Jarrod and Sara’s Site

 Hello everybody, just got back to civilization and realized we were falling behind on this again. Hope everyone is doing well back at home, putting the beer on ice and getting the food ready for the Pats this weekend. I can really not even believe that this is the season I am missing. Haven’t seen any of the playoffs, and unless I can find a sports bar catering to Americans in Siem Riep, Cambodia (unlikely, all the sports bars play is soccer…), I will probably be missing the Super Bowl as well. If anyone has Tivo…. please record!… and I jealously hope everyone enjoys the game.We were recently in Saigon (officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, but everyone refers to it as Saigon) the biggest city in Vietnam. We really enjoyed this city quite a bit. After the uptight, aggressive, constantly in your face Hanoi (which I still enjoyed, but was also ready to leave after a few days), Saigon is quite different. In general, as we went south through the country and the weather grew warmer, the people seemed to be more mellow and Saigon (deep in Southern Vietnam) was no exception. The people were much more laid back, friendlier, smiled more, the city was much more spread out, it had sidewalks that you could actually walk on - this made a huge difference - and there seemed to be more to do. A stereotypical example of the difference is: in Hanoi, the motorbike drivers (who wanted to taxi you around) would follow you and you would have to tell them no firmly three or four times before they left you alone, in Saigon, the motorbike drivers would wave to you while lying on their motorbike and drinking an ice coffee, and when you said no, they would smile and wave again as you walked by.

The first full day we were there, we went to the biggest market in the city to browse. This has become one of our favorite things to do because each of the markets is so unique (if you get past the t-shirt and souvenir stalls). Its great people watching and the markets, especially this one - Ben Than Market - usually have great food stalls to eat at. These are the equivalent of a food court at a mall at home, but much more lively and they have a much more diverse mix of foods. Besides the stalls to eat, there is also the food market section where individuals and restaurants come to buy meat, produce, etc. This is always an interesting place to walk through, as I walked through this particular food market I saw the following and many more: a person shaving the remaining hair off the lower leg of what I believe was a goat with a Bic razor, cow tongue, cow brain, cow intestine, pig heart, tons of snakes still alive and slithering in little buckets, tons of different fish, along with candy, baguettes, fresh coffee, and fruits and vegetables. These places never get old to wander through (except the smell).

We next visited the War Remnants Museum, which is a very popular museum (mostly tourists) about the American War, as the Vietnamese refer to it. This was a little difficult to digest as it had quite a few photos and videos about the lasting effects of chemical warfare. Basically it was in a large building that you walk through and look at photos and read information displayed throughout. Outside, there was a collection of U.S. tanks, helicopters, etc. and an exact replica of the “Tiger Cages” that were used by the South Vietnamese on P.O.W.’s. While this museum obviously only showed the atrocities of one side and only showed the effects of the war on people from one side, it was strange to see these things as a tourist from the country who they were at war with such a short time ago.

We also visited the Reunification Palace, as its now known, where the Saigon regime’s headquarters were. For the most part it was a typical capital building. It was weird to see the gates and then to inside see the famous pictures of the North Vietnamese crashing through the same gates with their tanks to take over the capital at the end of the war. It was also interesting to walk around the basement’s tunnels that housed the rooms where they supposedly orchestrated the war. The rooms contained a mix of large maps of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, telecommunication equipment which looked like it was from the stone age even though it was used so recently, and empty rooms with nothing but simple telephones on a bare desk. It obviously had been stripped of most things and I’m sure looked a lot different during the war, but we both said that it was incredibly easy to see people working furiously in all the rooms, talking into radio equipment, running back and forth between rooms delivering important pieces of paper, looking at maps, and smoking tons and tons of cigarettes. It could have been totally different, but thats what we both envisioned when we emerged from the basement and talked about it. We could also have just seen too many war movies.
Thats about all for Saigon. We filled the remaining time walking around for hours exploring different parts of the city, drinking potent Vietnamese coffee while watching the motorbike traffic (its art to watch the traffic flow in this city of 3.5 million motorbikes with no traffic rules), eating lots of good food, and drinking cold beers on the sidewalk, while watching the city, and meeting different sorts of travelers. Great place to spend time.

Again, we really hope everyone is doing well, and we miss you guys. A little over a month to go. Keep in touch and we’ll see you soon.

Jarrod and Sara