Happy New Year from Saigon!
Trip Start
May 02, 2007
1
61
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Yvonne and Natalie
. We stuck our ground, insisting that he show us someone's ticket that had reserved seat numbers. He never did this, so we stayed put. As the bus drove around hotel to hotel and filled up, it became clear that some did indeed have reserved seats, but most did not. The last two passengers, a German couple, got on the bus and after being told they to get in the back of the bus they started a commotion and insisted that they had reserved seats, in fact the ones we had occupied. Too bad for us because in the end, the bus organizer finally played his trump card and told the staff to take our bags off the bus. This is when we knew we had lost and moved. If he had been nice and polite about the whole thing, we would have moved at the beginning. It really just became a matter of principle when he so quickly elevated the situation and lost his temper. It was actually pretty funny to us to get him riled up like that. We arrived in Saigon on New Year's Eve just after six in the morning and woke up the staff at our hostel to let us in and store our bags as they cleaned our rooms. We happily found a place to have breakfast to kill time. After checking into our rooms we made a walking tour of the city. It is very different than Hanoi - it felt roomier with the bigger and wider streets, but one thing that was the same was the traffic. More cars, motorbikes and scooters filled the larger roads
Yvonne and Carlo
. Locals were busying themselves setting up stages, blocking off roads and putting up lights in preparation for the night's festivities. After brief naps in the late afternoon we got ourselves dolled up and hit the streets. We were a group of eight as a few friends of Mark's met up with us and another Aussie girl we met in the hotel joined us. After a sub-par meal, which included them leaving out some of our dishes, we headed to an open-air bar on the corner of a busy (not with cars, but with people) street. The mood was very festive and I think the locals were enjoying themselves just watching the foreigners drink themselves silly and act like lunatics. Half-way through the night the bar jacked up its drink prices by about four times the real price, so everyone started crossing the street to buy cheap drinks at the little market and going back to the bar. We readied ourselves for 2008 with small bags of glittering confetti and a bottle of bubbly and popped it when the clock struck midnight. Everyone surrounding us were covered head to toe in glitter. Shortly after, we left the bar and walked along the packed pedestrianized streets. We stopped for a bit at a stage with a Vietnamese rock cover band belting out Bon Jovi's "It's My Life".After a couple more brief stops at drinking establishments, the night ended at about 2 AM and, with Mark's persistence, culminated with me playing a couple songs on a borrowed guitar for the Vietnamese-packed place, who all clapped along at my drunken rendition of Kenny Rogers "The Gambler". It was a New Year's to remember!
