Saigon, Vietnam

A few weekends ago me and Lorna took a small vacation over to Ho Chi Minh City, (formerly Saigon) Vietnam to see the city and stay with some friends from our October LanguageCorps group who are teaching there. We took off on Friday on a 6 hour bus ride from Phnom Penh to Saigon for $10 which included a nice little snack box of strange pastries with a slice of Ham inside. Me and Lorna both brought mid-terms we needed to grade for the bus ride, but as I suspected I spent most of the time sleeping or staring out the window. Ive taken a bunch of 4+ bus rides around Cambodia and staring out the window never gets old or boring, you see amazing things like tiny wooden hut/houses and the families hanging around outside, cows, water buffalo, mini-vans filled with no less than 20 people, houses on stilts 20 ft off the ground with a 30 ft ramp leading to the front door, and beautiful stretches of fields, trees, rice paddies, and the occasional mountain or non-flat feature.
Another fun part of the bus ride was that unbeknown to us it included a ferry ride. Our full-size coach bus drove onto a ferry, floated across a river for 10 minutes, and drove off and on towards Saigon on the other side. We also had to cross the border which entailed us getting off and on the bus a few times and driving through a weird, zombie movie-esque, dilapidated, 300 or so ft. buffer zone between Cambodia and Vietnam.
Once we hit the city it took us about an hour to get into the city center where we were dropped off, it was obvious Saigon was a real city, nothing like Phnom Penh; tall buildings that prevented you from seeing most of the sky, designer stores, neon signs and tons more motos and people than Phnom Penh. After getting off the bus we met Megan, one of our languagecorps friends at a restaurant and had dinner before she took us to her apartment.
Megan lives with 3 others from our languagecorps group, Casey, Ashley, and Matt in a modern, 4-floor, narrow, green apartment of their own. Very different then my very basic and undecorated Cambodian apartment.
I’m not sure if I was able to get a true feel for Saigon in the short 5 days I was there, but I got to do and see lots of cool things. It was also nice to hang out with some friends I hadn’t seen since October. You can take a look at the pictures to see some of the following things. Some highlights: the telephone poles and wires which were somehow worse and more of a chaotic bundle than Cambodia’s; the parks and green space; the hotel rooftop pool we used one afternoon for $2 and its view; taking a moto taxi which actually have laws to follow such as everyone must wear a helmet and only 1 passenger allowed per moto (as apposed to Cambodia where the law that the driver must wear a helmet is just starting to be enforced and you can put as many people on a moto as you can fit, ive seen a family of 5); the War Remnants Museum - a main tourist attraction with lots of crazy photos, accounts of the history of the war, and lots of US military tanks, planes, helicopters and other equipment which was all presented in a pretty unbiased way; the Saigon Post Office; the upscale touristy shopping area; the famous Ben Tan Market; and some fun nights out with Casey, Ashley, and Matt. One night Casey took me to his favorite street-vendor food stall to get some friend noodles with vegetables and meat which was so good I had two for about $2 and then to a popular back-packer hangout, a tiny outdoor place with children-size plastic chairs and tables that sold jugs of beer for about 75cents.
By Tuesday at noon it was time to get on our bus back to Phnom Penh and return to work on Wednesday. It was a good trip and Saigon was an interesting city. It's hard to compare it to Phnom Penh because I’ve lived in PP for 5 months now and was in Saigon for less than 5 days. The main difference was that Saigon felt like more of a real city, something like NYC, with an insane amount of people, traffic, and overall much higher level of development than PP (I've heard PP is about 20 years behind Vietnam in terms of development). It was a great trip but from my brief time there I would say I very much prefer the less intense (although still very intense) life in PP.

Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam