Marcy and Henry just left for Hanoi for a brief visit before heading home to New York via Seoul. We had an amazing two weeks with them, but have been too busy to keep up with the blog, so we have some catching up to do. Last week, we flew to Saigon (officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the war). We had dinner at a Turkish restaurant and went to bed exhausted. The next day, we visited the War Remnants Museum, which presented images and artifacts from the war between communist North Vietnam and US-backed South Vietnam. In the afternoon, we went to the Reunification Palace, the iconic site of the South Vietnamese loss on April 30th 1975 when a North Vietnamese tank crashed through its gate, ending the battle for Saigon and the war over Vietnam’s future. After a swim at the apartment, we had dinner at a very local restaurant with no English menus or English-speaking waiters. Through a combination of pointing and Google Translate, we managed to order grilled prawns, fried fish (plucked out of a large tank to order), fried rice, and plenty of Saigon Beer. On our second and last full day in Saigon, we took a tour of the Mekong Delta, where the river feeds into the South China Sea at the southernmost tip of Vietnam. Lined with stilt houses and filled with tourist boats, it was very different from the relatively uninhabited section of the Mekong that Robert and I visited in Northern Laos. We learned about local production of honey, rice paper, rice wine, and pop rice (the rice version of popcorn). We finished the tour with a traditional lunch of prawns and river fish at a local homestay.
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September 2018
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