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Published: April 12th 2009
We seem to bring the rain with us wherever we go. We've been in Vietnam for 15 days, and we've had 2 days of pure beautiful sunshine. They were the first 2 days in Hanoi.
Ho Chi Minh City (they only use Saigon when speaking of the city verbally) is a massively dense city full of short shanty-type dwellings squeezed between taller townhouses and tourist accommodations, with an ecclectic blend of French colonial architecture and the stoic, grand over-sized government buildings that reek of a Communist flavour. The city has a continuous soundtrack on loop from dawn til dusk, with the tooting of zig-zagging motorcycles, the shrill tinkering of pushbike bells, the hustle and bustle of rushing pedestrians, and the beckoning cries from street store-keepers armed with "good morning, vietnam!" t-shirts, coconut candies, pho soup ladles and lonely planet guides for every country but Vietnam.
We went a bit museum-crazy in the first couple of days and did a walking tour of all the major landmarks (Opera House, Town Hall, General Post Office, Cathedral, temples, Reunification Palace, Museum of War Remnants) but perhaps the most impressionable was the last stop. As the museum was undergoing some extensive renovations, the
hodge-podge temporary exhibition spaces unfortunately did not do the subject matter justice. I won't go into the specific political details and historical facts of the Vietnam War (that is wikipedia's job) but the photographs on display depicated some of the atrocious and violent crimes against the Vietnamese people, including acts of torture, the repercussions of 'Agent Orange' and the napalm bombs which destroyed much of the country . Aaron and I didn't take photographs as a) we felt a little weird/guilty doing so, and b) no-one else was....but there were quite a few which chilled us to the bone.
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tom
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severed elephant feet?
did they cut off the elephant feet for the tourists? or do they have some other sort of significance that warrants a footloose elephant dancing the saigon shuffle somewhere? i always knew there was a communist in you - i dont mean that filmmaker you hang with. it fits that a propaganda atrocity museum was the straw that broke the capitalist camels back! ever a man of the people...neo stalinist is all the rage at the moment though so temper the leninist claptrap in burma. sedition is so easy to say but electrodes to the nipple leave electrical burns to last a lifetime. The reunification palace looks stuunnning - gorgeous lime green decor teamed perfectly with my grandma's chandelier. To think she has the same decorator as ho chi min? what a connection! And i love how the library has no books! nice nod, but a bonfire with a sign in front of it that says 'library' would have been great. or too...Cambodian? im going to work tomorrow. jealous?