After the rain

I had a very lazy morning as I was feeling a bit fragile after yesterday’s drinking! When I eventually left the hotel, I walked through the new park (I say new but it’s probably been there for years!) and went to look at the new underground shopping centre at one end of the park. There weren’t many shops but there was a large food court full of different stalls and it was packed with local people eating lunch. I decided to join them.

I think that’s one of the biggest changes I’ve noticed. There’s now a large middle class with money to spend on eating out at moderately expensive restaurants and cafes. Street stalls are still very popular but there are lots of expensive cafes that have lots of customers too. Young Vietnamese people have money to spend on going out with their friends, either to cafes, restaurants or bars (where they sit in groups looking at their mobile phones like everyone else in the world). When I lived here, teenagers would spend Friday and Saturday nights driving around the city on motorbikes and hanging out next to a small lake rather than going to places where they needed to spend money. There’s clearly also a lot of very rich people too. There are lots of very expensive cars (and tax is something crazy like 200% to import a car), and someone must be shopping in all the designer shops, it’s definitely not all tourists.

But it’s not all riches. If you look round the edges of the wealth, the remaining poverty is clear. Elderly people collecting rubbish to recycle, disabled people begging, people in threadbare clothes selling various things. Although I do think the level has reduced though (or people have been moved to other areas in the city). I haven’t seen children living on the streets this time and the numbers of children working selling stuff in the tourist area has definitely dropped; I’ve only seen one girl. I keep looking at the faces of the women who go around selling souvenirs to tourists to see if I recognise any of them as the children who sold postcards, books and flowers when I lived here. Most of them also went to school so hopefully they’ve got much better jobs now.

In the afternoon I went to the War Remnants Museum (originally called the ‘Museum of American War Crimes’). It’s changed too. My impression is that they’ve toned down the rhetoric a bit, but it’s still a one sided display. The most gruesome of the items they used to display have gone and the information is now presented through photographs, some of them quite graphic but many are more powerful for what you know happens immediately after the photo was taken.

There’s a collection of photos that have been put together into an exhibition by two former war correspondents. The photos are all by photographers who were killed during the war while doing their job – some American, some from other countries, some North Vietnamese and some working for the South Vietnamese. As I walked around I overheard a group of young Americans talking about how there was so much about the war that they didn’t get taught at school.


When I left the museum it was pouring rain so I went to a cafe until it stopped. I then walked over to a temple that I hadn’t been to before. (Being back here has made me realise just how small my Saigon world was when I lived here. There are so many places in the city I’ve not been to before.) By the time I got to the temple the light was really bad. It was starting to get dark and the overcast sky meant that none of my photos came out well. So here’s a shot of the traffic! It’s just after the rain stopped. The little kid in the orange raincoat made me smile.