Saigon (the city not the rapper)

Disclaimer: If you came to this blog looking for info on Brian Daniel Carenard, better known as Saigon, or details on his much-anticipated album "The Greatest Story Never Told", please keep searching. For I won't go into any details about the 34-year old New Yorker who's made countless (4) appearances on hit shows like Entourage and Bring That Year Back 2006: Laugh Now, Cry Later. No I'm not going to talk about him at all. Although I WAS a fan of his 2007 mixtape Hookers and Success, but that's a Saigon bygone.

For those of you who came to this blog post to read about Saigon the city, or Ho Chi Minh City as it's been called since 1976, then you're in the right place.

Jules and I got to muggy Ho Chi Minh after yet another red-eye (when booking these flights months in advance it seemed like a good idea to always go with the cheapest, middle-of-the-night flights....so much easier to decide this when, months in advance, sitting comfortably on a couch sipping coffee...). Tired, groggy, and smelly, we dropped off the backpacks at our hostel and hit the streets. We only had a day there before continuing on to the hidden gem known as Phu Quoc so we wanted to see as much as possible....or before we collapsed in exhaustion.

We started by going to......uh......who am I kidding it's been 6 months. Let's try that again, that day we saw many Vietnam War historical sites like the Reunification Palace

and the War Remnants Museum.

I've been told that in the subsequent years after the Vietnam War ended, US tourists were required to go to this museum before being able to do anything else in the country. There's a good reason for that. The place is heavy. Real heavy. Extremely biased, but when it comes to something as delicate as the Vietnam War (or American War as it's called in Vietnam......wrap your head around that), I think it's imperative you get both sides to the story. And the Vietnamese side is, obviously, very anti-American. Not to say what we did wasn't necessary but....in fact, I'll try to steer clear of any "right", "wrong", "necessary", and "unnecessary" talk, and just say that the museum was intense.

As can be expected, we needed some time to recover a bit after witnessing some of the photos. Especially in the Agent Orange room. And to hear that amounts of dioxin are still in Vietnamese soil and tap water that are STILL affecting babies born today, makes you sick to the stomach. If you want to ruin an appetite, I recommend googling agent orange aftermath and check out some of the photos. Truly appalling stuff.

I can't remember what we did after that because I just remembered some of the stuff we saw. Ummmmm, I think we walked around the city a bit more after that, which was fine because HCMC is a pretty cool city. A lot of places were closed because of our old friend Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar Year.

Fo Me?

We retired early that night because of our pleasantly-early morning flight to the land of motorbikes, deserted beaches, and really bad sunburn (cough B cough).