A FEW DAYS IN SAIGON

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We’re staying at the Beautiful Saigon Hotel in District 1, also known as the backpacker district. The usual tourist hotels are in another part of town; we’re in the area where younger (ahem) people stay, a mix of 2-3 star hotels and hostels, bars, massage parlors, cheap restaurants, and souvenir stores. We wear earplugs to sleep because of the rock music blasting out of the bars, but we knew that before we arrived – this is the fourth time we’ve stayed here and we knew our room would front the street. It’s a great place for people watching and listening. Yesterday, we could hear Chinese and German conversations in the breakfast room, and at today's breakfast, we talked with a man who was here in the Army in the late 1960s.

We spend our days walking, visiting markets, drinking water and eating pho, the Vietnamese beef noodle soup. At night, we sit in little sidewalk bars along with everyone else, nursing beer or wine, and watching the show. The thing that I HATE MOST is seeing old western men with (very) young Asian girls. Horrible, disgusting, vile … and I’m not talking about Asian and western men and women dating. I’m talking about sexual slavery.

It’s really hot today, so we walked over to the Rex Hotel. Folks our age remember the fifth floor rooftop bar as a hangout for journalists and home of the American military command’s daily war news conferences. They were called the “five o’clock follies” by the reporters who even then wondered about the appropriateness of daily war briefings in a hotel outdoor restaurant/bar. Sound familiar? Hmmm?

A side note: we hate DHL! Since it's hot in Vietnam and cool in Japan, we shipped a package of cool-weather clothing to our Tokyo hotel, which they should hold for us until we arrive in mid-March. Tom tried to make everything easy and did the pre-shipment paperwork online before we took the box to The UPS Store on Hardin Valley Road. That was February 3. The box arrived in Tokyo on February 9 and was held by DHL until today, while they put the UPS folks through a nightmare set of ridiculous bureaucratic hoops. We were sure they were about to send it back to Knoxville any minute. The kicker is that if Tom had not done the paperwork on line, no one would have known what to do to get the box released for delivery. They never contacted the UPS Store, and it's only because Tom got automated notices that we knew there was a problem. We do NOT recommend shipping with them! Now, we only need to wait until we arrive in Tokyo to find whether the box is really waiting for us.

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Photos

Beans at the Market
For me, the food displays were fascinating.

Ben Thanh Market
The market is the size of a city block (at least) and is crammed with anything you could want to buy.

Meat Market
You can't be squeamish about understanding where the meat comes from.

Fish at the Market
Tom knows his salt-water fish, and he couldn't identify some of them.

Not shrimpy!
These shrimp (prawns) were bigger than my hand.

Pho Bo in Saigon
As you can see, Tom eats the noodles and I like the broth.

Vietnam Post
This one is for our neighbor Barry Houchin.

Comments

[Jim DeBernardi]

Nice photo of the Ben Thanh Market
So organized.... really nice, I bet Tom liked it. lol