Ho Chi Minh City

We weren't able to post sooner since we had no charger and were afraid that we better save computer power for essential communications. That is all now resolved so we've got some catching up to do. We better start our long story of the last few days at the beginning.
Saturday December 29th
Zack picked us up at home at 2:30 pm for what we all had thought would be the usual maximum 2 1/2 hour trip to the Ottawa airport. Due to the snow and really slippery driving conditions we didn't get there until 6 pm which was still in lots of time for our flight. By the time he got back to Beachburg, Zack had spent 8 1/2 hours driving in very bad conditions. Not much fun for him but he got us where we needed to go.
At check-in, we discovered that our flight to Toronto at 8 pm was delayed until 9:30 pm which would mean that we'd miss our flight from Toronto to Frankfurt. We were told that there was a direct flight from Ottawa to Frankfurt leaving at 7:30 but it was full and there was no way we were getting on. The check-in lady said to go to Toronto and sort things out there since that was a major hub. We were told this twice.
So we went through security, got a bowl of soup and then hung around. We watched the Frankfurt flight board their plane late, which didn't seem to impress most of them. I had given up on getting on that flight but Anita decided to ask one more time. A different Air Canada guy said, "Why didn't you come to me sooner? There's lots of room." He ran to make sure our bags could get on the Frankfurt plane and then ran back and issued boarding passes to us. We ran to the gate and somehow I managed to strain my hip flexor which has been giving me problems for the last 6 months. We were so happy to be on our way while everyone around us was so unhappy because the plane had been delayed several times already and they were all 4 hours late for their connections in Frankfurt. Since we didn't have to go to Toronto it ended up that we got to Frankfurt an hour ahead of schedule.
The flight was a bit uncomfortable as my hip seized right up but we didn't really care since we would make our other connections. Due to waiting for de-icing it took awhile longer to get going but we got to Frankfurt after a 7 hour plus flight. We had 3 1/2 uneventful hours in Frankfurt before boarding our Thai Airways flight to Bangkok. Our plane was an Airbus 380, only a couple of months old and the biggest passenger jet made. It was huge, 2 complete levels and all very nice. Thai Airways provides excellent service. It was over 10 hours to Bangkok and more time zones. We left Frankfurt in the afternoon local time and got to Bangkok about 6:30 am Bangkok time on Monday. So we missed 12 hours of Sunday due to time changes.
Monday, December 31st 2012
After walking about 2 or 3 km through the Bangkok airport we found our gate and boarded our Thai Airways flight to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) about 7:30. We arrived at HCMC a little after 9 am and got our visas, which we had arranged beforehand by email. That took only 20 minutes or so and we got through customs with no problem. We were probably the last ones to get to the baggage carousel and our backpacks were nowhere in sight. We were told that the plane was completely unloaded so our bags had never gotten on. We went to the lost luggage and the lady checked our tag numbers. She discovered that our bags were sitting in Toronto. I guess they got sent there on our originally planned flight and hadn't been with us at all since we left Ottawa. She arranged to get them flown to HCMC on later flights and sent to our hotel when we arrived.
As tired as we were, since we had slept only about 2 /12 hours since Saturday morning, we were really excited when we met Dylan at the front door of the airport. He was all happy and smiling and so were we. He got a cab for all of us to our hotel near the backpacker hotels area of HCMC. Dylan had reserved a room for us at the Ngoc Minh, which is a modest hotel up a little alley off a main street, as a lot of these little 2 star hotels are. It's just fine, family run, clean and reasonably priced. We have a decent size room with ensuite bath, breakfast included, for $25 per night. We all went out for lunch at a nearby restaurant, bought some flipflops and shampoo, since we had only our carry-on daypacks with toothbrush, computer and money, and then went back to our room and slept for 3 hours.
That evening, Dylan brought his girlfriend Kasumi to meet us. She's a sweetheart. Knowing that we had no other clothes, she brought Anita a few items of hers to help out. That night was New Years Eve. We went to a big restaurant where each dish is cooked by a different team at all these stations along the sides. It was great.
After dinner, we walked back to our hotel right through all the crowds at the New Years festivities. They have a huge party with music on a couple of big stages in the park, food booths and just general craziness. The moto (motor scooter) traffic was totally insane. We learned how to cross the street filled with thousands of motos by just flowing across at a steady pace while the motos veered around us. This ain't Combermere.
By around 11 pm, we were tired and went back to our hotel to sleep.
Tuesday, January 1st, 2013
We felt great after a good sleep and breakfast on the rooftop patio. Dylan came to our hotel and we made a plan for the week. Dylan has a school presentation to do Friday morning as part of his MBA program with the Universite Libre de Brussels which offers post graduate business programs here, so we picked that day to go to Cu Chi Tunnels. We decided I should buy a custom-made suit where Dylan has had 5 made to wear to work. So off we went to Nam Silk where we picked out fabric and I got measured in a hundred different ways. Dylan did the negotiating for us and in the end I am getting a custom made suit, 2 custom made dress shirts and a tie for $150 US. It should be ready later this afternoon. Then we went to Tuan Travel and reserved a bus trip for Friday to Cu Chi Tunnels. The trip by bus, with guide, runs from 8 am to 2:30 pm and takes us about 50 km out of town to an area where nationalist resistance fighters eventually carved out about 200 km of tunnels through their wars with the French and later the Americans. It should be interesting.
After a nice lunch we spent some time at a big flea market type place (totally crazy) but we needed another nap so we rested for most of the afternoon. In the evening Dylan, Kasumi and Dylan's friend Mr. Brian (as his students of English call him) arrived at our hotel with a couple of bottles of wine that we drank on the rooftop patio. Then we went by taxi to the Barbecue Garden, an outdoor restaurant where a gas grill is built into each table top and you cook whatever you've ordered yourself, sort of like a BBQ fondue only not a fondue. It's cheap to get around the city by taxi since the meter starts at 12,000 dong (VND, Vietnamese dollars) and often a 10 or 15 minute drive ends up at maybe 30,000 dong. Since 20,000 dong equals $1 Canadian, that's only $1.50. There's not much incentive to walk. After a taxi back home we had another good night of sleep which was only broken once again by a neighbourhood rooster crowing at 6 am. Although we're in the middle of a city of 7 or 8 million, there are free range chickens wandering along the side of the smaller streets and alleys.
Wednesday January 2nd 2013
Before Dylan arrived to be our tour guide for the day, we walked around the neighbourhood and through a local market where there are lots of people selling meat, vegetables, clothes and you name it along with little food stalls where people sit on little plastic stools and eat. There are lots of people all over the place crouching and cooking food to sell or crouching and eating. Ladies walk around with a carrying pole across their shoulders with a little BBQ in a metal pail on one end and food to cook in a pail on the other end. They stop and set up quickly wherever they think they'll get some business and sell food. Lots of people eat street food for every meal, it seems.
When Dylan arrived, we took a taxi downtown to the Metropolitan tower where he works on the 10th floor at the Canadian Consulate. He showed us around a bit and while he checked his email and stuff, we walked over to the main post office and by the big Catholic cathedral. The post office is a beautiful building.
After we had gotten some bandaids for Anita's swollen mosquito bites on her feet, probably suffered at the BBQ Garden the night before, we went to the War Remnants Museum, which has many photographs and artefacts depicting Vietnam's struggle against French and American imperialism. The descriptions definitely have a Vietnamese government slant and tone to them but there are lots of quotations from American government leaders that we don't often hear in Canada. In the 1950s US president Eisenhower really did say that it was cheaper to supply arms and equipment to the French to enable them to quash nationalist resistance in their Vietnamese colony than to risk losing a stable source of tungsten and tin that America needed from the region. As usual, imperialism is more about money than about ideology. As we all know now, the American war, as it's called here, was ot about stopping the threat of communism. And although Vietnam is a one party so-called socialist republic, it definitely doesn't seem communist. It seems to be a rigid one party state where each individual has to look out for themselves. Canada seems much more socialist. Here there seems to be vast disparity between the rich and the very, very poor. So Vietnam has a lot wrong with it but communism isn't one of its sins. And also, as usual, there is a difference between government policy and the people's attitudes. So far, they couldn't be more friendly and able to get along with each other in less than ideal conditions. There's no road rage despite all the crowding and chaos, which seems almost unbelievable when you're in the middle of it.
The War Remnants Museum also had many photographs of school children during the war who continued to go to school with their straw hats on for protection in case of bombs and with their first aid kits. They all knew what to do in case of an air raid but schools kept going. It seems like the Vietnamese people were determined to fight for generations and set themselves up to carry on through anything for their independence. The Museum had many very powerful displays about the effects of the defoliant Agent Orange on both sides, about massacres and torture that occurred and generally about the horrors of war. It's not nice to go through the Museum. However, it's worth seeing.
After getting over the emotion of the Museum we cheered up and went for lunch. After lunch we went to Independence Palace, also known as Reunification Palace. The original was bombed in the early 60s and the replacement is a big example of typical 60s style. For $10 in total, 3 of us went in and got a guidebook. Plus at the front door, there was a lady who gave a free one hour tour of the whole thing from banquet halls to meeting rooms to the gambling room, the movie theatre, the rooftop nightclub, the rooftop helipad and the basement bunker. In the 60s and 70s this is where the South Vietnamese president lived. There is a famous photo of North Vietnamese tanks breaking through the front gate on April 30th, 1975. This is also where a South Vietnamese pilot, who was really a North Vietnamese secret agent, refused his orders to bomb a North Vietnamese position in February, 1975 and instead bombed the rooftop helipad of this palace. He was shot down but not killed and still lives in HCMC at the age of 66.
After another late afternoon nap, Dylan, Kasumi and Dylan's friend Jay came to our hotel and we had wine on the roof again. Then we went to a modest local restaurant for dinner. During dinner people, including little children, kept coming in to sell stuff like flowers, cigarettes, gum etc. Then it was back home for another good sleep before the rooster crowed.
Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
First thing we did was send Josh a happy birthday email. We'll celebrate from here. We went for a short walk and when Dylan arrived we taxied downtown to Saigon Square to look around. Then we walked down to the Opera House which is the scene of some of the action in the movie "The Quiet American". We walked all the way back and bought some pho (rice noodle soup) to eat on the rooftop. After lunch Dylan went to work on his presentation for university tomorrow and we're catching up on our blogging. That's it.
Tonight, Dylan and Kasumi will probably guide us back to the big restaurant we went to on our first night. Eating in restaurants is really reasonable. The BBQ Garden the other night cost 713,000 dong for all 5 of us. That's about $35 for a feast. Other restaurants have all been less so far.
We're caught up.