Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam — 2024

     March 21 found us docked in Phu My, the port for Ho Chi Minh City (previously named Saigon, and still often referred to by that name colloquially).  There is nothing to see or do in Phu My, which is just a small town with an industrial port, so we spent the day in Saigon.  It is about an hour and a half drive to Saigon but HAL was offering an excursion that would take you there, leave you for about 5 hours, then take you back to the ship.  Saigon is a very walkable city with very friendly and helpful people, a large percentage of whom speak English, so that is what we decided to do.  It helps that we had been here twice before:  the first visit we went on a tour of the major sights ( https://baderjournal.com/2016/04/16/phu-my-vietnam-ho-chi-minh-city/ ) and we spent the second visit walking around the city on our own as we would do today ( https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/27/ho-chi-minh-city-saigon-vietnam/ ).  Because of the long drive our bus left pretty early in the morning.

     The bus dropped us off at the Bitexco Financial Tower, the second tallest building in Saigon, which has a well known observation deck on one of its upper stories.  This was also the place where we would meet the bus for the return journey, but in between we were on our own.  We walked up toward the heart of town passing, among other things, a vendor lounging comfortably on his cart.

     We stopped to visit the Hồ Chí Minh City General Sciences Library.  Built on the site that had held a somewhat notorious prison since 1865, this library opened near the end of 1971 as the National Library (in South Vietnam).  It was renamed the General Sciences Library 1976, shortly after reunification of North and South Vietnam.  The building has a white facade with an abstract design and looks very much a mid-century style.  It is surrounded by a narrow moat and a nice park where people were eating or reading.

     Inside the first floor (we couldn’t go up the stairs) the library had a bright and open design.

     We wandered on, generally in the direction of the Ben Thanh market, a large single story building housing many individual vendors (Mary bought a hat there last time).  On our last visit we had been impressed by the silk embroidery for sale in a shop not far from this market and we were hoping to find it again.  There had been a lot of construction in this area when we were here before and we weren’t certain we could find the shop, whose name we had not written down, particularly since it was not large on the outside.  But to our surprise it was just where we thought we remembered it, a narrow unimposing building in a long block of commercial stores.

     Just two weeks earlier, in Suzhou, China, we had visited an institute where we watched silk embroiderers at work.  https://baderjournal.com/2024/08/26/shanghai-china-day-2-suzhou-2024/  It is very painstaking work using silk threads that are so thin as to be barely visible and the production of a midsize embroidery can take many months.  We spent a good deal of time exploring this shop in Saigon, which had three stories full of framed silk embroideries in a large variety of shapes, sizes and designs.  One of the shop ladies was working on an embroidery in the front of the shop during our visit.  While all of these works were beautiful, we were particularly taken with the two sided embroideries, stitched on a sheer see through (silk?) canvas that could be viewed from both sides.  Most of these were mounted in carved wood framed screens.

     Well, those screens were way above our budget (and were far too big to bring home on a ship).  But we did find a smaller embroidery framed as a wall hanging that we could afford.  And they threw in the frame, which we really liked, for just another $20 or so.  We waited for what seemed a long time for them to package it (extremely well), and they made a carrying handle on one side out of ribbon.  It turned out to be rather heavy and unwieldy but Rick managed to carry it all the way around town and back to the bus.  And his arm didn’t even fall off.

     We walked quite a way back to the center of town and saw several landmarks we had visited before.  We saw the old presidential palace (now a museum) in the distance as we crossed a street in front of its park.  The facade and towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, built by the French, were covered in construction scaffolding, apparently getting a renovation.  Across the street was the General Post Office, which was so full of visitors we only stayed briefly.  The portrait in the distance in the post office is Ho Chi Minh.

     We had lunch on the next block in a small Banh Mi restaurant.  Banh Mi refers to a small baguette sliced lengthwise and filled with meat and other ingredients to make a very tasty sandwich.  This tiny restaurant looks bigger in the pictures because the walls were lined with mirrors.  If you look very closely in the middle of the second picture you may see the photographer reflected in the far mirror.

     Outside the post office were a number of vendors selling souvenirs.  One inexpensive type of souvenir that we had seen here, but nowhere else, before is a card that opens up like a child’s pop-up book to show a fold-up cardboard structure.  Some are Vietnamese landmarks, some are flowers, some are dragons, etc.  We had looked at these before lunch and had told the vendor we would be back after lunch.  I doubt she believed us, but she looked happy when we showed up again.  We bought several of these cards, among them the Dragon Bridge in Da Nang (but the wrong color), the Ben Thanh market, the Japanese Bridge in Hoi An and a dragon boat.  Each of these folds completely flat when you close the card, but stands up on its own when you leave the card open.

     It was time to start the long walk back to the Bitexco Tower to meet the bus.  We walked over to the Hotel de Ville, built by the French in 1908 as the city hall and now housing the People’s Committee that governs Saigon.  A statue of Ho Chi Minh stands in the park in front of the building.

     We walked down this park to where we would meet the bus.  The park was decked out in festive attire, with a colorful sign welcoming people to Saigon for the Spring (if we understood correctly).  As we neared the Bitexco Tower we passed streets jammed with motorcycles, a common sight in this area of the world.

     We got back to the meeting place with time to spare, so we sat for a while in a cafe in the lobby of the Tower and had a snack and a drink (much needed after the long walk in the hot weather).  After the long ride back to the ship (somewhat marred by the bus driver’s piping his favorite radio music through the bus PA system) we sailed away from Vietnam around dinner time.