Out of the Melting Pot and into the Rice Bowl: Tales From a Scholar on the Mekong Delta: A Tale of Two Cities

Mea Culpa…it’s been 21 days since I posted I am sorry. Between the weeks in Da Lat, a week of teaching, nine days in HCMC and Hanoi and then returning back to teaching blogging was nowhere near the top of the list. My apologies.

As I just wrote I spent the New Year in HCMC and then travelled up to Hanoi with one of my dearest ETA colleagues Michelle Brown who is placed in the north, about 3 hours above Hanoi. We both agreed that we needed some big city adventure and luxury and it was spectacular.

We spent our first day outside HCMC in Ben Tre, visiting Jefferson Day the Fulbright ETA stationed there.

Jefferson and I at his college. We have been roomies at every official Fulbright function so far.

I have to be very careful when I mount a motorbike. Like most everything in Vietnam it's not designed for ergonomic giants (i.e. Americans) and I have been known to knock my Vietnamese drivers off their bikes as I lumbar up to the seat. At least I'm a cute giant.

Me, Jefferson and Michelle. Three happy Fulbrighters.

We started in Ho Chi Minh City (formally Saigon), which is the largest city in Vietnam. HCMC is home to nearly 7.4 million people and is a sprawling tangled mess of streets and laneways. Some parts of clearly French with wide tree lined boulevards and others are clearly Vietnamese. We stayed in the bougie backpacker neighborhood in District 1 so we could be close to all the major sites: the Reunification Palace (former Presidential Palace), Municipal Theater (former Opera House), Cathedral, Market, shopping and museums.

To be honest I was dreading HCMC. It’s the pickpocketiest place in a pickpockety country. I was run over by a motorbike here. And my limited experience of getting from the bus station to the airport and back had been marked by usually being ripped off my nefarious and avaricious cabbies. But who’s judging right? I thought some time in HCMC might change my mind…well it largely didn’t. Ironically me the urbanite found HCMC to be too loud, busy and commercialized. I constantly felt exhausted and just wanted to escape the crush of people. Some of this chaos was due to the New Year, but still in all my experience HCMC is the wilder, dirtier and more salacious younger sister to Hanoi. Pictures are below.

HCMC by night. At times it tries just a little too hard.

The next stop was the Cathedral. The tour book said it was ugly. It's no Notre Dame but it looks great for being heavily bombed during the war. Lonely Planet can be such an assh*** at times.

Next to the cathedral is the Post Office. This was built by the French and it has a striking similiarity to the Gare du Nord in Paris.

The interior is a massive barrel vaulted ceiling with iron work designed by Gustave Eiffel. Note the huge looming portait of a certain famous Uncle.

Another French masterpiece. The City Hall. Again it's nearly identical to Paris' Hotel de Ville. Lonely Planet says the interior is fabulous and then tells you that heavily armed gaurds will strongly deter and resist your entrance. So why tell use that the inside is fabulous? Thus we settled for the outside. Again Uncle Ho leading the children with his back to the French. Coincidence? I think not!

Some of the fine sculpture work on the Municipal Hall.

Next to the Municipal Hall (City Hall) is the Municipal Theater (Opera House)...by now you're noticing the remaning scheme right?! This is a beautiful building that isn't a copy of the Paris Opera like Hanoi's Opera House. How nice the French came up with a new design. Like the City Hall the inside is supposedly amazing but there were no performances playing when we were in town.

Yes those women are topless and yes there were many nasty old men gawking and standing in such a way as to appear to be pinching various parts of the statue. Some men are such dogs.

This is the tallest building in Vietnam the Bitexico Financial Tower.

This is the large market in HCMC. We just walked aroud it. If you want to lose your wallet, phone, passport, watch, sunglasses or anything else this is hte place to do it.

This is the War Remnants Museum. It used to be called the Museum of American War Atrocities. Like it's sister in Hanoi, it's one-sided (as it should be) and you leave feeling appropriately shamed and nauseous. Not the day to be carting my Fulbright bag or wear my US Figure Skating t-shirt.

Some American warplanes captured by the Communist forces on display outside the museum.

One of the most popular tourist sights is the Presidential Palace (Reunification Palace now a days). This is the home built by the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dihn Diem who was largely seen as inept and corrupt. He showed clear favoritism, bias, nepotism and was extremely oppressive. He is largely seen as a coward and fool in Vietnam. It was under his leadership that the Buddhist monk Quang Duc set fire to himself in public. A moment of civil disobedience and martyrdom immortalized in that famous photograph. Diem built this Palace in his vision of what a modern state would be. He never saw it completed as he was thrown from power and assassinated in the November 1963 coup d’etat. The palace is large and very art deco. Today it’s slightly eerie to walk along its deserted hallways and view the rooms that remain perfectly preserved.

The communist tanks crashed through the palace’s front gates on April 30, 1975 and it’s as if time has stood still ever since. After crashing through the gates as solder ran into the building and up the stairs to unfurl a VC flag from the balcony. In the reception chamber, General Minh, who had only become president of the South Vietnamese state 43 hours before waited with his cabinet. It’s recorded that he said ‘I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you’. The VC officer replied ‘There is no question of your transferring power. You cannot give up what you do not have’.

The Reunification Palace.

A meeting room. There must have ben a sale on horrendous carpeting.

One of the reception halls.

A not so modern room with some rather intense and imposing wall art. Plus a French crystal chanedlier to finish the look. Who designed this place? A bipolar Liberachi perhaps.

The world's largest stand mixer...and the birth of KitchenAid. Good thing they downsized.

One of the many large caverous hallways.

An American helicopter on the roof.

One of the tanks that crashed through the gates during the Fall (or Liberation) of Saigon.

The ~~highlight~~ lowlight of the trip was New Years. Michelle and I knew that it was going to be crowded and it was. The streets where completely choked with motorbikes. You literally couldn’t cross the street (Michelle has pictures…when I get them I will post them). So that night we decided to try to avoid crowds and get a nice dinner and bring only what would fit in my pockets. Eventually we found a place that would seat us and by 11:20 pm we were winding up dinner. Unfortunately for us the only way home was walking by the Opera House which was party central. Throughout the day we kept hearing about the ‘ball drop’, to which Michelle and I just rolled our eyes at each other. Especially in light of the fact that the ball people kept referencing was resting on a platform with no pole…so it couldn’t be dropped. But what the hell your in Rome you might as well go.

By the time we made it to the Opera House it was near midnight so we stopped and watched as crowds surged inward to the aforementioned platform with it’s dropless ball. About five minutes before midnight a hotel near the Opera House, The Rex lit sparklers off it’s roof. These sparklers were seriously a foot high and they just were the most pitiful, not to mention mistimed things I have ever seen, but the locals around us all oohed and awed…and that should have been sign #1. But we kept our game faces on and my hands glued over my pockets and a few minutes later another building had a flare descending along a guywire to its roof (for all the world it looked like a recreation of the Atlanta Olympic Cauldron lighting going in the wrong direction and lacking Muhammad Ali). Michelle and I were lost. Was that the ball? It’s not a ball? But it’s dropping, not falling. Well maybe that’s it and when it reaches the roof fireworks will erupt. Nope. It just fizzled out. That should have been sign #2. The countdown started and ended and as we supposed that big ball moved exactly zero inches. We just stood there and blinked…talk about over-hype. We could see the gleam of a few fireworks over the river but like the sparklers they were so tiny that nobody could see them.

Thus the New Year arrived and unceremoniously we all filled out feeling kinda dazed, disappointed and utterly confused. What was that? What that New Year’s? Were those fireworks? And where was the ball? Such a head scratcher. Later Michelle and I caught the ‘fireworks’ on TV and it was a junkboat with some cans on its roof making 2 passes with the teeny tiny firecrackers. It was just precious. The entire evening could best be described as impotent. It needed a good dose of Viagra and testosterone. We are so spoiled in the West with our fireworks. So so spoiled.

New Year's was sponsored by Hieneken Beers this year, thus everything had a green and white hue. I preferred to think of it as homage to Wicked... not a tasteless marketing stunt.

There it is the dropless ball. How anybody could have thought it was going to descend is just beyond me. And now pictures of the crowds of people.

After HCMC Michelle and I went to Hanoi. Unlike HCMC I love Hanoi. I love the narrow streets of the old quarter. I love the restaurants and the quiet moments of tucked away squares, parks and lakes. Of course I lived in Hanoi for a month so perhaps I am being unfair…but it’s irrelevant because Hanoi’s my favorite child. Like HCMC Michelle and I ate, coffee housed and bookstored our way through the city. I began reading Les Miserables, finished Moby Dick and gorged on western food. What was nicest about this trip was of course spending time with Michelle but also not being a zoo animal. Nobody stared at us as we walked. Nobody screamed ‘Tay Tay Tay’ as we passed by and it was nice to just be a person again. The other thing I noticed is that some tourists are starting to piss me off. I watched on many foreigners being rude, obstinate, and belligerent on many occasions in restaurants and hotels. The wait staff is doing their best and they have good English skills and your thick German accent with quick speech isn’t helping. Also miming what you want in a mean, haughty and imperialistic air is really unattractive. What is wrong with people?