chillin' with uncle ho

I want to first echo yesterday’s post and say that traffic here is straight crazy.

I woke up super early today because my body has not adjusted to the time difference. I managed to dally in my room with my friends for a while before beginning the day with breakfast at the hotel. Breakfast consisted of coffee (which here is always mixed with sweetened condensed milk) and French roll that was about the size of a six-inch Subway sandwich with very sweet strawberry jam. It was very delicious.

We went to the Museum of Fine Art. It was in this lovely building that’s yellow with blue trim. The tile work on the floors was intricate and colorful and the stained glass doors and windows were absolutely beautiful. I wonder what that building was originally used for. It had everything from ancient Vietnamese art (heavily influenced by the Chinese) to modern art. There’s a lot of art made with lacquer on wood. Almost every work was done with vibrant reds. There was this one funny metal sculpture in front of the museum that looks like a man flying off the back of his motorbike.

After the art museum, we stopped into X Crème, a café known for its imported, New Zealand ice cream. I got this wonderfully arranged plate with three little cakes each sandwiching a scoop of ice cream. It was crazy refreshing.

We ambled around the city for a little while and saw the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Ho Chi Minh Post Office. The post office also had beautiful floor tile-work. I find that no matter where in the city I am, Bac Ho (Uncle Ho, as the Vietnamese people called him) is gracefully watching over everything. After the post office, we stopped into the lovely Press Café and had a delicious beef and rice lunch with iced green tea for the equivalent of $2 USD. Trust me, it was a steal.

We moseyed over to the War Remnants Museum. We got a little turned around on our way there, but a very nice man stopped to help us out. He is an American from Texas and was shot in the Vietnam War. He had flown into Hanoi and made his way down to Ho Chi Minh City. He seemed really pleased to run into some other Americans. Even though I haven’t been here that long, I was pretty pleased to see another American, too. He said that we should know that the War Remnants Museum was gonna be tough and that all the information is skewed from one side. He was right, but it’s so important to hear the story from both sides. At the museum, there are a number of US aircraft sitting outside the building. I took a picture in front of the Huey because it reminded me of riding in the Vietnam-era Huey with Dad’s flight group. I walked through three exhibits: the Tiger Cages, Agent Orange, and a collection of photos taken by photojournalists from 11 nations during the war.

Tiger Cages and holding facilities had been reconstructed outside of the museum. The exhibit talked about the various forms of torture and the horrifying realities of being detained during the war. The Agent Orange exhibit focused mainly on the Vietnamese affected by the toxin, but also showed the pictures and stories of Americans affected by it. I didn’t realize that there are still children being born with serious defects both physical and mental. Dioxin is evil.

My favorite exhibit was the photo collection. The introduction stated that this collection was originally gathered in Kentucky from photojournalists on all sides of the war who lost their lives in the conflict. Their photos were harrowing to say the least.  The pictures presented such an even-handed truth that war affects everyone. It doesn’t matter which side you are on, the pain of loss is acute and long-lasting.

We wandered aimlessly about the city for a while thinking we knew where we were and then not knowing where we were for a while. The good thing is we are a navigational team, and eventually, we started recognizing places we had been. We walked through this one park where there was exercise equipment for people to use. There was definitely an elliptical, some crazy oblique twisty contraption, bars to do pull-ups on and platforms to do crunches on. This is Public Health. 

The vanilla icing on the top of this M&M cake is that I heard the Backstreet Boys played twice today in public places. Thank you BBoys for being that awesome.