It's our second night in Saigon, and we're loving it. Lorelle describes it as "relaxed chaos", which is pretty accurate. Lots of shops, shanty areas and people selling fruit, vegetables and live fish. There are girls wearing head to toe white silk outfits with masks on their faces on bikes, and lots of friendly people.
There are millions of people on bikes, cyclos (people on pushbikes with a seat at the front), and in cars - all with no traffic lights and no road rules. However, everyone politely dodges everyone else and we haven't seen an accident yet.
We're very impressed - the local beers are about $1.70 a stubbie (though we are probably getting ripped off) and taste pretty good, and the food is cheap and interesting. We were forced to eat with our cyclo riders last night for a Valentine's dinner (very romantic), and at one stage we thought we were eating what the guy described as "puppy". To our relief, we found out that "puppy" means "duck".
The weather is a beautiful 34 degrees, and really humid - we've decided that it is too hot to hold hands in the middle of the day (again very romantic).
Things we've seen:
Reunification Palace - an absolutely amazing palace, where the South Vietnamese ran the Vietnam war from. The decor is very 60's - straight out of an Austin Power's movie. It's where the North Vietnamese ran their tanks through to and finally ended the Vietnam war.
War History Museum - Lorelle decided to skip this one and have a massage instead. Actually used to be called the War Crimes Museum, but they changed the name to attract some tourists. Very hard hitting and interesting.
Saigon Post Office - Beatiful old French architecture. We bought some phone cards here to call home, but we still haven't worked out how to use them - so thanks to our Mums and Dads for accepting our reverse charge calls.
Ho Chi Minh Museum - once again, the building is like something out of an old movie. We would have spent more time here, but we realised we had set our watches wrong by half an hour and they almost locked us in for the night in a room with a mummy.
The language is interesting, as they say sentences backwards to what we do. For example, the Addidas slogan here is "Impossible is Nothing". We've had a laugh at this one all day. We've almost mastered how to say thankyou, but we're still getting laughed at when we say it.
The Continental Hotel where we are staying is a beatuiful old French hotel built in 1880 - the architecture here is amazing.
1 comment:
Hi there,
Sounds like you are having a ball, Saigon is a really interesting and fun place to be, different to Hanoi in many ways! You will love the Mekong, lots to see and makes a great photo. We had lunch in a small village with the locals when we were there, they are wonderul people. The kids will probably try to sell you some dope, we thought they meant chewing gum until this gorgeous child about 6 years old pulled out a bud from his pocket!! Bet you are loving cigarettes being 12,000 dong, we couldn't believe it. $1.70 for a beer is not too bad in Saigon, it gets cheaper in the smaller towns - down to as much as 60 cents!! That's for Ba Ba Ba and Tiger. Hope the phrase book helps, you will pick up the language as you go. Will talk soon.
Hen gap lai (see you later)
xo erica and mark
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