Noon Report:
– See yesterday

Day 2 of our Vietnam visit dawned, well, gray and gray.

We had an early excursion call so we were up and out to breakfast before heading to the StarTheatre to wait for our tour number to be called.

This morning’s adventure was the “included” tour we booked yesterday evening.
For the non-Viking people in the crowd, your Viking cruise fare includes one excursion in every port. Others are (generally) available at an extra cost but there’s always at least one freebee. For HCM City our tour is Scenic Ho Chi Minh City. As with many other included tours this was an air conditioned (yay!) bus tour with stops along the way for photos.
Yesterday we looked at some of the roadside commerce in the “industrial” part of the city. For today here are a couple of shots of roadside commerce a bit closer in.

Our first photo stop was the Independence Palace (President’s office)- or the Reunification Hall. This is where the North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates on April 30, 1975, effectively ending the Vietnam War.

Next we drove the short distance to the Notre-Dame cathedral (which is currently undergoing renovation). It was built by the French between 1863 and 1880 when Vietnam was their colony.

During October 2005, the statue was reported to have shed tears, attracting thousands of people and forcing authorities to stop traffic around the cathedral. The top clergy of the Catholic Church in Vietnam could not confirm that the statue had shed tears, but that failed to disperse the crowd flocking to the statue days after the incident.

Across the street from the Cathedral is the Main Post Office – a grand building from the French Colonial period (built between 1886 and 1891).

Looking southwest from the post office you see this building (now and as it looked on 29 April 1975).

Contrary to reports at the time, this was not the US Embassy. The apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street (called the Pittman Apartments) housed employees of the US Agency for International Development and, on the top floor, the CIA’s Deputy Chief of Station.

Our next stop was the Opera House.

While we were in the area we took the opportunity to do a little walking.

A block down we saw the Rex Hotel.

And up the street from that is city hall.

Note the Lotus blossoms. The Lotus is the national flower of Vietnam. We prefer this photo.

In the other photo of us and City Hall, some guy was photo-bombing it:

On the way back to the bus we noticed a couple posing for wedding photos. Our guide told us that it is very common to see people having wedding photos around these iconic buildings.

Our next stop was a Buddhist temple.

Our guide, a Buddhist himself, offered great insight into the practice of this ancient religion.

Following this visit we put our shoes back on and headed back to the ship where we grabbed some late lunch (but I had to eat my ice cream first because it was almost 3 pm and they were in the process of closing the Cafe). Then we headed back to the room to change for the 2nd tour of the day.

4:00 saw us getting back on the bus to the city for the evening’s activities. But first we saw…

At the market we DID find Randy a new digital watch, since his old one died with all the humidity here, and found me a short silk robe. For the rest of the scenic sights – been there, done that. Even the dinner menu was much the same (though at a different restaurant) – good though!

One of the ‘must do’ things we had heard about is the water puppet show. The puppets are controlled by rods under the water. These water puppet shows were first started by farmers celebrating in the flooded fields after the rice harvest had been brought in. The scenes show the dragons (Eastern dragons are more serpent-like and are thought to swallow water and fly with it up into the air where they shoot it out as rain to keep your crops from dying of drought-always a good idea to have dragons on your side). They showed the people planting the little rice shoots in the water and the farmers pumping water into the fields. There were also scenes of farmers madly swimming trying to catch jumping fish for their food (there was also a man fishing from a small boat and smoke was coming out of his pipe – and then out his ears). People hold dragon celebrations (including fireworks) and in the final dance, two phoenixes (representing grace, virtue, nobility and pride) get together, an egg rises to the surface of the water then hatches into a little baby phoenix and they all go swimming off stage. After the show, all the puppeteers came out to briefly bow to our amazed applause (they all looked wet so I’m sure some of their special effects meant they were swimming under the water).

Before you view this I want to apologize for the brevity of the clips (Next time I’ll bring the GoPro and film the whole thing, then edit it down.) and for the transitions between clips (I’m using new software and am still learning.). Enjoy it as best you can.

So that’s Day 2.
Would we have done it differently if we had had more complete information? Yes.
Are we sorry we spent so much time on the bus to see so much of the same sites? Maybe.
The Buddhist temple was fascinating and we learned a lot there. The water puppet show will be remembered as one of the high points of the whole cruise.

Spoiler alert. Tomorrow includes lots of time on a bus and a couple of exceptional experiences.
But that’s tomorrow. Tonight we sleep.

Nite all, R

Cheryl’s Factoids:

• Vietnam is culturally different from its neighbors. The ancient kingdom in North Vietnam was invaded many times and spent 1000 years under the Han Chinese rule (but they were never able to assimilate them because of all the rebellions. The Vietnamese language includes about 50% of Chinese words but never lost their own language. When the French were ruling the colony, they introduced the western alphabet and the Vietnamese were glad to switch from the laborious Chinese writing – however a “D” seems to be pronounced as a “J”, etc, and has 7 different tonal meanings, so it’s still very hard to learn.
• The Vietnamese people have lived in the North for almost 2,400 years. As population pressure increased during the past 400 years and the people started moving south, they ran into the fertile Mekong Delta – which was already sparsely occupied by the Cambodian people. After a series of wars, the racial mix of the South Vietnamese includes both Chinese and Cambodians.