Hello where you go?

Internet was out at the hotel for a while, so I hadn't had a chance to blog. This is my last full day in Saigon, I head out to Hoi An first thing tomorrow morning. So far, being here, I've definitely been very much a tourist. Most of my days I've spent wandering around to the various sites. The day before yesterday I spent at the various museums, the most interesting being the War Remnants Museum. It's essentially a catalog of the various atrocities committed by French, American and South Vietnamese forces during the war. It has a room devoted to the Mai Lai massacre, as well as pictures of the vast numbers of birth defects and injuries caused by the use of Agent Orange. It's all stuff that I pretty much knew before, but in this setting, you really get the sense of how impactful it is to the Vietnamese. This essentially is their equivalent of the Holocaust Museum, and although it's a little more crass, really beats you over the head, and doesn't include any mention of possible atrocities committed by their side, it's still very powerful nonetheless. Their attitude towards the Vietnam War (which they obviously call the American War) is much like ours towards WWII. While we tend to speak of the war with words of self-reflection and bitterness, they seem to have a pretty clear view, that they were the good guys, we were the bad guys, they kicked our ass, and the world is a better place because of it. Although many of the various war museums in Vietnam have an air of cheap triumphantilism, displaying the helemts of fallen GI's for instance, they have an even larger sense of reconciliation, making many mentions of former American and Vietnamese soldiers meeting after the war, as well as talking in great length about how many Americans protested against the conflict. It is comforting that the governemt is actively purporting the idea that the American people were not the enemy, and that they can even look away from the past and embrace former soldiers. I'd like to see Al Qaeda have anything close to this.

I went to the Cu Chi tunnels the next day, (many things in Vietnam are named humorously similar to English sexual terms. For instance, the Vietnamese currency is fortunately called the Dong) which were a series of tunnels built by the Viet Cong to fight the French and Americans. They stretched to about 200 km in total length, and took over a decade to build, since it was all done by hand. The site now has just a few remnants of the tunnels; the part you actually go through I found out later was a reconstruction, made bigger to facilitate larger Western tourists. Our tour guide seemed to make several jokes about fat Americans in fact; in order to stop GI's from infiltrating the tunnels, he told us, the Viet Cong made bottle-necks at various points, where the smaller Vietnamese solider could slip through, but the "American, who was fat eating cheeseburger" would get stuck. Apparently, Americans ended up using Hispanic soldiers to get through them. Who knew. They displayed various traps they used on American troops as well, most of them consisting of pit falls laden with bamboo spikes. They also showed us an old propaganda film, which chronicled the exploits of some Vietnamese peasants-turned-guerrillas, who the film diplomatically refereed to constantly as"Hero American Killers." Our tour guide, who actaully was really nice and pretty informative, talked about the Viet Cong killing American troops with an innocent-like glee, similar to a little boy excitedly telling his parents he caught a catfish.

The best part of the tour was the part where they let you fire guns. How this links to anything of historical importance, I don't know or care. It was by far their best money maker, and I'm sure I could have done for it for less in near-by Cambodia, but for about $12, I got to shoot ten rounds in AK-47, showing a large crude painting of a rabbit who's boss (or really, a large patch of hillside behind and around the painting) Any delusions of toughness were stamped out, however, by the giggling group of sixteen-year-old American girls firing an M-16 next to me. The tour also had an M-60, which I should have firedtoo, but we didn't have a whole lot of time, and there was a line.

After I got back into town, I walked around a bit, and randomly ran into that American guy I met the first day here. His name was Darren (I think) and he told me that he just moved here in February, without ever being here before, without a place to stay or a job, or anything. Just straight moved here to be somewhere different. There seems to be a lot of expats here; I met a British guy who was teaching English here for two months. Yesterday, I met a rag-tag group of friends hailing from various English speaking countries and Scotland (seriously, I could barely understand a word that guy said) Most of them were either living here or tavelling around for past couple of months or so; the one girl in the group said she had lived in Cambodia for six months, and in Mexico for a year before that. She also said that she was from Toronto, and when I mentioned that I had some friends in LA from Winnipeg, she made a disgusted face and said "Winnipeg, urgh, that's like saying they're from Idaho!" I went with them to probably the sleaziest club in Saigon, called "Apocalypse Now," which only the Scottish guy seemed to know was a reference to a movie. (The Canadian girl thought it was for "Apocalypto," greatly irking my film snob sensibilities) I heard it was great, only to see such a great concentration of Vietnamese prostitutes and middle-aged white guys, along with the occasional cougar wife who isn't gonna let her good-for-nothing-piece-of-shit-whore-chasing-husband have all the fun here. I felt uncomfortable from the get go, only heighten when, just standing there, two scantily clad Vietnamese girls (by the way, girls here generally dress very conservatively) started robitcally grinding in front of me, trying give me some kind of "sexy" look, that really came off more as eye-rolling boredom. I left early, not being drunk enough to think I could dance, being given extra motivation to leave after they started playing that "boots wit tha' furrr." song.