One unanticipated advantage on this trip has been our proximity to Cong Vien Van Hoa Park--the largest, quietest green space in Saigon that we know of. We weren't really aware of the park before, and now it's turning out that we spend a lot of time there. We're 1/2 a block away, and the gym we go to is directly on the other side so we pass through every morning. Whenever we walk downtown, we cut through the park to grab a few extra steps away from the motor scooter noise and smog. There is a patio cafe where each of us goes at least once a day to sit with coffee and tea and a book for awhile. And we usually stroll around it in the evening after dinner.When we do stroll around it, we are joining throngs. It's in heavy use every hour of the day. (See my previous post on jetlag.) By common consent, there's one roughly circular path around it that is reserved for walking and jogging, and the interior paths are taken up with every imaginable sport and amusement--baby karaoke and the high jump for instance, as you can see here. Badminton and necking are more common.
In the mornings and evenings one large open space is filled with a women's aerobics group and just out of range several other women lurk behind trees following along in the exercises, apparently unable to pay the class fee. On Sundays, the park is filled with boy scouts and girl scouts and during the day the rest of the week groups of high school-age children sit in study groups or doing the kind of ice-breaker, team-building games you might see a church youth group doing. There's a flower garden on one side where girls in ao dai pose for boyfriends practicing their photography. At another end is a children's playground which in the evening is certainly the most concentrated space filled with ecstatic children that I have ever seen. Ice cream vendors, who carry the merchandise in large coolers on bicycles, park in the street nearby. At dusk, the sky starts to fill with bats.
-Robert
