First Day Recap

(9:30 PM Vietnam) Just returned from dinner. I feel like there is so much to cover from today...

Our tour the city began by bus. We drove by a beautiful park, Reunification Palace, and down beautiful boulevards until we reached the Plaza with Notre Dame Cathedral and the post office. This is the wedding season in Saigon because it's not nearly as hot and uncomfortable. We saw probably three different wedding parties taking wedding photos in the Plaza.

Even though this is the most comfortable season in Saigon, it was still very hot and very muggy. It has the same sauna feel that you get in Louisiana or Houston in the summer after it's been raining. Very heavy air, very moist, very damp. Makes me wonder just how unbearable it must be during the rainy season in the summer. It also makes you appreciate what must've felt like before air-conditioning. Most of the places we visited either didn't have air conditioning or they didn't run it very much. It wasn't uncomfortable, but I can see how if it was a little hotter and you didn't have many options for a reprieve, it would get tiresome very quickly.

From the Plaza we walked to the opera house. The cathedral, the post office, the opera house, and even the thoroughfare that we walked were part of the French's colonization efforts. It was a very European feel and look to the buildings.

Along this walk, however, you can see where modernization was pushing aside some of this history. A very large shopping mall stood halfway between the post office and the opera house. Numerous buildings were being demolished to make room for even more new development.

After this walking tour, we returned to our bus and went to lunch. The meals have been large, banquet-type arrangements where large platters of food are brought to the table and we all share. Also, because drinking water that isn't bottled is discouraged, beer has been a preferred beverage. The price is surprisingly low. For example, a bottle of Heineken costs somewhere between one and two dollars. They also have delicious fresh fruit smoothies. Because mango is in season, that is what I elected to have. The food is very good, with a lot of fresh herbs.

From there, we went to the War Memorial Building. There were exhibits from photojournalists who covered the Vietnam War (referred to as the American war in Vietnam). There was a large exhibit on the impact of agent orange, and a large display of war atrocities. It was a little weird going into the gift shop, where you could buy souvenir Communist Army hats and other paraphernalia from the North Vietnam Army. Many of the exhibits were from the perspective of the North Vietnamese, so it certainly wasn't objective. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the impact to Vietnam. US casualties in Vietnam were 58,000. Vietnamese casualties were approximately 3,000,000, two thirds of whom might be classified as civilians. As bad as the consequences of the war were to the US, it pales in comparison to the impact on this country.

Just a note: in looking through the war correspondents photos of US troops, I was struck by how few African-Americans were represented in the photos. I've always assumed that there were a lot of African-Americans who were sent to Vietnam, but that was not reflected in these photos. I could count on both hands the total number of African-Americans that I saw among all the photos. I'm not sure if the photojournalists were assigned to predominantly white platoons, or if the bias of either the photographer or the news organizations that they work for lead them to focus primarily on the white soldiers, but I do not believe that the ratio of whites to blacks represented in these photos was accurate.