Day 2 was a very good day. It all started around 10:30. I know, I know, what the hell were we doing gettin' started so late? Well, the short answer is, yer readin' it bucko. We spent the early part of the morning updating the website. At 10:30, we headed out to Pham Ngu Lau (which is sort of the backpacker district) to book tours to the Mekong Delta and Cu Chi. We did that at the Sinh Cafe with the help of a young man who spoke outstanding English (we leave at 7:30 tomorrow morning, for the record... ugh! Aren't we supposed to be on vacation?)
We got to Pham Nhu Lau via a pair of xich lo (cyclos). How to describe a cyclo... well, it's essentially a bicycle with a big padded seat on the front. You hop in and they peddle yo' ass wherever you want to go. The strange thing about cyclos is that you are up front
, so there's nothing between you and whatever is headed your way but unpadded air. You have an unobstructed view of the craziness that is, Vietnamese traffic. Mike and I talked for a while about the best way to describe the traffic here and I came up with the following analogy: There are no lanes, and the double yellow line down the middle of the street seems to be a suggestion or a guideline rather than a rule.
Vehicles routinely shoot down the wrong side of the street looking for an opening.
Imagine, for a minute, trying to get to your seat at a baseball stadium. The crowd moves shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-chest. No lanes really, and every now and then someone pushes through the crowd headed in the wrong direction and gums up the works.
And the best way to improve your time is to constantly look for faster moving lanes, then shuck and jive your way through the crowd. Same deal on the roads in Saigon. It was amazing to watch from afar, but even more incredible to be right in the middle of.
So, having booked our tours, next on the hit parade was finding an internet cafe in which to update the site. We had troubles with this since the first two we tried had firewalls that prevented us from doing what we needed to do. (They were fine for web browsing and email, but uploading our pictures is a bit more complicated.) But fortunately, Pham Ngu Lau is jam-packed with cybercafes, so we just kept trying until we found one that worked.
Then we stopped back at Sinh for lunch. We both ordered Pho, which is a hearty broth with noodles and chicken or beef. Good stuff. Lunch percolating in our bellies, we decided to hire cyclo drivers to cart us around to the things we wanted to see. We negotiated a fee of five dollars US for a trip to three sites and back to the hotel.
First up was the War Remnants Museum, which used to be called the Museum of American War Crimes, until the Vietnamese started to realize that there's some serious cash-ola to be made in the tourism business, and changed the name.
This museum is a sobering place. Obviously, a lot of the exhibits are propaganda designed to make us look like a bunch of murderous barbarians testing out our cool new weaponry on a bunch of worthless yellow people. But then, we did give them an awful lot of material to work with. The four main exhibit rooms are full of captured US weaponry, guns, mines, mortars, tanks, jets, etc. and evidence of the horrors caused by defoliants, among them two severely deformed human fetuses floating in jars. But there is evidence of a growing trend toward making the message of the museum "hey, war sucks, and no one behaved particularly well in this one, so let's let bygones be bygones", as opposed to "my what horrible people those Americans are."
On our way out of the museum, we stopped to take a picture of the sign out front and ran into a fascinating little girl. She was trying to sell us postcards, ten for a dollar (which is a pretty common occupation for kids her age, here). She was about ten years old and spoke decent English, better than any of our cyclo drivers. I wound up buying a pack, mostly because she was adorable and a pretty good saleswoman to boot. At one point after Mike told her for the fiftieth time "no thank you", she said "I no understand 'no thank you', I only understand 'sell'." When I open ICM Saigon, she will be my first hire.
Our cyclo drivers were waiting to take us to our next stop, so we hopped aboard and headed for Reunification Palace. We bought our tickets and sat down to wait for a guide.
Our guide turned out to be a beautiful young woman whose name we were never able to pick up to any degree of satisfaction. Her English was not that good, but she was cute and sometimes that's enough.
Vietnamese women are, to my surprise at least, strikingly beautiful. They absolutely love to smile, and as a bonus, many of them wear a traditional outfit called an ao dai, which very nicely accentuates the slim Vietnamese build.
As our guide sashayed around the Palace, I found it very hard to look away.
Reunification Palace was the home of the last few South Vietnamese Presidents, including Ngo Dinh Diem, the ruthless bastard whom we were finally forced to allow to be overthrown by a military coup in 1963. Other famous Presidents include Thieu, who is most notable for being the guy who volunteered to be President as the NVA tanks rolled down Duong Le Duan and (quite literally) over the Palace gates, and as a consequence, only got to be top dog for one week.
The Palace is interesting because the interiors were designed in the late 60's and after reunification, the Palace was left as was. As a result, the decor is, to be kind, very "Stayin' Alive." For a good example, check out the entertainment center and "art" on the wall in this rec. room. We tried to talk to our guide, but as hard as talking to attractive women is under the best of circumstances, things get even hairier when a language barrier is throw into the mix. We did manage to get that she's a business student, but not the name of her college. And when I told her that I work in Hollywood, she looked at me as if I'd told her her hair was on fire.
Next we had our boys take us over to the former US Embassy. Two images of the old Embassy might come to mind, 1) MP's attempting to retake the building from Tet offensive-inspired snipers in 1968, the beginning of the end for the American war effort, and 2) The actual end in April of 1975, as the last choppers air-lifted American personnel off the roof as the NVA quite literally knocked on the front door. But for some reason, our cyclo boys decided that we needed to see the current US Embassy (est. 1995), and no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't manage to explain the difference, so we told them to take us back to the hotel. At this point a serious downpour had opened up and we got to see the cyclo's rain awning in action.
When we got back to the Rex, our drivers tried to renegotiate from 5 dollars each, to 10. We haggled with them for a while, but we had been feeling guilty about making them wait around for hours while we toured museums, so in the end, we let them bump us up to $15 dollars for both of us. Not bad for a four hour commitment.
After freshening up, we headed to the post office to send out a few postcards. One nice thing about the Commies is that their public service agencies open early and stay open late. The main post office (Buu Diem) in HCMC opened at 6:30 am and closed at 10:30 pm. Hell, if you want to mail a letter in a Capitalist pig-dog post office, you had better getcho ass down there before 5pm or you are S.O.L sucka!
So, I bought stamps and used their provided paint brush to paint glue onto the card and affix the stamps (8,000 VND per stamp, but well worth it for the Sumo wrestling cats depicted thereon). As I worked, Mike noticed in the guide book that post office officials monitor each outgoing post card for subversive material. Well, I can't imagine anything more subversive than the cards I sent out to y'all today, so if you guys get anything from me, I'll be as shocked as a wet giraffe in a lightning storm.
Postage taken care of, we decided to walk around the city for a while. We stayed off the beaten track and as a result, saw some things that didn't feel touristy... couple old ladies making boxes, a group of kids barbecue-ing chicken's feet over an open flame, a bus station ad advertising my favorite British Premiere League club Manchester United... I mean who knew?
This day was definitely relaxing, as we finally felt like we had begun to figure this place out. Too bad we're planning to leave for two days starting tomorrow. Oh well, we'll be back on Thursday.
We rounded out the day sitting on the rooftop bar at The Rex, drinking Tiger Beer and eating the tastiest spring rolls I can ever remember eating. Mmm, mmm. Wish y'all were here.
Tomorrow, the Mekong Delta... I say hell yeah!!!
