#bitexco tower

Sài Gòn

Day 2, HoChiMinh City, Vietnam

(Pictured)

Vincom Center

Bitexco Financial Tower

Nguyen Hue Street

This post has been sitting in my drafts pile since July, shamefully. Earlier in that month, while Fra and the girls visited cousins in UK, I took advantage of a long weekend to check out Ho Chi Minh City (still referred to as Saigon by its citizens though). We haven’t yet toured Vietnam as a family, perhaps because Francesca has simply been more keen on seeing other countries (having lived in Hanoi for a year), but we will get there, just not likely to this city. Another big motivator for me to fly down was to meet up with a childhood friend of mine making his way there from the States on business.

Situated at the Mekong Delta feeding the South China Sea, Saigon is the country’s most populous and metropolitan city. Most historically, the land belonged to the Khmer empire, but as Vietnamese settlers expanded their presence, it was eventually turned over to them until France and Spain jointly colonized it in the mid 19th century. For the next century, south Vietnam remained under French colonial rule, and the architecture and layout of the city reflects the influence. Today, Saigon’s skyline is dotted with numerous modern office buildings and hotels, but for my stay, I opted for a taste of the previous century...

The Hotel Majestic, frequented in its heyday by the likes of Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, is parked at a busy intersection right by the Saigon River, and offered a great starting point for my first afternoon stroll through the scenic Đa Kao district.

The French architectural influence is dominant, especially along the main thoroughfares, like Dong Khoi Street (formerly Rue Catinat), home of 3 of the old city’s most famous landmarks... 

1. The Saigon Opera House, above and below (though I also wanted to document the very modern engineering taking place out front - an underground rail line under construction, part of a joint venture between Vietnam and Japan);

2. The Central Post Office, designed by Gustave Eiffel;

and just next door,  3. the Notre Dame Basilica, a favorite spot for wedding shoots I quickly found.

Above, tucked quietly behind the Post Office was this charming street, where every single shop was a bookstore or bookstore-cafe. Given the level of information control I experienced in my last trip to still-very-Communist Vietnam 15 years ago, it was impressive to see such density of literary resources. Indeed, despite Saigon having been an anchor of capitalism up until the end of the Vietnam War and the strong Western presence, there are nevertheless consistent reminders that the city is now firmly under Uncle Ho’s domain...

After an unplanned afternoon repose (who knew that Saigon observed a siesta??) I marched over to Independence Palace - the former home and office of South Vietnam’s president, and the primary symbol of the Fall of Saigon after NVA tanks smashed through its gates in April 1975 and subsequently renamed it Reunification Palace. The building has remained unused ever since, and perfectly preserved in its stark 1960s aesthetic.

The only new area of the grounds is a gift shop at the front gate, in which I was amused to find prominently displayed copies of a book about the imperialist dogs’ very own president. (On further research, and even stranger, it’s not even a book by, or about, Obama, but rather a text about public speaking!)

The Palace contained many grand conference rooms and halls that Don Draper would have loved to pitch some ideas in, but I found the underground floor to be just as interesting, containing a bunker and communications command post - the bunker, incidentally, not an original part of the building, but constructed later by President Ngo Dinh Diem after his own troops dropped a couple bombs on him in an assasination attempt (they eventually succeeded)!

Above, some enviable furniture happening here. 

Below, the Palace’s helipad denotes two spots where the aforementioned bombs detonated.

After my Palace visit, I strolled the avenues some more, taking in the city scenes, including street corner moped fix-it stands, afternoon tea sessions, and sidewalk snack gatherings.

Above, a potential second career awaits. 

Below, a fellow with unusually long arms (I followed him, entranced, for a farther distance than I care to admit).

The final stop on my self-guided day tour was the War Remnants Museum, which provides a sobering chronicle of decades of atrocities the Vietnamese people have suffered at the hands of both foreign powers as well as their own countrymen. Though completely one-sided and shamelessly propagandist, eager to portray Communist Vietnam as a victim of unjust aggression, it nevertheless doesn’t shy away from displaying the harshest realities of the war.

As an American visitor, it was almost comical to me to see the lengths the curators went to portray the North Vietnamese as Geneva-abiding innocents. Above, samples of anti-American cartoons and letters apparently willfully created by U.S. POWs while imprisoned, and below, photos of fit and smiling GI’s enjoying recreation time and festive holiday meals.

Along with recreations of the horrendous prison conditions NVA prisoners endured and displays touting the quantities of weaponry and bombs expended by the US in its losing effort, certainly the most striking exhibits involved portraits of children born with various malformations due to villagers’ exposure to Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants - an aspect of the war heavily glossed over by historians on the US side of the conflict.

Following a very sweaty day of city trekking, I headed out again in the evening for more exploration, which took me through night markets, a popular backpacker area, and to the skydeck of the country’s tallest building.

A taste of home?? (Nah, I’m good here)  

Below, midnight kung fu at Quách Thị Trang Park.

Bitexco Through Plastic

Bitexco at Night