Saigon

There was something different about Saigon from the start. It just didn't have the evident character that Hanoi had. It was a faster paced city. There are no hostels, only cheap hotels, and the French architecture that's so nicely clustered in Hanoi is more dispersed in Saigon.

We went to the War Remnants Museum, we went to Post Office. We could've done more sightseeing, but I wasn't motivated. The museum was highly propagandized but not even that can mask the terrible things that happened. The Post Office was beautiful and ornate and much more impressive than the Notre Dame Cathedral next to it. We sent some postcards and I browsed the gift store: wooden tanks and other engines of war, flip flops, hats, bags, and picture books of overburdened scooters, and a bit unexpectedly, breast-feeding.

We ate good Indian food, drank maybe too much beer, and met an American named Scott, a Russian from London named Nadya, and some other transient friends. We walked a lot and consequently had to avoid innumerable where you going?s, where you from?s, long time no sees, what you looking for?s, and a couple good morning Vietnams.

It was the 23rd and I was ready to leave the city and Vietnam. I wasn't particularly excited to make it to Cambodia - it wasn't what I had in mind as part of my itinerary months ago, and it represented another step on the well-trodden southeast Asian backpacker circuit, consequently full of backpackers. But it was moving on regardless.

We got a message from a friend we met in Ha Long Bay that evening. Her brother was marrying a Vietnamese girl on Christmas Eve and he was in need of some more groomsmen, and were we interested in coming to the wedding and subsequent party on Christmas day?

We went out and bought some appropriate-ish outfits. For me, black flat-fronted slacks, a white long-sleeve dress shirt, and a new pair of shoes. The cost was $33 and I still think I was overcharged. I had to beg a little bit to get the shoes for $12.50 instead of $15, because that was all I had left in my wallet.

The wedding was strange for sure, but very nice. Derek was nice enough to let me and Adam show up and tag along for his big day, and we got a peek into traditional customs. Starting with a ceremony at the groom's house, his parents arrange the ceremonial offerings which are then carted off in a procession to the bride's house. I was one of the eight groomsmen that carried one of the eight offerings. It was something in a mounded tin under a red cover. Someone else got the roasted pig.

We actually took a van to her place, otherwise we might not've made it by Christmas. We lined up on the street, and gave the eight offerings to eight bridesmaids, all dressed in beautiful pink ao dai. Then it was up through the first floor travel agent to the top floor where the bride Duyen lived with her parents.

We waited out in the hallway while the main family members crammed into the room for the ceremony, and then it was back outside, in the van, back to Derek's place for a final ceremony that smelled of incense and oranges, and was the last symbolic ritual of the day. He had brought her and her family gifts, taken the vows, and now brought her back to his place to become part of the family.



We had lunch, Adam, Randy, and myself getting significantly drunk by 1:30PM thanks to our novelty as foreigners and the men's - family members, friends; I don't know - tendency to toast us and "100%" us with the never-ending supply of Heinekens and columns of ice refilled in our mugs. Courtney was off at her family's table, being the sister of the groom, and was thus not gang-pressured into getting drunk underneath the massive open-air cone roof of straw.

Christmas was spent sleeping late, trying to recover from the previous day and evening when the party didn't stop after we came back to town, and then going to the big wedding party. Adam and I arrived just in time to grab some places with Randy and Courtney in the gymnasium-sized party hall. It was fully packed with people too, at least 400. There was a bizarre ballet interpretive of marriage, song and dance, streamers, confetti, toasts, and pyrotechnics.

There was a lot more 100%'ing in between the courses which included fried frog legs. It's true, they really do taste like chicken. After a few hours of that, the crowd dispersed and the four of us took the longest cab ride in the worst traffic back into Saigon and realized our dream of doing Vietnamese karaoke with some other new friends we met at the bar beforehand.

I got maybe an hour of sleep before it was morning and by a Christmas miracle I found a hotel with computers and Skype that was just rolling open its steel curtain for the morning, and managed to get to see and talk with my family. I'm not very impressed with Christmas for the holiday itself, but I can't deny how nice it is to be with family for good times of simply being together, and it was a true treat to see and talk with everyone.

Three hours later, Adam and I got on a bus to Phnom Penh, contriving ways we could convince ourselves to lay off the booze. I'm going to claim I'm Mormon, with the slacks and shirt I bought for the wedding, I'll only need a black tie and name tag to look the part.

Night Train to Saigon

Nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City Ho Chi Minh City. I'm sure there's a better reason than the one I've figured out, but for me Saigon just sounds better.

While waiting on the platform for the train in Hue, a young Vietnamese man walked up to me and pointed to my camera, slung across my shoulder.

"Camera. Canon. Cheap."

"Really?" The camera cost about $500 less than two years ago. Even being old and worn, it was worth at least $150, not cheap by any Vietnamese standards.

"Yeah. Fifty dollar. This old, maybe forty dollar."

I grunted in amusement.

"Yeah, forty dollar." And he walked away. I couldn't for the life of me figure what his motivation could have been for so unexpectedly making such an obviously wrong statement. Could he want me to sell him my camera for a low price? Did he have some shitty knock-offs he wanted to sell me? I had no idea.

On the train, Adam and I busted out our respective instruments and began playing - terribly, as we always do. We had the cabin to ourselves for the time being, soft class this time. A curious Vietnamese wandered in and watched me play guitar and then took it from me to play.

He spoke no English, had terrible brown and yellow teeth and an easy smile, greasy hair and fingers thick and rough from a life of hard work. His left ring finger nail was black and thick and horrible looking, but he played a bit, and wasn't bad. He made eating and drinking motions but we declined. He seemed quite drunk already, even before he showed up with a beer at noon.

The landscape was amazing. We rolled past the coast, high above and caught breathtaking sights through open spaces in the wall of greenery: waves crashing below us on hidden beaches, the front of the train bending around curves and into tunnels 200 feet above the water.

We ate a pretty wretched meal in the dining car. It looked like it hadn't been remodeled since the orangeish-brown wood panels were last in style. The 70s maybe? The view through the big windows and the adorable little girl across from us made up for the bony chicken and tepid cabbage.

She may have been the cutest kid I've seen in all of Asia, and Asian kids are far and away the cutest kids I've ever seen. I made faces at her and stuck chopsticks up my nose, which she really seemed to enjoy. She dug a camera out of her mom's bag and sorta knew how to use it enough to photograph me with my mouth open mid-bite.

Our drunk greasy friend wandered in now and again. He was definitely drunk now, and reeked of incense and dank smoke as he'd lean in just a little too close to me as I was playing, and later trying out some Vietnamese phrases from the back of the guidebook. He was unforgiving with pronunciation: sigh-GONE? sai-GAHN!

I napped and listened to Lady Gaga. I've become smitten; I guess I never paid attention to her music the last billion times its been on the radio and sound system at clubs. Weird. When I awoke the air was still crisp and clear above the ocean to our left, and hazy and golden with the sun trying to fight through the mist-wrapped mountains to our right.

In the evening, our cabinmates finally showed up. They were a couple escorted on by their older family, a cluster of smiling wrinkled faces who grinned and shook our hands when they heard we were American.

"Me too," the guy said, settling in. "We're from St. Louis." He spoke with the high nasally voice of a Vietnamese, so he wasn't born there. "This is my hometown," referring to the village he and his diminutive wife had boarded at.

She said they'd been married for ten years, so when I said they looked so young to be married so long, they volunteered their ages as I'd hoped. She was 32 and he was 38. That meant he was born in 1972, during the war, which would explain why he was much darker than most Vietnamese, with curly hair. His dad was a G.I.

The couple liked to talk, usually at the same time, which made it harder to understand them than just their accents alone, but they were enthusiastic. They were going to spend a month and a half with her family in Saigon before going back home to St. Louis.

"You can eat twenty-four hours," was his reply to my question about what he most liked about Saigon. He offered to give us his cell number so he could take us out to his favorite places, which would've been great, but we eventually all got to bed without exchanging numbers - or names - and the next morning at 5:30AM, we arrived in Saigon and they were gone with their boxes before Adam and I packed up and disembarked. I foolishly thought the train was going to arrive at 5PM and Adam foolishly trusted me, so we were caught a bit off guard.

The best thing about Saigon manifested itself almost instantly. Honest cab drivers. We got in, told him where to go, and the meter came on automatically, and it counted up at the right pace, and we arrived at the backpacker ghetto of Pham Ngu Lao happy as clams, a first after getting out of a cab in Vietnam.

How to Pass a Weekend in Hanoi

Friday night we met up with Courtney, Randy, Yannis, and Carlos from soloing and Cat Ba. After all of us finding our separate ways back to Hanoi, we met in the same hostel and had a little reunion night out; just heartwarming, I know.

We started by playing Asshole and drinking free beer in our hostel, then went out in search of bia hoi which took way longer than it should. Twelve beers on the street put us back a total $3.50. Then it was off to karaoke. At least that was the plan.

Google Maps led us astray, down a little alley by our hostel to where there was most certainly no karaoke. We went to a bar instead and a bartender was spinning and tossing flaming bottles of booze. Then the mouthy friendly woman behind the bar gave us directions to a karaoke place, and the cab driver brought us there to find no karaoke. We demanded karaoke and the driver asked someone where he could drop us because we had agreed to pay way too much for the ride and the least he could do was just get us to a karaoke place.

We got to one, but they wanted to charge like $20 an hour per person. We walked back to eat and drink on the street in our neighborhood.

That was Friday. On Saturday everyone had left except for Adam and I, and we were feeling lazy so we went to the movies. After accusing the cabbie of bringing us in the wrong direction, I was humbled when he brought us straight to the theater.

The map I had looked at showed it way north of us; it turns out that the Internet is occasionally not to be trusted. Who knew? It's hard to give the benefit of the doubt sometimes when you're constantly getting hosed - my bad.

We went to see Faster, but Adam talked me into seeing Due Date instead. It fucking sucked. Don't see it unless you like flat rehashed jokes that just aren't that funny, and films that are broadly uninspired in every way. The best part was when Robert Downey Jr. punched an obnoxious little kid in the gut.

Fortunately, we got there early and the movie was finished by 8PM and Faster started at 9PM.

Double feature!

Faster was infinitely better. The Rock was pissed off the whole time and had about eight lines of dialog, like a juiced up inked up Frank Morris. Here's an example of dialog:

After the warden's lengthy monologue -upon The Rocks release from prison - about darkness, life on the outside, and turning a new leaf,

Warden: Do you have any questions?
The Rock: Yeah. Where's the exit?

Truly awesome stuff. Billy Bob Thornton is a junkie cop, and there's some sissy British guy who's a prima donna hitman. There were no boobs, despite a quick scene in a strip club, and after taking so many steroids to get so jacked, The Rock strangely didn't even take his shirt off.

Here's one more example of how awesome the movie was:

The Rock is about to execute a pastor who had severely wronged him in the past, before the pastor "found God" and turned his life around. The pastor, invoking his unwavering faith, beseeches The Rock for mercy in God's name:

The Rock: God can't save you from me.

Pure class, pure entertainment. It's a train to Hue tonight, then Saigon, then god-knows-what.