Uncle Ho's Namesake City

Let's first get caught up with pre-departure and pre- and upon arrival photos. Above, waiting to board at JFK, Dan looking weary while waiting to board our Hong-Kong flight to Vietnam, touching down after a dramatic thunder-and-lightening stormed approach to SGN and, finally, the beautiful, modern, SGN airport.

After the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Communists on April 30, 1975, the first order of business for the new government--literally, the first piece of legislation passed by the first National Assembly--was to rename Saigon to honor the country's greatest nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh, affectionately known to the people as "Uncle Ho." The name never quite stuck, and visitors and locals alike still refer to the city as "Saigon." But generally, and most accurately, "Ho Chi Minh City" refers to the greater metropolitan area, comprised of 19 sprawling districts, while "Saigon" refers to the main commercial center--districts 1, 3 and 5--much the same as "New York" most properly includes all five boroughs, though we often use it to mean only Manhattan.

HCMC is Vietnam's commercial nerve center. It's busy, but doesn't feel particularly brash, as it has been described. It's chaotic--especially the traffic--but not jarringly so, as is the case in large Indian cities. Perhaps it's the relative quiet of the traffic: scooters, whose engines and horns dominate the auditory melee, are quieter than cars. Stepping of a curb into hundreds of oncoming scooters an, to a lesser extent, cars, trucks and buses, can be frightening, until you realize that the drivers lack the aggression of US and even Indian drivers. The see you, they expect you, and they are perfectly willing to steer around you, even into oncoming traffic, to avoid you, much like avoiding a pothole in the road, without so much as beep-beep, much less and angry one.

Yesterday was our first day of sightseeing in Saigon, and a busy one. Fortified by the prior evening's feast at Hien's family's home, after which we were invigorated by having been scootered back to our hotel by, respectively, Hien and her sister, Hang, we we began our day with the much-anticipated pho breakfast. ;-)