ho ho ho chi minh city (AKA saigon)

to some it's ho chi minh city. to some it's saigon. either way, it's rainy. like forrest gump once said, in vietnam "We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." it made walking around less-than-enjoyable, but it made the weather surprisingly cool, which was a trade-off i'll take any day of the week in southeast asia.

so monday was my first day here, and i went to the museum of war remnants, which is what it's called now, since i suppose the vietnamese thought not a lot of americans would want to go if they kept the original name: "the museum of american war atrocities." they had all sorts of photo displays from journalists, most of whom had died covering the war. graphic photos. heart-tugging photos. ones we've seen before, like the naked 12-year-old girl running from the napalm bombing, and the pulitzer prize-winning one wherein a mother helps her five children swim across a swollen river to escape the viet cong. the photos really struck me because i thought about how many of those young men died in this country. americans, just out of high school many of them, their lives cut short...you didn't have to wonder what had happened to them because for many of the photos, the caption underneath would say that the person had died shortly after the photo, either of the injuries pictured or due to a landmine or something.

i really felt for gene, my mom's husband, who was here in the mid-sixties. i think i heard my mom say that vietnam remains the defining moment of his life. i was thinking about gene, who was (pardon my french) scared shitless the entire time he was here, riding around in helicopters, just like the ones they had outside of the photo exhibit! they had a large collection of US military gear: planes, helicopters, tractors, mortar, artillery, bombs, tanks, guns, left over when we finally lost the war in april 1975, about three or four weeks before i was born. i imagined that the helicopter there in the park-like setting very well could have been the one gene was in, all those years ago.

inside a new wing of the museum was a gallery with photos of the effects of agent orange, and a giant quote from a US senate debate on the use of agent orange, wherein some senator said it was the first time in the history of mankind that an army was at war not just with the enemy, but with the environment and the future. and he was right: the effects of agent orange are still being felt. levels of it are still a thousand times the healthy level in big chunks of vietnam, and babies with deformities that can be traced to agent orange are still being born. the exhibit, in addition to photos, had jars in which floated fetuses with various birth defects: two heads, huge heads, too many arms, little flipper arms and legs, and a whole bunch of people born with no eyes (just skin straight across), which is a common side effect of agent orange.

i'm not going to go all anti-war, etc., on y'all, because this was a totally one-sided museum (the north vietnamese/viet cong certainly did their share of torture and degredation). but the museum really pounded home that war is awful, and that the innocent are often those affected the most.

so that was a real upper of an experience...

the next day i went shopping in a big enclosed marketplace - and was the center of attention, although i personally was more fascinated by the live fish being chopped up before my eyes and the rows after rows of cow and pig intestines, lungs, spleens, and other various disgusting body parts. after that fun i went over to the backpacker area of saigon - the rough equivalent of bangkok's khaosan road - in order to book a one-day tour out to the mekong delta, where you can see the stereotypical vietnam of oxen, rice paddies, and women in conical hats. oh, wait: you can see the conical hats here in the city, which is kind of cool. it lends a kind of vietnam war-era feeling to the place, a feeling that was accentuated on my taxi ride from the airport a few days ago by the taxi driver, who switched the radio to an english-language station that came back from commercial and announced "this is radio saigon!"

the one-day tour was set to begin at 7:15 this morning, but yesterday afternoon, after day after day of eating probably too much fresh fruit that may or may not have been washed in safe water, i came down with the saigon squirts (TMI, i know), and spent the afternoon doing the ho chi minh hustle back to my hotel room every once in awhile. when my alarm went off this morning at 6:45, i knew that i wouldn't be able to stand 12 hours traveling by boat and bus through rice paddies and mangrove jungles, so i skipped the tour and re-booked it for tomorrow - which will be the last day of my trip! i spent today wandering around, taking it easy, and found a pharmacy with an english-speaking pharmacist, who was able to give me some immodium without me having to resort to charades. ick.

i'm feeling better now, at half past 11 p.m. on wednesday night. my flight leaves in 24 hours exactly. red-eye from saigon to tokyo, layover there for six hours, then 13 hours to dallas/fort worth international airport. i'll hang out part of friday with my dad and family there, then take a relatively short flight back to ontario, where my trip will be complete. wow. i'll have been all the way around the world. cool!