Family Vacation to Vietnam

From Mui Ne to Saigon it was only about a four-hour train ride, and we took a midday train. Robert and Samantha picked up some sticky rice with pork and chicken legs, and we always had more of those "Crab Me" crab crackers. This train, too, was nearly sold out when I finally figured out how to buy our tickets, so we were in the regular air conditioned seats, not the super fancy ones. Effectively, this was a Chinatown bus in the US, whereas the fancy seats were business class on the Acela. It worked--it got us to Saigon, and since the ride was relatively short, no one needed to use the bathrooms.

Marcus mostly read on the train, but Samantha amused herself with drawing, both in a learn-to-draw book Sarah and Sean had gotten her, and on paper. I'd bought her a family of koalas to bring along on the trip and she played with them everywhere we went, even now drawing an apartment floorplan for them on a piece of paper and talking Robert through endless permutations of which koala went into which room.

When we got off the train in Saigon, Robert observed some people getting off the train carrying motorcycle helmets. "Hey, look," he said, "They brought their helmets, even though they couldn't bring their..." Here his voice trailed off. From the very next car, people were riding motorcycles out and onto the platform, and then down a ramp and across the tracks into the front of the station.

We stayed at the Palace Hotel, right on one of the main walking streets, Nguyen Hue, which only opened as a pedestrian mall last year. There were scores of people ambling around finding Pokemon, and others snapping selfies and enjoying the color-changing lights in the trees and the random fountains that spurted out of colorful lights on the street, almost surprising us with a drenching. We walked out for dinner toward the Vincom Center, a very large mall.

We found a Japanese cat-brand clothing store in the mall, just as we'd seen in the Lotte Center in Hanoi, and we finally broke down and bought Samantha a dress with some of the adorable cats on it. We also found a supermarket where we could buy diapers and wipes--in hindsight, we would have had exactly enough diapers to make it home without buying more, and just a couple extra wipes, but those are not things one really wants to run short of, so buying more with two days left seemed like a smart idea. The wipes came packaged with a box of handwipes, free, and the diapers came packaged with a surprisingly large cat-head-shaped pillow, but apparently we can't even read pictures, because we accidentally bought a pack of pull-ups. Still, they worked for the next day, and then we used our regular diapers for the flight home.

Dinner was at an all-you-can-eat Korean-style barbeque in the basement of the mall, just after we'd seen a dancing parade of eight giant Vincom bunnies perform a little show near the coffee shop. Samantha, of course, was enchanted, and kept pressing up against the bunnies, who largely ignored her and continued with their dance.

 

The next day was our last day in Vietnam, our last full day before we traveled, and we tried to pack in as much as we could. We started the day by meeting two students from the Saigon Free Walking Tours, and going with them to a number of different sites. We really enjoyed talking to the students, and to all the tour guides we'd encountered on our trip. It was very interesting how utterly convinced they all were of their modernity, their lack of ties to tradition ("Look, I dye my hair," one guide had told us. "I am not a traditional Vietnamese girl! My hair is red and only to my shoulders! And I wear jeans!"), and their committment to and fitness for the modern world. For instance, they all majored in business administration or tourism, not that I have any idea really what one learns in either of those course. "Does anyone major in, say, literature, or history?" I asked. "Not many," I was told, but clearly there's no reason why someone couldn't be a perfectly good tour guide with a degree in literature or history, as well as--if not better than--with a degree in tourism! Nobody we met seemed to agree with us, though, on that. On the other hand, though, most of the students and recent graduates were still very clearly products of their culture and were unable to see beyond that--with the exception of our motorcycle guide, who had once spent a few days in Korea, none had ever been out of the country, and all still imagined a future of getting married, having a child or two, living with their parents (or in-laws, if they were women), and having their sons take care of them when they were old. "You know, the world might be really different in forty years," Robert warned. "Your son might not be staying right here taking care of you by then!"

First our guides took us to the Cau Dai temple, a religion created in Vietnam in the 1920s. Our guides, as well as a number of things I'd read online, all seem very proud of that. The temple includes depictions of all the Vietnamese sacred animals, plus cranes, and Samantha loved spotting her turtles (hint--they're often underneath the feet of a crane). There were separate staircases for women and men, and also, surprisingly, a portrait of Victor Hugo.

From there we took an Uber that was memorable because it had tray tables in the back seat, like on an airplane. Samantha was pretty pleased with this. We headed over to a Cambodian market in a heavily Cambodian area, with a short detour to a pet shop first for some window shopping.

At the market we had sticky rice (Samantha loved it), Cambodian squash soup (Robert didn't love it), and ice cream, coconut and passionfruit for Marcus, chocolate and coffee for Samantha, and kiwi topped with sweetened condensed milk and peanuts for Robert and me (we all loved it). This was also where we bought Samantha's straw broom, right next to the ice cream stand.

We headed back to the hotel, Robert not feeling very well at this point, and Samantha and I went out for lunch. I ordered shrimp pancakes at a bun place because it sounded reliable, but I wasn't expecting a pile of shoe-string fries knitted together with batter into a pancake, topped with crispy shrimp in their shells. Samantha ate a lot of the fries, and we brought some of the pancake and some shrimp home to Robert and Marcus. We also stopped at a smoothie place for a passionfruit smoothie and a nuoc chan.

When everyone felt well enough to venture out again, we went to Ben Thanh Market to get some dried coconut for Marcus and Vietnamese silk pajamas for Samantha and Helen. On the far side of Ben Thanh, we walked to Tao Dan Park. I'm not sure it's completely obvious in these pictures, but here there were even more people playing Pokemon Go than on the street by our hotel--sitting, standing, milling about: everyone was staring at their phones catching Pokemon.

The kids enjoyed the playground, and then we watched some folks playing a version of badminton where you kick the birdie over the net. Then we headed to dinner at Bahn Khot Co Ba Vung Tau, a place which specialized in pancakes. We had my favorite bahn xeo, and then we had smaller versions of them called bahn khot, and even smaller versions of them as well. Samantha was on a meat kick that night, and she ate two full plates of Vietnamese grilled pork (which was quite a challenge to get, because it wasn't actually on the menu on its own--we kept having to order a bun dish and then say "No noodles! Just meat!"), but we loved the pancakes.

The next morning we left bright and early for the airport, for an 8:00 flight. They wouldn't let us carry Samantha's straw broom on ("Weapon, weapon!" we were told), but they wrapped it up and miraculously there it was in Logan, leaning against a piller in the baggage claim area. Marcus was pretty fascinated by the fact that our second flight left Narita at 6:10 p.m., and we landed in Boston at... 6:10 p.m. We had smooth flights, including a nice stint in the Japan Air lounge in Narita (since we were Economy Plus on one leg, we were eligible), and then a fun time going through customs and having our pictures taken for entry (Helen looks like she's in the Wall Street Journal here).

What a good trip, even with the periodic sickness! The baby stayed well, and everyone had a really great and memorable time. I'm not sure where our next trip will be, but Robert requests somewhere where it's not almost a hundred degrees.

 

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Created: 9/3/16. Last Modified: 9/3/16.