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.