M&C: HCMC

We arrived in Saigon (south Vietnamese tend to still call it Saigon, while northerners call it Ho Chi Minh) around 5PM and took a Grab (the ubiquitous Uber copycat) to our Airbnb outside of the central tourist area, a neighborhood of cute little streets and small buildings bordered by scores of new high-rise apartment complexes on one side and the river on the other. After settling in to our enormous and ridiculously wood-paneled room, we walked around our neighborhood a little, enjoying the bustle and being nearly the only foreigners around. We got banh trung cut nuong, a kind of hot quail egg salad, from a nearby street vendor, then walked over to a slightly younger and more student-y neighborhood nearby. We found a super cute little hipster beer garden where Chandler had a couple craft beers on draft while we shared some snacky food and listened to several very hip-looking young people beautifully sing a series of romantic ballads on karaoke.

The following morning, Chandler went out on a fruit-finding mission, wandering among all the various vendors, picking up not only a couple of kilos of several kinds of fruit but also two small yoghurts, some coffee, and two banh mi, all for about $5. We feasted on our fruit by the window in our room, looking out over our little corner of the city, feeling really happy and peaceful.

Later that morning, we took a Grab downtown and walked around the central tourist area a little bit, visiting the gorgeous post office building and Ben Thanh market. A friend in Denver had put us in touch with a friend of his in Saigon, Khang, and we had plans to meet up with him at about 4 at the base of Bitexco Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the central business district. Turns out Khang works at the World of Heineken exhibit as the front-end manager of the bar located on the 60^th floor of this building. This is effectively the symbolic headquarters of Heineken in Southeast Asia, where the beer is apparently hugely popular. Heineken, we learned, also owns Tiger Beer, which by itself accounts for over 70% of the market share in Vietnam. Crazy.

We went up in the elevator and did a quick little tour of the small Heineken museum there, which included getting a “pouring lesson” where we poured a Heineken from a tap and also playing around on a Formula 1 racecar simulator (which made driving an F1 car seem extremely difficult). After this, we walked down one level to the Heineken taproom, which wraps around the whole floor so you get amazing views of the city in every direction. We had a couple beers (on the house), admired the views, and chatted a little off and on with Khang as his duties permitted. He was very enjoyable to talk to, and the whole experience was actually really cool, despite being so brand-centric and something we would not normally choose to do.

We watched the sunset from the top of the tower, then said goodbye to Khang and took a Grab back to our part of town. After a short rest, we went out in search of dinner, eventually stopping at a small pho cart on the street with a few simple tables laid out. The food was tremendously delicious, and we enjoyed watching--and feeling like one small part of--the quiet bustle of the neighborhood going about its collective evening routine. From there, we walked back over to the student area where we sat at another little outdoor café, had a beverage, and enjoyed the warm breezy evening, indulging in a little alternate-life fantasy where we move to Saigon, learn Vietnamese, and live a romantic expat life in this hip and beautiful neighborhood.

The following morning (our last in Vietnam), we started the day with another breakfast of fruit and banh mi in our Airbnb before packing up, leaving our luggage downstairs, and heading back into town. Up to this point, we had not really come face to face with the fact of the US war in Vietnam. On a superficial level, the country seems amazingly well-adjusted and healed from the conflict. Signs of it are few and far between, mainly just leveraged into tourist-trinket imagery, if anything, and we certainly never encountered any animosity or even caginess related to our country of origin. That said, we did want to have the experience of confronting the realities of the war a little bit, or maybe just felt it was kind of a responsibility we had as guests in the country. Having passed up famous historical sites and museums in Hanoi and central Vietnam, the War Remnants Museum in Saigon was our last chance.

The museum is laid out in three floors. The bottom floor focuses primarily on international sentiment regarding the war. It includes exhibits on global anti-war movements spanning all continents, but with an especially mature and thorough portrait of those within the United States (including extensive coverage of the GI anti-war movement, which, in our experience, is under-taught in US schools). The overall effect is one of laying the blame squarely on the US government rather than US citizens (a sentiment many of us can strongly sympathize with) as well as folding the US anti-war movement into a larger global outcry. There is also a moving section on collaborative international efforts to help Vietnam heal post-war, and gratitude is expressed towards many countries that helped in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

The second floor is the really tough one. One section details a variety of war crimes committed against Vietnamese civilians by the United States during the war, most notably the My Lai massacre but also others. The exhibits effectively accomplish the difficult job of enumerating the atrocities in a matter-of-fact way that manages to be deeply empathetic without resorting to sensationalism or finger-pointing. The facts themselves are so utterly devastating that they don’t really need any flourishes or embellishment. On the other side of the floor is an exhibit documenting the effects of Agent Orange and similar chemicals, using mostly large black and white photographs to chronicle the natural and human damage, the effects of which can still be found even in the third and fourth generation since the war. Included in this exhibit is a scathing denouncement of Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and other US corporations that developed and manufactured the chemical weapons used in the war. Even today, a lawsuit is still ongoing that would force these companies to compensate Vietnamese survivors affected by Agent Orange.

Finally, one half of the third floor contains a detailed timeline of the war from the beginning of Vietnamese armed resistance to the French in 1945 to the final north Vietnamese victory in 1975. It convincingly paints a continuous narrative of the 30-year struggle for Vietnamese independence against first the French then the Americans (supported by the misguided Saigon puppet state), though it does, somehow, fail to mention the involvement of the USSR and China in all of this. The other half of the floor consists of a moving tribute to photojournalists who died while documenting the war, without whose work the museum itself would not exist. Credit and gratitude is expressed equally to journalists working on all sides of the war: not only Americans and Vietnamese (north and south) but also Japanese, French, Australians, Cambodians, and people from over 50 other countries as well.

All this is to say that we left the museum better-educated visitors to Vietnam, reeling from the horror of war, and sadly reflecting that nothing has changed and there may well be a similar museum in Iraq in 40 years. We walked about 20 minutes to a restaurant Khang had recommended, specializing in a highland Vietnamese dish called “banh uot,” which is a kind of thin rice pancake wrapper that you stuff with a mix of meat and vegetables and dip into a variety of dipping sauces. The restaurant was in another absolutely delightful part of town, and the food itself was delicious and quite different from any meal we’d had thus far in Vietnam. Quick Grab back to our Airbnb to gather our bags, then off to the airport to fly back to Thailand.

Next up: Ocean time! Khao Lak & Ko Similan.