Ho Chi Minh City

October 2005

Our expectations are almost nonexistent, which is part of the reason Vietnam seems attractive. My companion wants to eat. I am just curious.

Driving in from the airport, Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, is of course not nearly as glossy and well-ordered as Singapore, but looks cleaner than India. Traffic is very heavy, and like India there are coutless two-wheelers, mostly motorbikes or scooters, and plenty of bicycles. The Spring Hotel (44 le Thanh Ton, Q.1, Ho Chi Minh City, VIET NAM, tel 848 - 8297362, Fax: 848 - 8221383, Email: springhotel@hcm.vnn.vn, www.vietnamonline.com/spring) picked with great trepidation and minimal help from guidebooks, turns out to be absolutely adorable. It is clean and comfortable, with lots of art nouveau style plaster decorations on the pillars, and a terrific, central location on a relatively quiet street.

Time for lunch at a much-recommended restaurant. It's supposed to serve local specialties in a first-world-friendly environment. We walk from the hotel. There are few traffic lights. As a pedestrian, you pick your moment. This will not be a moment when the street is clear of traffic, but one when you see a reasonable number of spaces in the wall of oncoming motorcycles. The trot across the street at an even pace while the two-wheelers whiz in front of you and behind you.

The restaurant is a huge building painted a warm golden-yellow color. It is on a street with some other big restaurants, but this one is by far the most attractive. Inside, it is all dark wood. We take a seat in the corner under a fan. Through the window, we have a view of some of the food prep area, which is set up in a ring all around the building. We order a number of things including soup with morning glory in it, fried eel, Vietnamese coffee, and green mango juice. Green mango juice, by the way, is delicious and has a flavor reminiscent of Granny Smith apples. The eel comes with lots of fresh greens and a little dish of an unidentified evil-smelling black condiment, which I do not have the courage to try.

Halfway through the meal, a drop of water lands on the table. The roof is leaking, I complain aloud, moving dishes around so that they are clear of the water. Another drop falls on the table. More water spatters me, and suddenly people at the next table start squealing. I look up, and realize the fan we are sitting under is designed to shoot jets of water periodically, presumably to cool the customers in a pleasant way. Unfortunately, none of us are enjoying it. A waiter runs over and switches off the water, allowing us to finish our meals in peace.

Back outside, the sidewalks are even and there's not an open sewer in sight. It's so different from India. The shops sell cute lace blouses and beaded sandals, or replicas of old political posters. Across a major boulevard is a harbor. We go across to look, because even though the waterfront is devoted to heavy commerce, the Mekong can't help being lovely at twilight. But crossing the boulevard a second time proves nearly impossible. The gap in traffic which allowed us to cross in the first place is not going to be repeated. We stand, foolishly edging forward and back and wondering when rush hour would end. We might indeed have waited that long, but instead a surprising thing happened. A young woman came towards us, crossing the boulevard in the other direction. We couldn't help but look at her admiringly as she strode calmly towards us, traffic swirling all around her. When she reached the curb where we are standing, she said, "Come on," turned around and began to cross back. We didn't wait--we followed her without hesitation, miraculously weaving through traffic unharmed. As we reached the other side, she went her own way without a word or a backward glance. It is an act of pure kindness.

Later, walking from the Czech brew pub to the Japanese restaurant we pass innumerable little steamtable cafes which set plastic tables and chairs (sometimes doll-sized, sometimes bigger) out on the sidewalk for their customers. We skirt the bounds of the tourist district. A martial arts class practices in the twilight. We pass cinemas, mourning because the French-language film festival is scheduled to begin a week after our departure. The markets are busy, even in the dark.

In the morning, I am fine but my companion is not. He blames the black condiment that came with the eel yesterday. I blame the basil leaves, which I had noticed were wet. I had assumed that a tourist spot would be using filtered water, but perhaps not. At any rate, he is in no condition to go out. I fill him with Cipro and ginger syrup and go down to breakfast.

The complimentary continental breakfast is not a dry roll and coffee. There is coffee, of course, delicious Vietnamese coffee that has a slight caramel taste even when unsweetened. Breakfast comes with a platter of cut fresh fruit, including half a passionfruit, papaya, something that may be persimmon and something completely unknown that has a sweet, cinnamon flavor. I wonder if it is dragonfruit. (It isn't. Much later, I learn that dragonfruit is white with little black seeds and a clean, refreshing flavor. It's common throughout Southeast Asia. Dragonfruit are immediately noticeable in markets, because they look like large, pear-shaped kholarabi that have been carelessly sprayed with hot pink paint. It something of a symbol of Vietnam, where you see dragonfruits on all sorts of tourist gimcrack as well as in all the markets.) There is also a choice of omelet, which comes with bread and jam, or noodle soup in various flavors.

I take my time. Back upstairs, the invalid has decided he is ready to go out. I have my doubts. We haven't gone far before the heat becomes too much for him. I take him into one of the cafes near the restaurant where we had the fateful meal to get him a drink. It is a huge courtyard. Although it isn't a mealtime, a few groups of non-tourists are scattered around. All of them have washtubs full of ice and beer bottles next to their tables (it is eleven in the morning), and all are eating and seem to be continually ordering more food. Companion drinks his Coke and flees back to the hotel, leaving me alone with my pineapple juice and a plate of steamed tofu. The waiter kindly removes the little dish of black condiment (it seems to be a close relative to the kind that came with yesterday's eel, and what on earth IS it, anyway?) and gives me some spicy soy sauce instead.

I later continue my lunch at a French ice cream parlor with a scoop of ginger ice cream and another of caramel. The idea of staying there all day and working my way through all the flavors, which include light chocolate, dark chocolate, and a whole range of tropical fruits as well as the usual suspects, is extremely tempting, but I manage to tear myself away.

At the political poster store again, the three ladies who work there are sitting in the back of the shop making little green bows and eating some kind of fruit from an enormous bowl. Their posters are priced at USD25, reasonable enough considering that you wouldn't find anything like them elsewhere, but just a bit steep for something so delicate. I buy two placemats instead, with the plan that I will get them framed in India. Although everything is priced in dollars, they are happy to convert the total to dong for me. (This never happened in the India of twenty years ago, when it was common to make tourists pay in dollars, or even in Russia fourteen years ago. When they quoted a price in dollars, they meant it. Vietnam is much more nicer.) One of the ladies wraps my placemats in beautiful red-flowered paper and attaches one of the little green bows she just made.

I don't buy anything at the huge Tax Department Store or the smaller but much more terrifying Ben Than market.

The Ho Chi Minh museum is devoted to the man, not the city. Everyone visiting the museum is Vietnamese, and most of the people seem to be high school or college students busily taking notes. The exhibits include newspaper clippings, posters, and other ephemera, but are mostly photos from Ho Chi Minh's life. There are captions in English, but these are not particularly informative, at least not to me. "Ho Chi Minh greeting students, 1954," for example. Clearly that is what he is doing, but it seems like there is probably some more interesting information that could have been provided. I realize that although a lot of the events photographed took place during my lifetime, I have no idea what I am looking at. I remember hearing words like Khmer Rouge, Saigon, and Ho Chi Minh on the evening news that my family watched during dinner, but I wasn't a clever enough child to listen and try to put the pieces together. In 1975, Saigon fell, but to whom or what? That spring I was much more interested in my first airplane trip to see my grandparents on my own.

Without any knowledge of Vietnamese, it's not possible to piece together much history out of the Ho Chi Minh museum. But the place serves its purpose. The many photos certainly make Ho Chi Minh seem human and real, more so than any exhibit on a single person I've ever seen.

The Ho Chi Minh City museum offers a more transparent history lesson, but it is getting late, and the exhibits nearly empty except for the bridal couple getting their photo taken in the foyer. The exhibits of the costumes and tools of early Vietnamese people are interesting and clear enough, but then there is the section about the Vietnam war. I am almost grateful when the guard comes in and starts turning off lights.

Dinner at the Binh Soup Shop. It is an unassuming place. Got beef soup, the server informs us. And that's all. It was once the secret headquarters of the Viet Cong, and the current owner--the son of the man who owned the place back then--has an impressive stack of scrapbooks and photo albums that he plunks down in front of foreigners when they order their soup. It is good soup and the books are interesting, but at the end of my bowl I am still hungry.

I wander through the neighborhood, taking several wrong turns, and enjoying the scenery, I think, this is the real city, far off the tourist path. Little shops sell fruit, soup, and clothes, but these are for the Vietnamese. The streets are amazingly clean, especially considering all the traffic and commerce. While I stand on a relatively quiet corner staring at the map, wondering where I took a wrong turn, a police truck comes driving down the street. Officers hop out and address the owner of a nearby cafe. Immediately, everyone in the cafe next door leaps to their feet and begins hauling tables and chairs, and there are a fair number of them, off the sidewalk and into the restaurant. The first man can't produce whatever documentation the police ask for, and his tables and chairs are loaded into the police van to be taken away. By the time the police are through with him, the place next door had all their tables inside. Apparently, the little steamtable restaurants need some kind of license to put tables on the street, but there are so many of these little cafes that some of them (maybe most of them?) feel able to take the risk of setting out tables without all their paperwork in place. And it seems that if the police don't actually catch you red-handed, they can't enforce the rule.

Time to hail a cab. I finished my dinner at a Thai restaurant near the hotel, where I had the best green curry and sticky rice I'd ever tasted. (This is before I ever went to Thailand.) Not only that, I got a small complimentary dessert. It came in a little square dish made of banana leaf, was white on top and greenish on the bottom, and was absolutely delicious. I have no idea what it was. Maybe it was some slightly sweetened nut puree, or maybe aloe jelly. In a way, it is more fun not to know.

Next morning, Reunification Palace, which would have been a better place to start sightseeing. The main floor was devoted to exhibits about the Vietnam war, mainly a very clear and reasonable explanation of the history of Vietnam that led up to the war as well as the war itself. Upstairs are huge, formal rooms for impressing dignitaries, decorated in shades of rust and gold. The furniture is a combination of the hippest late-sixties fashion and Asian silken elegance. Not only that, the building is well-designed in that it has great ventilation and natural light, but keeps the harshest of the sun's rays from heating the building.

Ben Than market is dreadful, even though it is an old-fashioned market building, and apparently is something of a symbol of Saigon. One end starts with flowers, moves on to fresh foods, then dining kiosks, and then all the cheek-by-jowl booths selling clothes, costume jewelry, sparkly shoes, athletic gear, and a dozen other things. The aisles are very narrow. Keeping a disinterested distance from the vendors is impossible. You have to look them in the face, whether you're planning to buy something or not. They pluck at shoppers' sleeves and are very aggressive. One woman is selling undergarments, pollution masks, and a strange assortment of gloves. Vietnamese ladies wear gloves, and it doesn't seem to be a fashion statement. A few women wear pyjama suits and peaked hats, but the majority of Vietnamese women seem to wear girl-cut T-shirts and skirts or pants, always with cute high heels. The gloves, when they appear, look more like a necessity than part of the outfit, but are they are for sun protection, cleanliness, or what? No time to find out, only a quick meal of rice and tofu flavored with shallot and lemon grass before it's time to catch the plane back to Singapore. On the way out to the airport, the cab driver, who speaks minimal English, suddenly points. A bicycle is moving through traffic, a mesh-sided crate strapped to the rear of his cycle. In it, two snakes move about restlessly.

I am a little in love with Saigon.