June 11th, 2023. Saigon, Vietnam.
Day 2 of the Southeast Asian Expedition.
The taxi was arriving. The sun began to set (although we couldn’t see it since it was a cloudy day) as we drove through the busy streets of Saigon. There were so many people outside riding on motorbikes that I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire population of the city was riding on motorbikes. It was chaotic and crowded— motorbikes were zipping in and out of sight as cars tried to navigate through the endless labyrinths of alleyways in the city. How people can go more than twenty meters in this place without a car crash I have no idea.
By the time we reached the restaurant, the rain’s ferocity had reached a new level. I have to admit, the stereotype about rain in Southeast Asia is true. Maybe the Internet distorts a lot of things, but this isn’t one of them. We ended up eating dinner with most of our family on my mom’s side. This included Koia (Who you may remember as the anime fan from Part 1) and a short old woman everyone called Granny Bay. On top of those two were Koia’s father, our grandparents on my mom’s side, my parents, and of course, me and Casey (Mia is in her senior year at high school and is very busy so she couldn’t make it).
After dinner we said goodbye to Koia. The next time we saw her would be in Hanoi in the Northern Part of Vietnam.
The rain had stopped by the end of dinner and we then headed to an apartment building a few miles away. We were here to visit even more relatives (The majority of our relatives live in Saigon) who lived in a room several hundred feet in the air. They were old people on my mom’s side of the family. They had a balcony, and outside I saw the shining lights of Saigon coming from the buildings miles away.
Anyway, the adults just started talking about who-knows-what, and after I briefly got a few minutes to show off my piano skills to them by playing Rondo Alla Turca, I got bored. Casey was quite sleepy so they gave him a room to rest in and I didn’t feel like sitting in there with the adults so I went into the room and watched YouTube on my phone while I waited for the conversation to finish. After waiting for about half an hour, we left the apartment and began to head back to the car. As we were getting in, I saw this really cool tower in the distance which I took a picture of.
It was a great first day in Saigon and Southeast Asia, with twenty-four more to come. It was the first day after landing, so we decided we’d need a good rest to prepare for the weeks ahead. We went to bed at around 10 or 11 PM. It took an extra hour for me to even fall asleep by that point because I was so excited. I was in Vietnam, a country on the other side of the world! Why shouldn’t I be hopping out of my seat? I did fall asleep eventually out of boredom, but in the back of my mind, I could still feel the excitement… the surrealness…
Zzz…
Due (again) to my excitement, I woke up at 4 AM. The room was completely dark… except for a light that was coming from the outside. Part of the wall was made of glass, and light was shining through from the other rooms of the house. Someone else was awake… maybe they were excited too. I stood up and walked towards the door. Most of the family was awake. Casey was up, Mom was up, my grandparents were up. For the next couple of hours, I was mostly idle, just sitting on my phone or reading. Today was supposed to be a day of mostly talking to friends or family. I had pestered my mom and dad over the past day about visiting some landmarks but they weren’t listening because they had their own plans.
At about 7, my dad got up and left the house. He went down to a nearby cafe called Cafe Dalat to meet with some of his friends. My mom went too, and it was just me and Casey left. Casey had insisted that my dad left his phone at home so he could use it and he spent most of the morning on YouTube Shorts. We had also brought Kindles with us, so I read some books in the meantime. An hour later, I had gotten impatient with Mom and Dad (I really wanted to visit some attractions) so I walked down to Cafe Dalat to check on their progress.
They were still talking. These were Dad’s close friends, so I knew they’d probably be together for most of the day. As I continued to bother Mom, one of Dad’s friends downloaded an app on my phone called Grab. It’s a really popular app in Vietnam and through it, you can get taxis or food delivered to you. It would be one of the most important parts of the trip.
Finally, Mom and Dad just couldn’t take my yapping anymore so they agreed to let me explore a bit. It was decided that while Dad hung out with his old friends, Mom would take me and Casey around the city. After some preparations back at home base, we ordered a taxi on Grab and waited for it to come. After it arrived, we took a drive around the city and headed towards our first stop, the Reunification Palace.
Yeah, you heard me right. I’m talking about the Palace where the Vietnam War ended. It’s an iconic building in Saigon and a symbol of the ending of the most well-known part of Vietnamese History.
For those of you who don’t know, Vietnam was one of the largest battlegrounds of the Cold War, an era of political tension between two blocs – the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and the capitalist bloc led by America. Both sides competed for influence around the world and came dangerously close to war in many instances. After kicking out its French colonizers in the 1950s, Vietnam became independent and was divided into two states. The Northern part of Vietnam was filled with communists and became a communist state, while the South ended up being a capitalist state. Throughout the 50s and the 60s, the North and South fought ferociously. America and South Korea both fought to defend South Vietnam but a string of humiliating defeats followed up by the fact the war was unpopular back home meant that they eventually had to withdraw. By the 70s, South Vietnam was on its own, and by April 1975, the North had overrun the South. Many consider the end of the war to be the moment that a tank rolled into this palace. We were about to enter it…
Took this right as our taxi pulled into the area
“Wait, let’s get lunch first.” My mom said as we got out of the taxi. I didn’t protest too hard since I had a small breakfast and was eager to try out some of the street food. We went into a building filled with stalls selling lots of different foods… they had all these different foods and it was hard to decide but I eventually settled on a broken rice dish with meat. Oh, yeah, and right as we started to eat my dad decided to turn up with one of his friends, and they ate with us.
After lunch, it was time to explore the palace. Oh, first we used the restroom which had some… interesting art inside of it.
Now it’s time to explore. We bought the ticket and walked through the gates. Immediately in the front, I saw a replica of the tank that broke through the gates in 1975. The inside of the palace was a really interesting building.
There were so many different rooms with their historical aspects intact. They had everything— a theater, a dining room, a bedroom…
And on the upper floors, we saw the helicopter launch pad. You might remember the launch pad as the one the Americans left during the fall of Saigon. And there’s also the view. You could see for miles… if other buildings weren’t blocking your view. We also bought two pairs of headphones, one for me and one for my brother. These headphones were attached to an MP3 player which played certain tapes depending on where in the palace you were. For every room you entered, you could simply press that MP3 file on the player, and it would fill your ears with stories about the room and its significance in history. It’s more than you’d expect, and even the less exciting rooms had their own stories, particularly stories about the war.
After an hour or so of roaming around each floor of the palace, we went back down and returned the MP3 player and headphones. I had created a file of all the places in Saigon I found on TripAdvisor that we could visit, and we were about to see two more of them. Immediately to the front of the palace, there was a large park in front of the palace filled with trees and motorbikes. We walked down the park towards our next location, which was less than a mile away. A man who was selling coconut juice just outside the palace got our attention and as we walked through the park in the afternoon day, the taste of coconut juice gave us some extra pleasures.
Our second stop of the day was the Norte Dame Cathedral of Saigon. When you hear the term Notre Dame the first things to come to your mind are likely the French city of Paris and the burning of the Notre Dame a few years back. Unsurprisingly, the Saigon version of Norte Dame does look very similar to the one in Paris, except it gives off a more red color than the Paris version, which after doing research I found it was white. I’m very sure the inside of the cathedral would be interesting to look at, but bad luck decided to strike at that moment. It turns out that Saigon Norte Dame Cathedral is up for repairs and it’s been like that for years. I read that the cathedral’s repairs aren’t expected to finish for a few years, but at least I got to enjoy seeing one side of the building!
We didn’t have to walk too far to get to our third stop of the day. Right next to the Notre Dame Cathedral was the well-known Saigon post office. The doors were wide open for citizens and tourists alike. This building does function as a post office but it’s also become a major tourist attraction. Inside the building, people do their actual business and in the back, there is a massive picture of the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh who led the communist North during the war.
I am sure I would have gone into the post office had I still had the strength but for some reason I had gotten tired. It was only about 3 PM, but exhaustion had started to catch up to me. I have a notoriously weak body that cannot stay up when it’s pushed around so much, so going halfway across the world to a harsh environment like this is a recipe for collapse. The rest of my family was feeling the same so we decided to calm down and recover at our grandparents’ house. We had plans to visit even more relatives (Seriously, how do we keep all these people in order?) and so we used Grab to take us back home.
After a quiet and monotonous car ride back home, we spent the remainder of the afternoon relaxing. I can’t remember exactly what we did, but I’d guess I was playing video games on my phone or reading books. I lost track of time throughout all of that so when the time came to visit relatives it was already nightfall. We began to ride out to the relative’s house through Grab once again.
We ate our dinner at the relative’s house. It was mostly old people once again (Who are from my dad’s side of the family) who lived in a fairly big and spacious house. They also owned a dog that was small, black, and quiet— it mostly just minded its own business while I was there.
Once again, visiting relatives was pretty boring so I just ate and then eventually went off to sit on my phone again. Time passed very slowly, but after waiting for the conversations to end, we finally left and began to head back home.
By this point, the quick transition from America to Vietnam was starting to take a bit of a toll on me. I was starting to cough and felt tired more easily. But my excitement remained because tomorrow we were changing cities… a new destination was approaching. We were about to visit the province of Long An.