Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta

Brian and I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) in the late afternoon, so as soon as arrived to our hotel to drop our stuff off, we were headed to the War Remnants museum. The museum is filled with relics and photos describing the impact of the American War in Vietnam. As we were walking through we said to eachother, "Wow, we really shouldn't have been here..." We killed so many civilians, destroyed cities and maimed generations with the use of agent orange. It was a nasty war to say the least.



Afterwards we just wandered around the several parks that we crossed on our way back to our hotel.



I realized quite quickly that barely anyone was going to understand my mangled northern Vietnamese. Most of the words are the same with some variation, but the accent is considerably different in the south. I already had trouble in Ha Noi with people understanding what I was saying and in Ho Chi Minh City it was a lost cause.

In the evening we went to Ben Thanh market to meet with Ryan and Ben's friends from Language Corps Hien, Linh and Au for dinner. Ryan and Ben spoke fondly of these women who were their first contacts in Vietnam, so I had to meet them. We had dinner with them and a bunch of Language Corps alumni. It was cool to talk to other English teachers who were teaching in HCMC.

Brian and I only had a day and a half left in Vietnam before we would be heading to Cambodia, so we decided to spend the entire next day on a tour to the Mekong Delta. Because most of our trip includes walking around cities, it was nice to sit in an A/C bus and sit around on a boat for awhile with a cool breeze. Up until this point it has been death hot outside and we had just been sweltering in the June heat.






Our tour included a trip down the river to an area where they make coconut candy (a little touristy, yes...but OK because it involved food), lunch, then another boat ride to listen to some traditional Southern Vietnamese music, and then a smaller row boat down the river.









That night Brian and I ate at Quan An Ngon for dinner. I have heard from several people that the restaurant in HCMC is better than that in Ha Noi, and I would have to agree. The whole concept behind the restaurant is that there are food "stalls" that surround the perimeter of the restaurant and they only make one particular thing, so you can walk around to the different stations to see what's on the menu. When you sit down you can order what you saw or from the menu. Everytime I went to a QAN in Ha Noi it was packed with people, and the one in HCMC was no different.

Whenever I did placement testing with incoming students at Language Link one the questions I would ask was, "Have you ever been to Ho Chi Minh City?" (use of present perfect). If their answer was "Yes, I have" then I would ask a few follow-up questions such as "When did you go?" "Who did you go with?" "What did you do there?" etc... (past simple) Then, I would ask "How is it different from Ha Noi?" and their answers would undoubtably include comparatives. They would answer, "It's bigger, it's noisier, it's more crowded, it's more modern" That pretty much summed HCMC up for me.

The next morning (and our last morning in Vietnam) Hien and Linh picked us up from our hotel and we ate breakfast at a local pho shop. We then toured around the city on the back of their motorbikes and had coffee at a nice outdoor cafe.




We rushed back to our hotel to finish packing and hop on a bus that would take us out of Vietnam and into Cambodia...