HCMC Tour, continued

The second major location of my Ho Chi Minh tour was the Reunification Palace, also known as Independence Palace. There was no information available, that I could tell, about this place, so I just walked around and didn't learn any history. I totally wish I could live in a palace, though.



I was lucky to get this shot of the fountain on the front lawn, because the next time I looked out there, it was off:



Some sort of bangquet room:

Some sort of meeting room:

Some sort of parlor:

Some sort of courtyard garden:

With pond:

Library (I leaned over the ropes to check out some of the books on shelves out of the frame, and there are English language books in there, too):

View from the roof, I think five floors up:

The roof:

The side of the palace:

The kitchen:

The basement was a maze of hallways like this:

With rooms full of old school typewriters:

And old school radios:

Between stops I took some photos of the traffic, mostly motor scooters:

We rode by the Notre Dame Basilica, but didn't go in:

That's the Basilica on the right there:

There was a wedding going on outside, but this was the best shot I could get of the bride and groom, being prepped:

Some better shots of the Basilica:

S

The main post office for the city is right across the street, and is considered another one of the major examples of Ho Chi Minh's amazing architecture:

After riding by those, we went to a lacquerware gallery, which I didn't expect. Here is a picture of the workshop:

This is an expository board, showing the different processes and steps the pieces go through:

I didn't take any photos in the gallery, because I thought that would be unwelcome. There was some pretty cool stuff in there. A lot of it was quite expensive, but there were some pieces that were affordable. I thought about buying something, but I didn't find anything in my price range that I liked enough to spend money on and go through the trouble of packing and bringing home. So no Vietnamese lacquerware for me (or you).

Here's another traffic shot:

This is video of the traffic. It doesn't really show how bad it could get over there. It was so bad my mom kept thinking she was going to get killed. Maybe Amber, too. There were almost no pedestrian lights, or even traffic lights, so you just had to step out and play Frogger, and hope they wouldn't hit you. This does show the ratio of scooters versus cars, though, which is ridiculous:

So that was my Ho Chi Minh City tour. I got to eat frog for lunch, which tastes just like chicken, of course, and it extremely difficult to eat with chopsticks. They gave me a fork, but I'm always too proud to use the fork when I'm in a chopsticks country, or any non-fork country. A word to anyone considering this kind of tour: always negotiate price beforehand, and if the driver give a specific timeframe, negotiate what the price would be to go beyond that, if it's less than like eight or ten hours. If you agree to a specific amount of time, watch the clock. The driver will keep going if you don't stop him, and then will try to charge you serious amounts of money for going over.

Anniversary

It was one year ago today that I arrived in Korea. It's gone by pretty fast, and I've done a lot. I feel busy all the time, even though that's not necessarily true. I guess that's just life. Lately I haven't been traveling around the country as I once did, since all the people I used to know in other cities have returned to the US, and I haven't made a cycle of new friends yet. I'll start getting around more soon, starting next weekend, the lunar New Year holiday, when I have a four-day weekend.

I just gave you a progress report a few weeks ago, so I won't talk too much about how I'm doing. I have been feeling a bit down the last couple weeks, though, and missing home. I have been doing a lot of planning and considering for my return home, and have been trying to decide on a plan for beyond that, as well. I've noticed that my low periods here have come about every four months. This one seems complicated by the fact that I COULD have been going home next week, but chose to extend, mostly for reasons of wanting to continue paying off my students loans more rapidly than I could in the States. Although I don't regret extending my contract, I could totally go home about now.

At work, though, everything is going pretty well. I have a pretty good routine going now, where it doesn't take me as long to plan my lessons, and I stopped taking homework home to correct months ago. Now I can get it all done during my breaks. I have a good relationship with most of my students, too. Some of them have been asking when I'm going home, because their parents have kept track, and realize my contract is up. I always ask them if they're asking because they want me to go home, and all but one of them have said no. They seem to really like me, judging by all the gifts I get on gift-giving holidays, and just the way they act with me. Even the kids who were transferred to other classes still always say hi to me when they see me. It's good.

I get the feeling my homesickness will pass pretty quickly. I used to do a lot of ten-hour days at one of my jobs in LA, and I found that I would dread the extra two hours all day, but then once I hit the eight-hour mark, that extra time was pretty easy to sail through. I think that's just what's happening now. Now that I've done my one year, doing the extra five months won't be so bad. Also, knowing your end date at a job just makes you kind of go out to lunch, and I guess that's playing a part here. It's going to be a long lunch, so I hope time continues to fly like it has been.

Moving on, I saw Yes Man with Jim Carrey today with Leon. Something funny happened. Here's a copy of the email I sent to the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where I took Korean language lessons before I came here:

"Hey, I hope I'm not clogging up your email, but I wanted to share an experience with you that I thought was cool. I attended the Korean language program in 2007 for two full quarters and 7 classes of a third before I came to Ulsan, South Korea to teach English. Today is actually my one year anniversary here, and I extended my contract until June.

Anyway, I see a lot of movies here, and I saw a preview for Yes Man a couple months ago. In the trailer, there is a scene of Jim Carrey in a Korean language class, and I said to my friend, hey, I think that''s my Korean teacher from LA. But then I thought, no, that's just wishful thinking. It couldn't be.But then I saw the movie today, and again, I said to my friend, I swear that's my Korean teacher. He joked I was racist and think all Koreans look alike. It has been over a year since I've been to KCCLA, so I really couldn't remember what John Song looks like, and thought maybe I was just projecting. But lo and behold, there in the credits, John H. Song. Awesome!

Seeing Yes Man in Korea was fantastic, by the way. The scenes in Korean were really well taken by the audience, and the fact that I could understand some of the dialogue and the cultural references, and enjoy it with that same culture, made it so much funnier. I also got to amuse/confuse the rest of the audience, as there were several moments where I was shrieking with laughter... and no one else was. That's my favorite part about seeing American movies here.

I thought I'd share that with you all over there, and congratulations to John Song for the screen credit. Nice work."

Now that I think of it, I should have written "conglatulations" instead. Damn it. I hate it when Korean jokes go untold.

Ho Chi Minh City Tour

Well, my sister hasn't gotten me the pictures from Vung Tau yet, so in the meantime, I'll tell you what I did when I got back to Ho Chi Minh from there. We had to take the 6am hydrofoil so my mother and sister could catch their flight to the Con Dao Archipelago, so when I took a taxi at 7:30 to the hotel, I knew I wouldn't be able to check in right away. I figured they'd let me leave my bag in the lobby, though, so I could do whatever in the city. When I got to my Liberty 3 Hotel, I ended up getting upgraded to another Liberty Hotel, number 4, I think, a block away. Apparently the previous occupant of my room had a flight delay, and the rest of the hotel was booked. So I dropped my bag off and went to have breakfast and another amazing Vietnam coffee.



As I left the restaurant, a man on a cyclo convinced me to go on a city tour. A cyclo is a big tricycle with a seat in the front for one tourist, and the driver sits on a raised trike seat in the back. It's pretty funy. He took me to see so many things I can't fit them all in one entry. We started with the War Remnants Museum. I took a bunch of photos:

These are drawings of postwar peace and acceptance made by local children:

There was a display of sculptures regarding the Vietnam War:

There was a small building devoted to the Tiger Cages in the war, where "difficult" prisoners were taken to be tortured and interrogated. This is a model of one:

The guillotine in the Tiger Cage building:

The museum was kind of a rough start to the tour, but good to see. I felt pretty guilty.

Another stop on the tour was this pagoda. It was very dark, and there was a lot of incense. There were also turtles in a little pond outside. That's pretty much all I have to say about that:

I'll do the rest of the tour tomorrow.