1. These pictures are from a wedding Ilene went to last week--the co-worker of a friend. The friend and her sister arranged to have an ao dai, the outfit she's wearing, made for her. That involved a trip to the silk shop to pick the material and then to the dress-maker's shop to pick the design and take measurements. A very generous gift. Ilene has a sequel to the underwear stories she posted on our last trip, but she's been too busy to write.
2. I went to the Reunification Palace the other day, which was very interesting. Unfortunately, I left my camera at the hotel. The palace is important in the cultural memory here because it's the site of the very last moments of the war, where the government of the South surrendered. For Americans, the iconic image of April 1975 is of helicopters leaving from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, but for Vietnamese, the iconic images are a few blocks away at the Reunification Palace. After the first tank smashes through the front gate, a tank gunner runs across the lawn and up the empty front steps with the flag of the provisional government clutched in his fist and appears on the roof a couple minutes later to raise it in place of the South Vietnamese flag. That was the end of 35 consecutive years of war against the Japanese, French and Americans.
Ilene has told stories in the past about how her visit to the Reunification Palace in 2003 was notable for how unfriendly and creepy the guides were. It's another sign of how fast things are changing here that my visit in 2008 was the opposite. It most closely resembled Western standards of all the museums I've been in here. (There was the occasional dead cockroach trapped inside a display case, but that's par.)
3. Last week we started volunteering at a charity for street children called Thao Dan, teaching English two evenings a week. More on that another time.
4. This city of 8 million is starting to feel a little small. Twice over the weekend we unexpectedly ran into people we knew. Or they spotted us, anyway. We do stand out a little.
5. Ilene has her big Vietnamese test this Friday and is quite preoccupied with that.
6. We bought tickets for a two-day hiking trip in Cat Tien National Park, next Friday and Saturday. This is a relatively new kind of tourism here, so we're looking forward to a really unique experience. We're using the same "adventure tour" company we used for the bike ride in the Mekong Delta last year--Sinhbalo. The cost includes a driver, a guide, meals, a bungalow room and leech repellent.
-Robert
