Ella Sallies into (and out of) Saigon

The first thing we noticed when we got to Ho Chi Minh City were the masses of motorcycles on the streets. I have seen plenty of motorcycles in places such as India, but never before in such numbers. The bikes reminded me of large, metal ants, but with almost no coordination because there are hardly any traffic lights. We got to our new apartment and became excited to see it. We were looking forward to a nice place of our own, but when we entered our building we were not prepared. Now, if we weren’t hyped about this apartment it wouldn’t have seemed so bad, but as it were, the ground floor’s small living area shared with a tiny kitchen seemed petit and cramped, and the steep stairway going up seemed never-ending. The first floor had two planes bedrooms, and so did the second, but the third floor was hot and humid and strung with laundry. Also, the laundry machine had clothes in it. When we got settled we realized how weak the wifi was, and when we closer examined the kitchen we had to kiss goodbye to the cake we had been planning to bake the next day. There was no oven. After doing homework, we ate a meal of pasta with tomato sauce and realized that there were no knives. For the rest of the day we heard a baby crying, a rooster crowing, and people screaming. When we awoke the next day, we realized that the apartment truly wasn’t so bad, it just took some getting used to. However, there were only two tables. The first one was in the kitchen and it only sat two people, and the second was on the roof, which only seated one. Therefore, after sweating to death trying to sit on the roof, I sat on the stairs and used a glass railing as my table. We decided to walk around the town, and we went to multiple markets and I noticed that the Vietnamese Teacher’s Day was coming up! I looked for string in the markets but didn’t find anything good. Then, we booked tickets for a show and went to the War Remnants Museum. This museum was very powerful because of its stories and photographs. Many people died the following second or within the following days, unless of course, they were already dead. Life-changing deformations were the result of Agent Orange, a chemical used by Americans, and descendants of those affected still have deformities today. Something that I saw and hadn’t ever thought about was that American soldiers, too, were affected by Agent Orange. I looked at a picture of a beautiful little girl in a white dress, but when the crowd parted I was able to see that she had no arm. Her father had been affected by Agent Orange during the war. There was this room in the museum where kids with deformities had drawn pictures of other kids with deformities, and there were three deformed people making beaded key chains, so I bought one and Aba bought seven simpler ones for our house. We ate lunch at a restaurant, then went home and did homework. We all took showers inside the bathroom with a drain and got the toilet sopping wet, and my favorite part of the evening was when Merrill saw a cockroach and shrieked! “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” Hehehehehehe… That made my day. When I did some more research on the war in order to do this blog, I saw this article; “From 8 PM to 9 PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal rangers (one of the most selective rangers of U.S Army) led by Lieutenant Bob Kerrey reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, Thanh Phu District, Ben Tre Province. They cut 66-year-old Bui Van Vat and 62-year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disemboweled one. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disemboweled a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury”. The Lieutenant, Bob Kerrey, was, up until 2001 when he confessed his sins to the public, a U.S Senator. The next day, we woke up early and got into a van with our guide. We drove to the Cu Chi Tunnels, which are tunnels that communist soldiers dug during the Vietnam War, and found out that they were very extensive and were under the entire country. I went inside many tunnels, but Aba, Troy, and Asher only went in one because they got scared by two fruit bats!

We saw different types of flip traps as well as different types of guns and bombs, but one technique that I found very interesting was that when Vietnamese left underground rooms they extinguished the lights. Therefore, if American soldiers found their way into the tunnels they would stay next to the wall and fell into pits filled with spikes! I thought that this was very clever. We drove to see a reenactment of village life, but then went back to our apartment after drinking some sugarcane juice. We took showers and then met our friend Hui at a restaurant. We met Hui in the Annapurna!!!!! We had a very nice dinner with him and then went home and dinner. I woke up early the next morning in order to study French and we went to a French bakery to eat breakfast. We walked around the city and saw a memorial to Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who burned himself alive in order to bring awareness to the policies of the Diệm government.

Then we toured the Independence Palace, a very cool government building that is mid-century-modern blended with Asian design. We went to a water puppet show at the Rex Hotel which was pretty cool, but the first half of the show didn’t have any puppets which I thought was kind of like a scam, but the show itself was nice to see. A funny thing that happened is that the first group of dancers wore elaborate costumes but wore sneakers! The next day we toured Chinatown, which was interesting though uneventful. That night we saw the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which I didn’t hate. However, before we got to the movie theatre, Troy decided that we should use the elevator instead of the escalators and when he forgot to get out at our floor we were trapped. With our luck, we had to stop at every floor going down for roughly six floors and the same thing happened going back up. Troy!

In the morning, we woke up early and got into the van with our guide and drove to the Mekong Delta, a maze of lush rivers abundant with vegetation and floating villages, or boathouses. We ate breakfast at a scenic area (I ate an ice cream sandwich and bread, don’t judge me), and arrived shortly after. We wandered around a market and in the meat section I saw severed chicken heads, feet, and organs, pig noses and ears and hearts and skins, and many other types of animal flesh. I saw some new fruits which were very interesting, but on the way out of the market, we saw a tiny cage packed to the brim with puppies.

The guide told us they were meant as pets, but I’m not so sure… We drove to an area filled with fishing villages and rented our own boat to sail down the river.

We got off and walked on a cement sidewalk in the middle of the jungle, past some houses, and through a lot of greenery. Then, we returned on the boat and got on a small baby blue truck that drove us to a restaurant. The restaurant wasn’t very good, but all I’ll say about it is that the food was endless and they kept piling it up on our plates. Also, they brought out an entire fish with eyes and bones and teeth and they didn’t understand our request for no pork. When we left the restaurant, we got into rowboats and paddled down a narrow stream, which was very cool.

We then drove to a coconut-candy-manufacturing factory and saw how coconut candy is made! This might’ve been my favorite part of the whole day because when they poured the cooling liquid-coconut it was still warm and the workers let me eat some! It was like taffy, which I’ve never had warm, but I think that it’s a lot better warm and liquidy. I even went back for more! We drove home to do some homework and then went out to dinner. The next morning I was awakened at 5:30 am by a very, very, very very very LOUD band playing on our street. They had all kinds of instruments; drums and trumpets and BAGPIPES and who knows what else. And it was 5:30 am. AND I had gone to sleep at midnight the night before because of an emergency with my friends! Anyway, I did some homework because I couldn’t fall back asleep, and Aba, Asher, Merrill, Troy, and I walked around the city all day again. I even bought 15 different spools of bracelet string of 14 different colors! We also went to a tall building that Asher though looks like the Avenger Tower (actually the Bitexco tower) to see the view.

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That evening, we went to an acrobatic show called AO which I found wonderful. However, there were some very loud tourists in the row across the aisle from me who were talking loudly and incessantly for the entire duration. I had to work hard not to slap them, they were so annoying and disrespectful!

After eating dinner at a former Opium-making factory, we visited a bar that Aba had been to when he visited Vietnam as a backpacker, called the Apocalypse Now. On the way home, we bought some gherkins!! The next morning was a little sad because Merrill boarded a plane to New York for her 21-hour flight. We mostly worked on homework after she left, and that night I started working on Christmas/Hanukah/Aba’s Birthday presents. Today we ate breakfast at a bakery called Tous Les Jours where we had already eaten a couple of times and then did homework. I wrote a creative story on the dog meat industry in Vietnam, so here is the link if you want to read it (be warned, it is gruesome and will make you sad). We had drinks with a friend of ours at the Rex hotel that we had met in Sydney, Australia called Sean, and Asher fell asleep on the table. Then, we headed toward the mall in order to see to see Wreck-It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet. I actually liked the movie except for *spoiler alert* everything concerning the giant Ralph, it was too cheesy and sentimental. However, it was Black Friday and there were literally thousands of people squeezed into the hall! We ate dinner at a Korean meat restaurant, did homework and blogged, and went to sleep.

11-6-3-11-14-6  4-17-6 9-3-10-23,  7-21-26 11-6-3-11-14-6  6-4-26 9-3-10-23, 23-3 4-17-6  18-6 5-4-13-13-1-7-4-14-23?

Ella

 #Vegan