Saigon

First stop: Madame Cuc's Hotel 127. Their driver picked us up from the airport about 11pm (11 hours ahead of east coast US time) and we had the 45 minute ride of our lives! The traffic of scooters and motorcycles, cars, trucks and buses, bicycles and pedestrians all sharing the road and taking traffic laws as merely a suggestion was a bit of a shock.

This is the view outside our 1st hotel room on our 1st morning. Many views in Vietnam were a juxtaposition of old and new, modern and primitive. Hotel room views didn't matter much in Saigon. It was the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff and overall cleanliness of Hotel 127 which recommends it, and led up to stay there again on our last night in Vietnam.

On our 1st full day in Vietnam, we walked around Saigon markets (mostly the Ben Thanh Market), where I scored a better backpack than I arrived with for only 350,000 dong! That's just about $21 dollars with their exchange rate, and it is a The North Face! We ate pho at Pho Cali, a relatively clean pho joint where President Clinton once ate. Then, because we were still green tourists, we got ripped off by a cyclo driver who would not stand by his agreed upon price to take us to the Ngoc Hoang Pagoda. He agreed on 200,000 dong and then insisted on 400,000 dong. We gave him 300,000 dong in the end. 100,000 dong is only about $6, but when you consider that later in the trip we rented motorcycles for a whole day for 120,000 dong or less, you can see where the rub is. Really that was the worst that happened, so you just have to watch out, and our ego was hurt more than anything else.






They kept tons of small turtles in this pool, and they had a very large one in a very small pool cage.


Then we visited the War Remnants museum. What struck me the most was all the images of the impacts of agent orange. I had no idea that the damage to and lasting impact humans was so great. Below is a statue made from collected shrapnel.




We took pictures from atop the Sheraton Saigon,





(Look, Dad, I got my picture taken in front of the town hall! ~ you can see it in full in the mid/upper right of the pic above)


More pics from the rooftop bar of the Sheraton Saigon:




and ate slightly westernized Vietnamese food near the Reunification Palace. At the restaurant, we were sat at a 4-top, and then they sat a German couple we did not know right at our table with us. This turned out not to be that unusual of a practice.