous to her region of Vietnam. There are several different groups of Vietnamese people, and they speak significantly different dialects of the common language. She offered to split the bill, but we insisted on paying for lunch; she's good at taking us to inexpensive restaurants.
In the evening Jay Tran came to find us after he finished work at the British legal firm where he is employed. He walked us to a Thai restaurant that he and his colleagues enjoy, the Coriander - it's featured in Lonely Planet, and we enjoyed tasty dishes, and a couple of different 80 cent beers. Jay refused to let us pay, or even split the bill - Vietnamese "first dinner with invited guest" custom, he said. We had a long chat and a walk in the park afterward, where we watched ballroom dancers practicing "classical dances" in three open air pavilions after dark, when it was a little cooler for them.
We watched four guys playing a kind of hacky sack with a shuttlecock made from what look like a stack of shoe tags stapled together with a feather emerging from the top of the stack. It makes a satisfying "click" sound when you kick it, and is a very popular game in Vietnam. It would import well to N. American parks, if we could get a supply of the shuttle cocks.
Jay is dying to travel himself. He has plans to go to California, to Ontario...by which he means the town of Ontario in the state of California. He confused me at first, and chuckled about it, but then I remembered that we have passed through or by the town of Ontario ourselves, only two years ago.
Next: Delta Days
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