Vietnam
Mopeds waiting for the light in Saigon
Saigon has the blessing and the curse of being on the leading edge of change in Vietnam. The blessing is that in this case “change” means better living conditions and job options. The bad news, arguably, is that Saigon is starting to look a lot like Bangkok at the expense of traditional Vietnamese culture.
There’s a lot of construction underway in Saigon. The pho stall I hit on Monday morning had an ad on the wall for an heavy equipment dealership and excavators were working through the night on Sunday when I arrived. The central market area in Saigon, Ben Thanh, was clean, well lit, and had “no smoking” signs up everywhere, none of which seem very Vietnamese. I didn’t see much traditional dress (except uniforms) and there’s a new Louis Vuitton store a block from city hall. District One is full of stores selling big ostentatious LCD TVs, Hi-Fi systems, French wines, and other flair of the nouveau riche. The government has clearly bought into Deng Xioaping’s epiphany that “to be rich is glorious” and has redirected their energy from implementing communist ideology to simply remaining in power (although the state-monitored media still ham up the stories of farmers using their land communally and such).
Having visited Vietnam last year some of its novelty had gone for me, and gone with it was the desire to spend every moment outdoors fighting off heat exhaustion. Instead I had a leisurely week with plenty of ca phe sua da (iced Vietnamese coffee with enough condensed milk to rot your teeth on contact), pho, banh xeo, and every other local delicacy that I knew I wouldn’t see again until I was back in the US near a Vietnamese neighborhood. The one tourist site that I took time to visit was the War Remnants Museum, a slightly anachronistic collection of salvaged US war materials and Vietnamese propaganda set amongst a neighborhood of new western style homes and office buildings. The museum contains horrible photos and descriptions of US behavior towards civilians, although as far as I can tell the North Vietnamese Army acted just as horribly….so both sides did awful things but only one tells their story in this museum. Do some fact checking on the exhibits if you go – allegations are often stated as facts and a few statements are outright wrong.
After spending a couple days in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s most significant rice growing area, I headed back to Saigon, and from Saigon I moved to Nha Trang. Nha Trang is gorgeous – sandy beaches, incredibly clear water, and amazing mango orchards everywhere.