Ho Chi Minh day 2

Today we went on a walking tour to get a bit of history about the city and our bearings. Ho Chi Minh was the capital of Vietnam during French occupation (1862–1954), and capital of the south of Vietnam when the north and south were divided. After the US left the country in 1975, the north and south unified and Hanoi became the capital.
Most of the big impressive buildings looked very European, as they were built by the French, including an opera house, post office and city hall. Unfortunately the cathedral, coined the Notre Dame of Saigon (original name of Ho Chi Minh), was under construction, so was covered in scaffolding and barely visible.
My favourite stop was a communist coffee shop hidden down an alley on the second floor of some apartments, next to the old American embassy building. This is where a famous event called the Tet offensive attack occured in 1964. Viet Cong was the communist front in Vietnam during the cold war, they blew up a parked car outside the embassy killing over 20 people, including 5 American figures. This event turned the opinion of a lot of the public, especially the American population to support the war in Vietnam. One of the American government's main driving forces for invading Vietnam was the fear of communism spreading to the US, so wasn't really a justification to start a war.
In the afternoon we visited a building called the apartment of cafes, which as it sounds, was a 9 story apartment block filled with mainly cafes, and a few cute shops.
In the evening we caught the ferry across the river and got a pretty spectacular view of the city at sunset and then lit up at night. We had to cross an insanely busy road to get to the ferry dock. From the other side of the road, we watched this middle aged Vietnamese lady cross, with her hand the air signalling for cars to stop, and the motorbikes drove around her. As we watched in disbelief, she crossed, looked at us with pity then grabbed my hand. I held Kath's, then this lovely lady guided us across this 6 lane hectic main road in a breeze, then she toddled off and crossed herself again! She was an absolute hero and didn't even speak a word to us!
We passed a lot of the walking tour sites we saw in the day, in the evening, and they looked a lot more impressive lit up, with the night sky behind them. We grabbed dinner and beers at a food market, then stopped off at a pub on the way home, but could only manage one more beer as we were both so full!Baca selengkapnya