Day 361 - War Remnants - best museum in Vietnam

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So then, a full year since the last money went into our bank account, but we think we’ve had pretty good value for that money. Today we set about the main sights of Saigon and took in the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum and the Ho Chi Minh City museum. The palace was better than we’d expected and was where the Communist tanks headed when they captured Saigon in 1975. It’s no Versailles though and makes us think of a 1960s hotel (with some influence from the Soviets) that used to be plush, has now clearly declined, but whose owners cannot see this. The War Remnants Museum is the highlight of Vietnam as far as sightseeing goes and is brilliant. Some of the photos are quite harrowing, and it is a very well managed museum. An ambitious project to revamp it is underway so soon it will be even better. The Ho Chi Minh City museum is also good, but not in the same league as the other one.

We headed to the Rex Hotel’s rooftop bar after reading a good review and found that in fact it was absolutely rubbish. There was an excerpt from a magazine article which talked glowingly about the very same bar, and astonishingly the article was titled ‘The World’s Greatest Bars’. The publication year was 1996 but even so we think some money must have changed hands somewhere for a journalist to put his name to that.

We went souvenir shopping for what may well prove to be our final bit of haggling. If we do say so ourselves we have become quite skilful in this area. It’s not exactly a feature of shopping in England though so we won’t get the full benefit from our ability to keep a straight face when saying that a price that is a tenth of what we would happily pay is outrageous.

Not much else happened but we need to admit that we couldn’t resist a visit to a restaurant that also does breakfasts and which is called ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, perhaps the least amount of effort ever put into naming a café.

PS Please give us credit for avoiding any blog titles along the lines of "Don't ever Miss Saigon"

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