Ho Chi Minh City! (aka Saigon)

We took a night bus to get to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam and arrived there at the lovely wee hour of 3:45am. We had no idea where the hell we were and all these drivers cornering us to take a moto or taxi ride with them for outrageous prices. It was pretty frustrating, especially after a long ass bus ride and little sleep. No one spoke English; it took us a bit to even figure out where we were in relation to the city center. They were all trying to rip us off, so Simon and I walked out of the bus station to find a more honest driver.

After haggling for 40 or so minutes, we found someone to take us to the backpacker district. Simon already had a place to stay since his friend, Martin, was in town, but I had to look for my own place. I wrote down the names of a few places I saw on hostelworld.com, and eventually checked into one at 5:30 in the morning.

When I finally started my day after a good 4 hours of sleep, I was so curious about this city. It was so much more developed than I thought it would be. I guess having been in Laos and Cambodia the past several weeks, where their capitols/major cities were not too big, Ho Chi Minh, was a nice change of scenery. There are motos EVERYWHERE; outnumbering the amount of cars for sure. Everyone seems to have one because they completely take over the road. And there aren't a lot of rules to driving, it seemed. Crossing an intersection as a pedestrian can be intimating, but it's fun at the same time. The trick is to not walk too fast and whatever you do, keep moving forward!



I met up with Simon and Martin at the Reunification Palace. The building itself was really nice. A good example of 1960s modern architecture. But the interior decorating was...pretty dated. There were some pieces I thought were fun and retro, like the furniture in the game room, but some stuff was just plain tacky.






The rest of the day was more tourist stuff. We managed to see a lot. We went to the War Remnants Museum (which, as an American, was very horrible to see because it the exhibits showcased what really happened on Vietnam soil), the Notre Dame Church, the post office (beautiful building), the Ho Chi Minh statue, and took a little boat ride on the Saigon River.


Notre Dame

Ho Chi Minh Statue

Boat Ride with Martin

At night, I met up with some of my cousin's friends, Norey, Jennie, and Jimmy. They were from the US too, but had been living in Saigon for a couple years now. We met them and a huge group for dinner and drinks. Had some really yummy food too. (I'll write another post later).We were supposed to go out with them after dinner but our taxi driver had no clue where he was going, so we just called it a night. It was ok by me since I wanted to sleep after a full day!


Norey and Jennie

The whole dinner gang