The last two days we've spent doing everything we every wanted to do in this city before we left. That included more shopping for esoteric items like pink scooter mirrors, some museums, the zoo and night activities.
The night life here is amazing. After dark most people come outside to the sidewalk and go about their business there. Families sit on small plastic chairs and gather around a low table to eat, drink coffee and chat. When you walk down the sidewalk you have to avoid these family groups and also the parked scooters. Many times the sidewalk is not an option and you walk in the street, hoping to not get hit by a scooter.
The Christmas decorations are going up at the bigger and better stores. Families load up on their scooter and drive to the sidewalk in front of the store. The kids pile off and run around to get a better look at the decorations. This is a photo opportunity for parents. The vendors of holiday children items are swarming here, selling bright hats, flashing toys and balloons. It's quite a scene, and very fun.
Saigon has some very beautiful buildings, many with French colonial architecture. The Opera House is a well known landmark. Last night we stood on the steps as the formally dressed Saigon music lovers came to hear the symphony play. It was the first time we'd seen people dressed up wearing western style evening wear.
The evenings and nights are pretty much the same temperature as the daytime. It varies about 3 degrees year round. So parks and fountains are packed at night with families enjoying the night air and getting out of a small, hot living space. Most family dwellings have big fans, but not air conditioning. I think it must be too expensive.
There are a lot of high end stores here, along with fancy hotels which cater to the multitudes of business travelers who come to Saigon. This is where the money is in this country and if you wanted to have a Vietnamese factory make a product for you, this is where you'd come to set up the deal and work out the details. I told Jiro that I thought the richest person in this country might be the one who owned the factory that makes the small plastic chairs that everyone sits on outside. We saw the factory on the way back from our Mekong adventure, thousands of workers streaming out after their shift.
We ate at a Japanese restaurant here and it was interesting. We were the only Anglos in sight, everyone else was a Japanese businessman with a briefcase, black pants and belt with a dress shirt. These men ordered interesting things off the menu, patted the hostesses bottom, smoked a cigarette between each course and belted down the alcohol. Jiro forgot to bring his business card, which was too bad. He was not acting in the traditional businessman manner, so I guess it didn't matter. The food was awesome and fairly expensive for here.
We went out into the night to walk home and Jiro suggested going to the bar at the top of the Sheraton for a bird's eye view of the area. So off we went, in our traveling clothes to the bar. It was on the 23rd floor and the views were breathtaking. We could see many of the areas that we'd been walking around in and it was fun to try to locate the landmarks.
On our last day here, we set out with a shopping list! Jiro offered to take home the things I wanted to buy so I won't have to schlep them around for the next few months. We began at the nearby indoor market, got the goods and deposited them in our hotel room. A wipe off of sweat, then on to a few museums, the botanical garden and the zoo. The botanical gardens are not in their heyday, but they had some nice plantings. The zoo is definitely old school, it needs an update. A lot of the large mammals used to be wild in Vietnam, particulary in the highlands area, put were hunted out by game hunters. Now people come to the zoo to see what they look like. My favorite were the white tigers which had blue eyes.
We had lunch at a cafe across from the zoo. There was salad on the menu, so I had one. We've discovered coconut shakes which are the best! The food here is so inexpensive, it's hard not too order too much. "How much is that? Oh, yes, $1.50? Sure, we'll have those also."
Museum entry fees are also reasonable, $.75 and $1.00 each for the two we went to. The HCMC museum has a history of the area, some of it we'd already seen in other museums that we went to. A bride and groom were having their picture taken in various areas of the museum and it was kind of different to be in a room looking at the exhibits and have a bride in full bride's dress walking around also.
A clever way to make a bold sign is to put containers with different kind of flowers or vegetation in a metal framework to spell out the message. We' ve seen this by the side of big highways also.
At the HCMC museum there was a water puppet show which we saw. This is an ancient art form from Vietnam. Pre-recorded
music plays in the background which the puppeteers work the puppets from behind a screen while standing in waist deep water. The puppets were really bright and colorful and there was a lot of simple humor in the skits, e.g. chasing, dunking, fighting, etc.
The last museum we went to had a good collection of old cars, also a boat from the Mekong region that the Viet Cong used to carry weapons. The boat had a false bottom which was virtually undectable.
We walked home from our night-time adventures, getting the obligatory bottle of water and made our way to our hotel. Since it was Saturday night, everyone was out and about. We'd read about the Saturday night scooter "madness" on the main street and sure enough, we thought there had been a lot of scooters out on Friday night but Saturday was unreal. For about a mile on either side of the street in the scooter lane, scooters loaded with kids, families, everyone are lined up about 10 abreast and move slowly down the street towards the opera house, make a big turn at the roundabout and head back the other way. It was an amazing sight and we noticed that many people were not wearing their normal pollution masks for this cruisin' event. Was this a see and be seen event?
Jiro is off to San Francisco and I'm back to Hanoi. It sure was fun to have him along for these two weeks. I'm figuring out what to do and where to go next. The possibilities are endless!
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