HCMC/Saigon was an interesting contrast to Hanoi. It was more modern, cleaner, and easier to walk through due to wider and less crowded sidewalks. As the guidebooks will tell you, it also doesn’t have the same kind of charm that Hanoi has (fewer trees, fewer older buildings). The pictures below show an example of the interesting contrasts within the city: the first shows people eating on the streets and a fancy coffee shop in the background and the second shows a building that appears to have been built by the french in front of a run-down building, in front of a new high-rise.
Art Museum. The first painting depicts the effects of Agent Orange. Most of the museums we went to had nationalistic and anti-American rhetoric. Many of them, also, openly communicated the pain and destruction the “American War” caused. Agent Orange was part of that pain and destruction that effects both adults and children’s lives today–and something the U.S. government and people have never paid reparations for.
These were a couple of my favorite spots. The video is of a Buddhist pagoda. Somehow we snuck in during lunch hours when we weren’t supposed to be there, so we were practically the only people there. It was a lovely spot among the trees, where you could hear the crazy traffic down below. This was also the spot where in 1963 Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, left from to burn himself to death on a nearby street corner to protest the persecution of Buddhist monks by the South Vietnamese government. The next place we visited was the corner where the self-immolation occurred. There’s a beautiful space devoted to him. In the pictures below I’ve included a photograph of the self-immolation so you can compare it with the monument to him.
More shots of Ho Chi Minh City:
Somehow it never occurred to me that the “Vietnam War” would be called the “American War” in Vietnam, but of course it would!