Saigon

The official name for the capital of Vietnam is of course Ho Chi Minh City, but just about everyone I met in the country called the capital by its pre-war name, Saigon. By whatever name it's a fun city. Getting there took a lot longer than I thought it would as the broad river delta that greeted us at sunrise turned into a narrow channel winding its way through lowland forest. We slowly made our way upriver against a considerable current from the river and a falling tide, passing small fishing craft and little huts on the river bank. We didn't start to spy the tall buildings of Saigon itself until mid-morning. By noon, we were alongside and the loudspeaker was calling classes to get to their busses for their Field Exercises. In every port, some subset of classes have activities associated with the course work that are carried out either in the first day of the visit or the last. Today's activities included temple visits for World Religion classes and visits to Vietnamese water puppet shows by Theater classes. Myself, I had nowhere I had to be, so I headed into downtown Saigon.

The city was bigger than I expected. I guess my mental image of Vietnam has been formed by bad Hollywood movies. The reality is that the central downtown is a combination of beautiful French Colonial architecture combined with the non-linear towers of steel and glass that we saw in every Asian port city we've seen so far. American cities like New York and San Francisco have very different skylines, more regular and straight. Asian cities have twisted and non-symmetrical looks that give them a more alien feel from my western point of view. The main streets are wide, often with medians of flowers or trees running down the center - a legacy of the French. Side streets are tight, with little shops and stands standing side by side.

A small group of us wandered around the downtown, looking at shop windows and dodging traffic. There was a LOT of traffic. Motorbikes dominate the scene, with entire waves of scooters and small motorcycles filling the streets, sometimes nine or ten wide. While there was the occasional streetlight, most of the intersections seemed to have very few rules. Bikes and cars entered, moved around each other and seemed to narrowly avoid hitting each other using some sort of psychic power. When a bus needs to make a left hand turn, it just pulls slowly into the traffic and the motor bikes just flow around it like a school of fish swimming around a coral head. Crossing the street requires slow movement forward and a lot of faith that the motor bikes will go around you. There is definitely an art to being a pedestrian here.

When the ship arrived, Vietnam was in the middle of Tet - the lunar new year celebration. Everywhere you look, yellow marigolds decorate storefronts and restaurants. Several of the larger streets were completely closed down to all but pedestrian traffic as the streets were flooded with colored lights, fancy displays, dioramas and lots of red flags. It was really quite pretty. A large group of us met at a rooftop restaurant and could look down at the sea of people and vehicles winding through the brightly lit streets. I called it an early night as I had to get up at 3:30 the following morning for our trip North. More about that next time...