Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

We only ended up having one day to spend in Ho Chi Minh City so we would have enough time for Thailand. I ended up being really disappointed that we had such little time. Everyone we had talked to about Saigon had protrayed it as this miserable loud overbearing city. I don’t think this was really a fair assessment. Sure it’s big and busy but the city could handle it and the people were some of the most friendly we’d come across.

We spent the first part of the day doing some running around. One of our cameras got a little smashed up in Hoi An so we took it in to have the LCD replaced. That’s the best part of being in Asia, you can have anything fixed. An hour later and only sixty bucks and we had our camera back good as new.

We spent the afternoon at the obviously depressing War Remnants Museum. It’s a collection of hundreds of photographs taken by journalists covering the Vietnam war. I had always known that the Vietnam war was unpopular but never really knew why or anything else about it.

There are rooms filled with pictures of the unnecessary and cold path of destruction caused by the American army. Pictures of children left alone in a pile of dead family members. Pictures of entire villages destroyed. And the worst, pictures of all the people still affected today by the agent orange poison that was sprayed over the country. It has caused severe deffects in several generations. After looking at the pictures they had a mock detention facility outside where they have outlined all the possible methods of torture used by the US army. I stopped reading.

I left the museum struggling to understand how any of it actually happened. How it’s possible for a country to drop in and massacre entire families without any consequences. The most surprising part is the Vietnamese reaction. No more than 50 years ago the country was torn apart by Americans and now they welcome them to their country with open arms.

After the museum we headed home through one of the parks. Since it was evening the place was full of people playing games, exercising or just hanging around. The parks are incredible places in the evening to just sit and watch life, a nice end to a day looking at death.