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Published: November 19th 2011
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Some people think we are here on holiday! We are not!! It's just that we like to enjoy ourselves at the weekends after a hard week at work!!!
We ventured back into Saigon on a very wet Friday afternoon. The roads were flooded and it was chaos. It normally takes around 2 hours on a Friday but this time it took 3. We had decided to go slightly posh as we had seen a special offer in a new hotel. At $50 a room we were happy but we couldn't imagine anyone ever feeling content paying $100 a room at the Nhat Ha 3. It was ok and definitely a cut above the usual backpacker haunts we stay in, but that's as far as it goes.
Their website doesn't even work! The rain hadn't abated after we checked in and freshened up so we ended up at
Pacharan which we think is an excellent tapas/Spanish restaurant. Despite the weather, we were happy!
The next day the sun shone strongly. We wandered through the streets to the
War Remnants Museum. It wasn't a particularly pleasant museum and we had expected nothing less. Whilst war photography can be quite impressive, heroic even, the pictures showing the aftermath
of war leave a scar on the soul. It wasn't nice and we found it especially difficult to stay long in the hall showing the victims of the dreadful
Agent Orange which was used to deforest large swathes of Vietnam's countryside during the "American War". We left a donation to help the victims but felt that maybe international governments, especially those responsible, should be helping more.
It wasn't just the "American War" that this museum commemorates. The French were no angels when they occupied, sorry, colonised, the region. The horrific
tiger cages left little to the imagination. it was uncomfortable to think of one captive prisoner being caged in them, let alone 4 or 5.
The museum was a sobering experience but we think it is necessary for anyone visiting HCMC to go there. It doesn't really help you to understand what happened here 30 years ago, or why, but it helped us to realise that part of our job here is still building bridges over past horrors.
A far more uplifting experience was the backpacker district on Saturday night. It was bedlam! You would have thought that Vietnam's football team had won the World Cup. In
fact they had beaten the mighty (!) Brunei 8-0 in the South East Asia Games currently being held in Indonesia. Russ didn't take his camera out with him that night, and regretted it so much, especially as his old phone is in dire need of replacing, as shown in the two salvageable photographs here!!
The next morning we went shopping! We even managed to find some cheap trainers and an even cheaper toaster - which works!! Oh, expat life isn't all fun and games you know, sometimes it's functional!!!
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