Uncle Ho v. Uncle Sam

Hello, friends!

The past couple days have flown by, and I've suddenly found myself in the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. But, I'll get to that some other time. First: HCM City.

We stumbled off the bus at 7am, bleary-eyed and barely awake, searching all over for a place to stay. The streets were chaos, completely overrun with tuk-tuks and motorbikes and people and their food stalls spilling out from every nook and cranny of the sidewalk. It was already unbelieveably hot, and we seemed to look at  one dodgy hotel after another in our search. After trying about 5 or 6 different places, we finally found a place to sleep that seemed reasonably comfortable and fairly priced and ended our hour long search, pretty soaked and glad to ditch our bags. (The highlight of our search was that we stumbled upon a restaurant that sold real, homemade cookies and bagels ... a breakfast sent from heaven! Literally. We found out later that the place was actually a Christian NGO that gets kids off the streets and into a safe place where they can gain work experience. More on this topic later, I hope?)

Because of time constraints (there always is when you're doing an entire region of the world in 2 months), we had to hustle to see of much of the city as we could in one day. We took an unbelieveably cheap "cyclo" ride (a man biking, pushing both Jones and I for about 15 minutes through insane traffic and heat ... we felt awful that we had negotiated the price down as much as we did once we realized how far it was!) Our first stop was the highly memorable war Rements Museum, formerly known as the "American War Crimes Museum." This alone should give you a pretty good idea of what you found inside. There were heart-breaking pictures of napalm victims and those who suffured the after-effects of Agent Orange, of bombed villages and mothers escaping the battle with their children. It made you feel sick inside, like you didn't want to believe that people have had to undergo such horrors in their lives.

Our next stop (after Gloria Jean's Coffee - what? Gloria Jean's Coffee, my old place of employment at Mayfair Mall, has a branch in HCMC?!) was the Reunification Palace. I know that North Vietnam broke though the gate, which pretty much signaled the end of the war; other than that, I couldn't tell you much, as it was the lamest museum I've ever been to (no plaques, no information, nothing - just a lot of gross 70's era furniture) and I didn't learn anything. The fun thing about it was that we saw three guys at the entrance, including one wearing a Badger hat and one wearing Gator athletic shorts. They were indeed WI and FL alum (the D1 schools of my family - sorry Kristen, no LAX grads ...) and we ended up getting along famously and spending the rest of the day with them.

What I will carry with me from the Reunification Palace was the documentary they showed, giving a brief history of the Vietnam War. Yet again, we witnessed the loaded and provokative language used to describe those pesky "American imperialists." This was taken a step further at our day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels the next day. It took a long time to get there (we visited the Caodai temples first - a very strange religion where both Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-Sen hold the third revelation of God to man, the first two being from Moses and Jesus. Hm ... ) but once we arrived we watched yet another documentary that informed us how the Americans came in to Vietnam with the intent of 1) Slaughtering women and children 2) Bombing Hanoi back into the Stone Age and 3) Subjecting South Vietnam to their imperialist regime. It's true that all these things might have happened in some way or another, and to say that this is a tragedy would be a cruel understatement. But to say that it was the intent? Meanwhile, the video depicted the valor of the Viet Cong "martyrs," and told stories about soldiers who recieved awards for "killing the most American enemies." Now, I've heard of the American government awarding its soliders medals for honor or bravery, but never for killing the most people.

Then we saw the tunnels that were used by the VC as hideouts, and also some of the weapons that they used in their guerilla warfare. They were homespun, ingenious, and horrific. Certainly no one's going to say that Agent Orange was a good idea, but is creating a device that will send another person flying down into a jungle pit to be impaled by bamboo spikes any less brutal? How can you condemn someone else's brutality in one breath and applaude your own in the next? It made me so sad to think that these are the videos that are being shown to the world, shown to all the foreign tourists about all the terrible things that evil old America did. We get enough bad press already. Do we really need sensationalized, even blatantly untrue propoganda against us as well? It was troublesome indeed and left me pretty agitated.

But now I've left Vietnam behind me. Truthfully, I'm glad to be gone. While there were places that I liked a lot, there were no places that I loved. While we came across really friendly people, there were a lot of people who didn't treat us very well (shocking, given the information they recieve about Americans ...). I don't believe that you could get a truly fair and representative picture of a place if you're only there a couple weeks, but you can get a good feel. And, I've been to lots of places that I've gotten a better "feel" from in the same amount of time. (China, Palestine, and Nepal, most notably.) I'm eager to see how the next leg of the trip, Cambodia, works out! I'm feeling optimistic!