We arrived in HCMC with a bit of time left in the day to find the hostel district and get ourselves situate for the night. After finding a couple places booked up we landed in one that had some space left and got a couple of bunks for the night. We dropped off our stuff, had a brief conversation with some Germans about how the bed I'd been assigned was full of bedbugs [it wasn't, but that wasn't determined to be true until later that night], and went downstairs to get my bed switched for the night before heading out for food and to check the place out.
The first thing that struck me about HCMC was that it wasn't at all like Hanoi had been. What rustic qualities it had were really more from grime and pollution than the well-worn but clean atmosphere of our previous city. Sadly, the posts of countless photos are almost over, as I took very few pictures in Ho Chi Minh. There just wasn't as much that struck me, and aside from being surrounded by Vietnamese some parts could have passed for Toronto. At the end of the day I simply felt that it was just a big city like almost any other, robbed of uniqueness and local culture by the ever-expanding influence of global culture. That said, there were still some interesting things.
We arrived in time to see the preparations for Tet, but weren't around long enough for the actual celebration. Lots of flowers.
This is taken from behind the cool flower horses because as you can't notice, in front there was a sign that said something like "Pictures for 50 000 VND", which is like $2.50, which wasn't a lot I guess, but it's free when you go around back and security as you can see wasn't exactly on high alert
Notice how the roots of the plants themselves are made to look like fish too. Nifty
I don't remember when this happened chronologically in the our time in HCMC, but at one point we started talking to a coconut vendor on our way to finding a museum and he let us see what his job felt like for a couple of minutes. It's not insanely heavy, but you can see why they're in a rush to sell them all quickly. Harrison models it well
This was taken near our hostel area one night as we sat and had dinner and watched everything go by. This place was tourist central but it only made for a more entertaining sight. Lu Lu here is a prostitute bar, one of many, where a gentleman sits down for a drink and a young woman comes up and sits with him, talks for a while, flirting of course, and perhaps if you're lucky a really amusing display of publicly inappropriate physical behaviour. It was some of the most fun I've had in terms of people-watching, trying to figure out who was there by accident, wondering how they'd became so frustratingly attractive to young Vietnamese women, or who was there with the full knowledge of what it all entailed and played it up shamelessly. At one point a fat old guy with one leg had a table of five or so young hookers around him as he drank and smoked away before walking off with a couple of them. That was the best part, watching them all leave together and the look of guilt and confusion on the faces of some of the guys. Also it's worth noting that we eventually figured out that the servers and owners of the place we were eating at were the pimps for the hookers across the street, often walking across with menus that were not so subtly filled with cash and brought back across the street before a waiter got on his moped and casually kept an eye on the patrons who'd left with a date. It sounds a bit tacky perhaps, and it was, but man, it was downright classy compared to prostitution in Thailand, so stay tuned for that because it's really funny
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