The city formerly known as Saigon
Trip Start
Apr 09, 2008
1
57
115
Trip End
Apr 19, 2009
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The next day my mission was clear. Find the post office where my replacement card was. It took me an hour or so but finally the card was mine. I tested it straight away and found it was working! I was rich again. The walk to the post office was great because it had taken me right into the heart of the city. And helped me to get my bearings a little
Notre Dame II
. I went next to the Notre Dame cathedral in the centre of the city and looked at some of the french colonial buildings nearby. Next I visted the Reunification palace, the seat of the president of South Vietnam during the war, it has been kept the way it looked the day north vietnamese troops entered the grounds, ending the war. After that I went to the war remnants museum but finding it closed I went to eat noodle soup and rice at a local restaurant. It was quite a good one. After Isat in a nearby park where I got talking to a Vietnamese business man, we had some green tea together before I had to excuse myself and headed back to the war museum. The museum itself is a really emotional experience, it shows all the atrocities commited by americans during the war. It is really an anti war museum. To seeing the torture, prisons and anti war propaganda reminded me of the Iraq war. After seeing pictures of victims and reading stories about masacres the final wall shows paintings done by oyung children with hopes for peace in the future. It is an uplifiting end to the museum which really makes you feel sick at the things humans are capable of. In the past and still today. After I walked accross town to the riverside area. That is where all the upmarket hotels are and also several large shopping areas. Markets and things. I was looking for a book shop where I could exchange my books. Instead I found a shop where I could buy souvenhirs and a market stall selling mountain coffee beans.
That evening I wanted to try to book onto a cooking course, I found one but it was quite a way out of the city. I booked it anyway becasue I had been thinking about doing a course for ages and now that I had some money nothing was going to stop me
War
! So next morning I got up early and found a taxi that would take me to the cooking school. It dropped me near the school but not outside. It then took me 30 minutes and asking at least 6 people directions before I made it to the school, I was now just in time for the lesson. Anyway the lesson itself was great, really, so I learnt to cook spring rolls and a sweet chilli sauce and how to marinate fish. Lots of usefull things and they give you a recipe book to keep at the end so I could try to cook it again at home. That evening I met up with some friends for dinner, the food was quite good and apart from all the beetles in the restaurant had a good meal.We agreed to meet the next morning to go to see the Cu Chi tunnels, tunnels left over from the war now turned into a tourist attraction. It was quite interesting to see the traps and tunnels and imagine how is was to fight there but for me it was too much like a theme park. After being so touched by the war museum it seemed a little bit cheesy. There is also the oppertuity to fire guns including an AK47 "the worlds weapon of choice!". I decided not to but I went and stood next to my friend while he fired, the noise is incredible. Overall this war seems horrible for those people forced to fight to protect their families and way of life and also quite ridicules for those people who chose to do this sort of thing for a living.
Later, back in town I showed my friends the cathedral, colonial area and shopping area that I had already seen. We went to the cinema that night to watch tropic thunder, a comedy about vietnam war films. We decided that there was not much more to see in Ho Chi Minh, most of the museums are around the same subjects as those in Hanoi. So we booked onto a bus the next day for Phnom Penh.
Comments
Travel
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