Helps Taiwan, You Help!
In the morning, we prepared for our 10 AM flight with coffees and chocolate scone from Starbucks, and took the subway over to the airport, only to discover that one had to take a free shuttle over to the international terminal.
Our layover in the Taipei airport was nothing special, just wanderings around the duty free shops trying colognes and perfumes while I was surprised to see a Swatch booth. There was a little museum shop, of sorts, an extension of one of Taipei’s actual museums. Over at our gate, a large and ominous sign informed us that drug trafficking in the R.O.C. is punishable by death.
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City early evening, taking a long cab ride we would later find out to be three times as expensive as our ride back to the airport. At the start we were absolutely shocked at the traffic situation, which involved hordes of motorbikes and the occasional four-wheeled vehicle moving in whatever direction they pleased at the time, constantly honking as if to say “I’m here, don’t hit me” or also for the cars “Warning: Get out of my way our you’re roadkill.” When I went to Rome, the traffic there was scary, but nothing close to this scale of organised chaos. It’s just a constant ebb and flow, water over rapids.
It took us a couple minutes to find our hotel, down one alley of the backpacker hotel area of District 1. The alleys are numbered, and each place has its address number, but halfway down an alley the main number may up and change to something completely different, as it did in our case. Luckily, after taking another look and searching out the hotel names, we arrived at the one we selected from our research online.
Our hotel clerk, a kind old woman speaking nearly zero English showed us our room and we handed her our passports as requested, which we received back when we left. It looked nice enough, and unexpectedly had an air conditioner. The shower and toilet were in the same room, the toilet in range to unavoidably get wet from the stream of the shower, in a somewhat illogical but money-saving solution. Our room was up a few flights of stairs, providing a balcony view of not much besides the other hotels of the alley, but we could see what was going on down below. A few of the other hotels had their own little café restaurants out front, but we never ate at one of them.
Venturing out into the city, we first found a travel agency just down the street and booked a bus to Da Lat for the next day. Then we walked through a nice, long park to find on the other end a huge dome of Xmas decorations, where quite a few people were moseying about while watching the mechanical show. The Ben Thanh market, our destination, was actually closed but the streets nearby were lined with booths set up for the crowds, serving up the usual clothing and trinkets, but also a variety of Vietnamese food. Farther down the main street we walked, into the sea of traffic near a line of trees adorned with Xmas lights.
Silent Night, Ho Chi Minh Night not so silent.
When it came time for dinner, we settled with one of the festival restaurants on the street back by Ben Thanh, which was tasty but annoying. I wanted to get pho (Vietnamese beef broth soup), but it was not available and so I got a pork and noodle stir fry. Unfortunately we only found seating right by the crowd, lending us extra noise and motorbike exhaust fumes, and Colleen’s beef fry took ages to arrive. We treated ourselves to some Tutti Frutti frozen yogurt afterward, a nice refuge from the smoke if not the noise.
Self-serve frozen yogurt at Tutti Frutti.
The crowd was going nuts at the time, us having no particular clue as to why that was, but we found out at some point that Vietnam had just won, for the first time in Thailand, a football (soccer) match against Thailand. Those all-red with a yellow star in the middle Vietnamese flags were waving everywhere as people cheered, and it took us not a short amount of time to work our way through the gridlocked crowd of motorbikes and pedestrians in the street to get back to our hotel.
Go Vietnam.
