Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon, Vietnam

I loved this city. The insane amount of motorcycles on the streets, the delicious and ubber cheap street food, the stacks and stacks of photocopied books and possibly the nicest locals yet. The city is also really easily navigated on foot and was the first big city that didn't have me frustrated to the max standing on a street corner breathing in intense amounts of exhaust and thinking "Why did I want to come to this city again!?!" (this is what happened in Manila and Jakarta). However, there is an intense amount of exhaust. All the locals drive around with face mask covering half there face, which left me thinking that maybe I should have one too. I'm also fairly certain that for most women the purpose of the mask is 1/2 to avoid breathing in the exhaust and 1/2 an attempt to stay as white as possible. Some of the women driving their motorcycles are wearing gloves that come up to their shirt sleeves, hats under their helmets, sunglasses and facemasks that come all the way up to meet their sunglasses. Very interesting look. The preference for being pale is also evident when you look around drugstores: ALL the products have labels that say whitening. Even the deodorant! Who really needs white armpits? SE Asians apparently.

I spent 5 nights in HCMC, but two full days were spent hibernating in my amazing aircon and fan room with duvet, fridge, bath and TV with 3 English channels including a movie channel! I was pretty exhausted from my diving in Thailand so staying in was way too hard to pass up. Also, I had no clean clothes...well no clean light clothes. None! So I also used that as my excuse to hibernate for 24 hours while I had my laundry done. Why didn't I go out in my slightly warmer clothing? Because HCMC was 39 degrees!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The heat in Southern Vietnam is INSANE!!!!!!!!!!! Once I got my shorts and tank tops back I didn't mind it so much. EVERYONE sweats profusely, even the locals, and I'm used to it by now. Also, it was quite entertaining to see the Westerners who have just arrived melt. Not nice, but 10 weeks ago that was me so I figure I can laugh now.
Sights in HCMC:
- War Remnants Museum: very very sad collection of pictures taken during the Vietnam war with the US. The explanations and captions are very helpful and provided tons of info on what happened, how many people were involved and what the costs were (human lives and monetary). Absolutely heartbreaking. Especially the sections dedicated to children exposed to Agent Orange.
- Reunification Palace: Huge let down. This is the Palace that housed various important people including Ho Chi Mihn. It's where international politicians and royalty are received and important meetings take place, but really...it's a big house/office building. From the outside the architecture looks really interesting and the lawn in immaculate. On the inside it has faded rugs, faded chairs, faded art. etc. etc. Nothing very exciting. The information provided by the free tour was great. Learned a lot about past rulers and wars, but there really isn't much to look at and it is stiffling with no aircon and only the occasional fan.
- Cholon/China town market: cool place to walk around and check out the local goods.
- Traditional water puppet show: Very cool! Set up with a water stage instead of wood. The musicians and singers were lined on both sides of the stage. They used a combination of instruments and voices to tell a story (in Vietnamese so I didn't really understand, but it didn't matter) while the puppets act out the action in the water. They also used lighting, fog and sparklers to created really cool scenes.
- Day trip to Mekong Delta: in the interest of saving time I signed up for a day trip to two towns in the Mekong Delta. Originally I was interested in seeing the floating markets, but I didn't have high hopes for this because the markets usually get going around 5am and my trip wasn't even leaving HCMC till 8am. By the time we got there the market was dwindling, but I still got a glimpse of what goes on. Essentially instead of having stalls the vendors set up their produce in a boat and then drive up and down the river area selling their goods. Next I got to see a couple of different demos: rice paper, coconut candy (so delicious!) and popped/puffed rice. The popped rice was definately the coolest. They heat up black sand in a huge wok, adding oil every few minutes to see if the sand is hot enough. When the oil starts to evaporate/burn they add in the rice (husk included)and it pops almost instantly.