Live in Ho Chi Minh City

Here's the Saigon experience:

Day 1
After scoring an amazing hotel room at the Stella restaurant on Bui Vien street I walked up to Keane and Kevin in an alley and asked them if I could join for dinner. We had delicious noodle soup. K & K are Irish architects on a whirlwind one year tour of buildings. Their entire trip is based around structures they want to see in the world. This explained why they went to Bangladesh for only four days. These guys convinced the border guards that Irish people didn't need a visa to enter the country. They then went to the British embassy to get access to the interior of the National Assembly building, designed by Louis Kahn, but the line "Irish people don't need a visa" didn't work with the British. They'll be in Fort Worth, Texas for two days to look at Kahn's Kimbell Museum. It would be great to plan a trip centred around one obsession. I tried to come up with one for myself but nothing came to mind in the time that we spent drinking beer sitting on low stools with locals as small children that should have been in bed ran screaming past us through the maze of alleys.

Day 2
We took a walk past the Hotel Continental, featured in Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Followed by an unsatisfying lunch at a Mexican restaurant where I took an awesome picture of Chris imitating Tom Selleck's moustache.

Then it was off to the War Remnants Museum. The courtyard of the museum was filled with old US military helicopters and fighter jets. The museum featured photographic displays documenting the Vietnam war. One entire section was dedicated to the journalists that lost their lives on assignment. The effects of Agent Orange and Napalm were on display in the form of two large jars of deformed fetuses.

Later we hung out at Go2 bar which, according to Chris, looks like a prime target for a bomb. If ever there is a bomb attack in Saigon his bet will be that it'll be at this bar. The place is on a corner and is usually packed with tables that spill out onto the sidewalk. Every once in a while the staff hurridly makes you move tables because the cops are on their way to bust them for having their patrons sit so far out on the sidewalk so late at night.

Day 3
The Cao Dai religion worships Victor Hugo, Confucius, Joan of Ark and Lao Tsu as prophets. The religion itself is a combination of Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism. There are no popes, only elders whose rank is distinguished by the colour of their outfit. Yellow represents Buddhism and red Christianity while blue represents Taoism. The women all wear white and the temple is a technicolored rococo creation.

The religion is practiced only in a small part of Vietnam. In the early part of the century the Japanese used the Cao Dais to fight against their government.

Basically the religion worships the all seeing omnipresent eye. Wow. That's deep. I'm waiting for that one white guy that will take up Cao Dai-ism and bring the show to North America. There's always that one dude. It's just a matter of time.

The second part of our one day tour consisted of a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels. These tunnels were the nightmare of the GIs during the war. The original structures were tiny and required the Viet Cong to crawl through them. Their small size made them safe from collapsing. To give us fat western tourists the opportunity to enter the tunnels a 100 meter version has been reconstructed at twice the original size.

The Cu Chi tunnel tour started with a highly one sided video of the tunnel's history. We lagged behind the group at every step so we could take jackass photographs of each other. Not that our tour guide wasn't entertaining. He came up constantly with little gems like "nip down for a quick squease" and "howdy mate".

Day 4
The Notre Dame cathedral and post office are side by side. However, visiting the cathedral I felt compelled to pay my respects at the oldest mosque in town, right next to the Sheraton. We got a private tour by an Australian Vietnamese woman. Vietnam has somewhere around 100,000 muslims, most belonging to the Cham minority group.

The Reunification Palace is where the last moments of the Vietnam war played themselves out in 1974. The original building burned down and was reconstructed in the sixties. When the tanks rolled in (on display outside the palace) the meeting rooms, a shooting range, kitchens, the living quaters of the South Vietnamese president and the bunkers were left untouched. All the seventies decor made me feel like I was walking through a retro dream.

I then made Chris walk 45 minutes to have pho at Pho Binh. He was not impressed. It's basically a very unassuming noodle place. Like all the other noodle houses except that this one has historical importance. It was here, on the second floor, that the Tet offensive was planned by the Viet Cong while American army personnel slurped soup on the ground floor. The offensive failed but it marked the turning point in the support for the war abroad. The owner was subsequently jailed and tortured. He ran the place until he died...the LP makes no mention of his death, so I'm assuming he kicked the bucket not too long ago. Definitely after 2005 because that is when the guide was printed.