Posts tagged 'HCMC'

For my final morning in Saigon I got up and ventured out north in search of something different for breakfast than the noodles and mystery meat I'd been having. I stopped along the way a few times to sit in tiny plastic chairs with the locals and drink iced coffee while the traffic did it's crazy thing. I ended up buying a half kilo of mangostein for breakfast with which I made a huge mess before the owner of one of the coffee stand I was sitting at came over with a knife and helped me out. Ugly fruit, but so very tasty.

On the third day I finally took first motorbike taxi, which was a fun, cheap and fast way of getting the War Remnants Museum (Previously knows as the American War Crimes museum), plus the breeze from zooming around is nice and cooling. Why was I walking everywhere like a schmuck!? And yes Mum, I wore a helmet, although they're all so small in Vietnam I half think it might actually make things worse if there was actually an accident, concentrating the force in a ring around the top of my head.

The war museum was interesting, but not catered to someone who knows next to nothing about the history of the war. There was lots of stuff about the specifics that happened, but very little about the motives of either side. There was a load of stuff about the after effects of agent orange on people of both sides of the war, but I needed to look up it up online to find it was a herbicide being sprayed to kill off all the vegetation so the Viet Cong couldn't hide among it.

On my first morning in Vietnam I woke, packed my stuff in my private room into my bags and checked out to walk 30M around the corner to the dorm style accommodation I have booked for the rest of my stay here. I wasnt able to check in until 1pm, so I left my big bag and took just my day pack with all the valuable stuff in it. Even with just a tiny laptop and an MFT system camera, valuables still weigh a ton.

I went out onto the main road to try some delicious baked goods from the bakery recommended to me by the first hostel. They had some pretty tasty stuff, but the place was a big franchise and felt very much like Breadtop back home. I sat outside eating my coffee bun and croissant and a little older Vietnamese lady who was there eating started to talk to me. She asked me where I was from, how long I had been travelling, etc. Then she offered me a massage. I could already see where this was going and told her no, but just in case I had missed her meaning she repeated she would give me massage and "boom boom". At 10am. At a franchise bakery. It seems that being a single male in Vietnam leads to the locals assuming you're a sex tourist.