I’d imagined Saigon in post-colonial elegance, but instead, it’s a post-industrial metropolis, a swirl of scooters driven by candy colored helmeted 19 year olds, nearly 9 million of them. I was absolutely wrong, Saigon was not the city I was looking for. The good news is that Phnom Penh absolutely is. The fine grace of …
Windowless hotel rooms. Icky bathrooms. The bus. Lousy air quality, including second hand smoke. All those zeroes on the currency. Unpredictable coffee. Very Hard Beds. No, I mean VERY hard. Noise pollution. Aggressive shopkeepers. Being on someone else’s schedule. That’s it for the complaining. Everyone gets to do a little bit, it’s only fair. But …
At the Cu Chi tunnels, you can see where the Viet Cong forces, working with the local people (or not, it’s not clear) dug out an extensive underground complex that reaches from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to Cambodia. You can see examples of the terrifying traps the VC built to snag the …
There’s a big mural on the back wall of one of the expat cafes in Hoi An town that’s got Bruce Lee with a big can of Coke in one hand, and on the other side, there’s a Mona Lisa wearing an iPod. In the middle, it says in big letters, “I shop, therefore I …
You know that paint you used in grade school? The chalky stuff, tempera, that when it dried, rubbed off on your clothes and your hands and your backpack and your homework? Remember those dry colors, dusty and dirty but oh so bright? Those are the colors of Hoi An. And because the entire country is …
A: Our internet connections, while plentiful, have been sooooo slow that I’m quite sure that if I uploaded even one photo, no one in Vietnam would be able to use the Internet until I’m done.