Anyways- I got to Palace Hotel and checked-in.
Tourist season is full swing in the days & weeks before the lunar New Year (Tet) on 17 Feb, so rooms were booked in all the hotels for the whole 3 day period. I would have to change hotels every night. No big deal. I’m amazed that a city with 18,000 hotel rooms can sell out so quickly!
My travel partners are 4 Aussie girls: Meg Ledger, a friend from Perth I met on my first deployment and speech pathologist, Anna (sister) and occupational therapist with an Australian mining company, Louise (cousin) social worker, and Sarah (cousin) herbal medicine specialist. My roommate Lydia couldn’t come (somewhat last minute) over technical difficulties with Indonesian authorities. As a Fullbright researcher without a multiple entry Visa, she didn’t have a good-enough reason to leave the country. (ie. No medical emergency in progress).
It’s fun meeting up with Meg again and launching off on an exciting trek through Vietnam with four Aussie girls. I tried meeting them in Cambodia, but couldn’t get permission to enter the country from the U.S. Embassy there. I’ll try getting there on future travel.
Meg and Anna just came from 4 days in Cambodia, and were full of stories about the charm of Angkor Wat, meeting some monks up there, and then venturing to Phnom Penh (the capital). Visiting the Toul Sleng genocide museum and the killing fields (of Pol Pot & Khmer Rouge fame), where an estimated 2 million deaths occurred between 1975-79, was eerie but unforgettable. Their guide explained how nearly all of her family members were killed there, after being tortured into “confessions” that they weren’t Communist enough, supported political opponents (Lon Nol), or Capitalism. All forbidden.
Louise and Sarah just returned from a 3 day tour on the Mekong River Delta… Amazing if slightly less luxurious. Living atop the chocolaty brown waters for two days on a boat was a journey punctuated with glimmers of beauty and few pampering accoutrements. Ha ha. Something about answering the call of nature in a flooded toilet, in the pitch of night (no electricity), with unknown liquids lapping over your bare feet and untold offense to the nostrils,,, robbed the experience of some of its luster. (=
Anna, Meg and I went off to visit our first cultural site in the city: Reunification Palace.
We took the tour, which lasted about an hour, through the former Presidential Palace, and now the symbol for re-unified Vietnam.
A lot of different things jumped out at me.
The traditional Vietnamese dresses are beautiful. Very elegant and simple. All the women tour guides wore them, as well as a student tour group.
It’s interesting finding myself in a Communist country for the first time. I had to adjust to hearing things (history) from a perspective I’m not used to. A lot of comments and displays along the tour seemed laden with a level of overt propaganda designed to constantly remind visitors and Vietnamese alike that the benevolent Communist government of Hanoi was the victim of unjust aggression, and America was the bad guy. Well,,, everyone is entitled to their opinions- and I’m a visitor in their country now, so I respect it. It’s more of a shift than I was expecting.
Actually, I was thinking, after 95 years of colonialism under the French, and 9 years of bitter struggle after World War II to get them out, I would have heard more about France as the bad guy. But no. America takes the cake. Our 12 years of unwelcomed presence there seem the only things worth reminding the people about.
Parts of the Palace were grand and beautiful: Presidential offices and meeting rooms. Parts seemed comically rooted in the 1970s: women’s parlor & men’s game room. Two levels of concrete, bomb-proof basement were filled with classic 1950’s style espionage- rooms reminiscent of the old spoof detective show “Get Smart.”
Tourist season is full swing in the days & weeks before the lunar New Year (Tet) on 17 Feb, so rooms were booked in all the hotels for the whole 3 day period. I would have to change hotels every night. No big deal. I’m amazed that a city with 18,000 hotel rooms can sell out so quickly!
My travel partners are 4 Aussie girls: Meg Ledger, a friend from Perth I met on my first deployment and speech pathologist, Anna (sister) and occupational therapist with an Australian mining company, Louise (cousin) social worker, and Sarah (cousin) herbal medicine specialist. My roommate Lydia couldn’t come (somewhat last minute) over technical difficulties with Indonesian authorities. As a Fullbright researcher without a multiple entry Visa, she didn’t have a good-enough reason to leave the country. (ie. No medical emergency in progress).
It’s fun meeting up with Meg again and launching off on an exciting trek through Vietnam with four Aussie girls. I tried meeting them in Cambodia, but couldn’t get permission to enter the country from the U.S. Embassy there. I’ll try getting there on future travel.
Meg and Anna just came from 4 days in Cambodia, and were full of stories about the charm of Angkor Wat, meeting some monks up there, and then venturing to Phnom Penh (the capital). Visiting the Toul Sleng genocide museum and the killing fields (of Pol Pot & Khmer Rouge fame), where an estimated 2 million deaths occurred between 1975-79, was eerie but unforgettable. Their guide explained how nearly all of her family members were killed there, after being tortured into “confessions” that they weren’t Communist enough, supported political opponents (Lon Nol), or Capitalism. All forbidden.
Louise and Sarah just returned from a 3 day tour on the Mekong River Delta… Amazing if slightly less luxurious. Living atop the chocolaty brown waters for two days on a boat was a journey punctuated with glimmers of beauty and few pampering accoutrements. Ha ha. Something about answering the call of nature in a flooded toilet, in the pitch of night (no electricity), with unknown liquids lapping over your bare feet and untold offense to the nostrils,,, robbed the experience of some of its luster. (=
Anna, Meg and I went off to visit our first cultural site in the city: Reunification Palace.
We took the tour, which lasted about an hour, through the former Presidential Palace, and now the symbol for re-unified Vietnam.
A lot of different things jumped out at me.
The traditional Vietnamese dresses are beautiful. Very elegant and simple. All the women tour guides wore them, as well as a student tour group.
It’s interesting finding myself in a Communist country for the first time. I had to adjust to hearing things (history) from a perspective I’m not used to. A lot of comments and displays along the tour seemed laden with a level of overt propaganda designed to constantly remind visitors and Vietnamese alike that the benevolent Communist government of Hanoi was the victim of unjust aggression, and America was the bad guy. Well,,, everyone is entitled to their opinions- and I’m a visitor in their country now, so I respect it. It’s more of a shift than I was expecting.
Actually, I was thinking, after 95 years of colonialism under the French, and 9 years of bitter struggle after World War II to get them out, I would have heard more about France as the bad guy. But no. America takes the cake. Our 12 years of unwelcomed presence there seem the only things worth reminding the people about.
Parts of the Palace were grand and beautiful: Presidential offices and meeting rooms. Parts seemed comically rooted in the 1970s: women’s parlor & men’s game room. Two levels of concrete, bomb-proof basement were filled with classic 1950’s style espionage- rooms reminiscent of the old spoof detective show “Get Smart.”
posted by jonathan adventures at 11:38 PM
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