Getting Random

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Alright, this is going to be me giving up on actually journaling everything we do while traveling. It's just not going to be possible to keep up... too many things to do, too difficult to take time out and find some internet, too many words to write about too many mind-blowing experiences. So from now on I'm just going to right about whatever random topic I feel like whenever we happen to find internet. Kind of like what a blog is meant to be in the first place.

So right now we're in Ho Chi Minh City (AKA Saigon), Vietnam. I am absolutely in love with the place. Waaaaaaaaay more than Singapore. It was instantly a contender with Rwanda for how strongly I feel about somewhere. So much so that I can't write about it yet. I don't think I'll do it justice.

Plus, we have to get moving pretty soon so we can get lunch from the world-famous Lunch Lady of Saigon. Google search it and you'll see the results.

Instead I'm going to wrap up our time in Singapore. A summary would be that we spent Thursday eating (black pepper crab..... *sigh*) and Friday eating/shopping. Lots and lots of good food.

We also saw the Sacred Buddha Tooth Relic Temple (kind of more words in the name than necessary I think) which holds a tooth of Buddha in a shrine made of something like 420kg of gold. Pretty sweet, very sparkly.

The evening after the crab experience we went to a beachside restaurant/bar and enjoyed the thankfully strong sea breeze. As if that day needed anything else to get better, but it did.

On Friday we went to Orchard Road, the true heart of modern Singapore. I'm trying to think of a comparison to use right now but I can't... I've never seen anything like it. Modern to the extreme - HUGE shopping mall after HUGE shopping mall, all lined up, one after the other, for as far as the eye can see. Not that the eye can really see particularly far when it's blocked by 7 storey malls and 40 storey towers popping up out of the malls. Orchard Road itself actually feels cooler (tempwise) than the rest of the city, which doesn't really make sense considering the mass of buildings it includes. I'm actually like 90% sure that it's just a product of the extreme AC the malls are blasting constantly and the floods of people rushing in and out that creates a halfway air conditioned street. Ridiculous. That definitely can't be efficient.

Some other notes about Orchard Road:
- It was the only metro stop we saw where the escalators went in the 'right' direction by American standards. Western influence? Maybe.
- One mall had a professional singer and piano player providing live entertainment in the atrium. Gotta find a way to get a competitive edge I guess. This mall was also probably the size of all the malls in Des Moines combined, so that was pretty cool.
- We found out that food courts in malls are basically the same as hawker centres but air conditioned. Awesome.
- Spent a pretty good half hour just watching people walk up and down Orchard Road on Friday night. Most people weren't even shopping, just going out to see and be seen. For the record though, Singapore definitely does America's goal of consumerism much better than America does at the moment.

And a couple more Singaporean observations:
- The number of different ethnicities in Singapore is staggering. Even more staggering, though, is how little they interact. English isn't actually spoken too well since everyone spends so much time speaking their mother tongue. It's kind of like a self-imposed segragation. Different neighborhoods are definitely set up by ethnicity.
- Along those lines, the ethincally Chinese people definitely get some favoritism in Singapore. Looking along Orchard Road, it's dominated by ethnically Chinese people. Apparently the gov't of Singapore is trying really hard right now to buddy up with both the US and China, and this is one of the results.
- I would also like to direct you to look back at the blog I wrote about the crab, and see that a random Singaporean saw my blog and felt the need to comment on it. Seriously, they are food-obsessed.

And that's all. I'm sorry this isn't a very good entry but my mind just isn't in it right now. It's still out on the street outside our Internet station here in Saigon. I just can't sit here, I need to go.

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