Saigon(Ho Chi Minh), Vietnam

Feb 22 – We decided to leave Cambodia behind with a 7 hour bus ride from Phnom Penh to Saigon. This is our last country of our trip. It was kind of sad to leave Cambodia because we really loved it! All of us thoroughly enjoyed our time there.

Once we got off the bus, taxi drivers met us to take us to our hotel. I made sure that the guy had a meter as we heard about scams with taxi’s. The guy had great English and was very nice. Until our drop off….. he stopped a 1/2 block away from our hotel saying that he could not go down our street. He stopped and did not help us get out. His meter said 680,000 Dong. I was paying as the kids and Renelle are taking the luggage out of the trunk on a busy street. The guy was giving money, taking money. I mean I am dealing with hundreds of thousands. Anyway, once the dust settled and he sped off, I realized I ended up paying him over 1,000,000 Dong. We read online that there are 3 legitimate companies (not this guy). His meter quadrupled in speed and he did everything to the tee that it says online. Arghhhh. Lucky for my 1,000,000 Dong is about $50. Needless to say we are only taking cabs from the legitimate companies. We walk up to our hotel and see this sign…………. It actually ended up turning out as the room was spacious, clean and had two air conditioners. We were so excited to see this last name (a friend of ours last name), Renelle took a picture. Little did we know that the Nguyen’s own the whole city, this name was everywhere.

We decided to head out for a meal and found a restaurant with every kind of seafood imaginable. It ended up being a Chinese restaurant, the food was greasy and not great. So we headed to our hotel and called her a day.

Feb 23 – We found a great bakery by our hotel, apparently one is not safe on the sidewalks in this city. Gabriel and Shawn almost got ran over on two separate incidents while we were clearly on a side walk in front of a business. We had our first taste of Vietnamese food and enjoyed it. We then headed out for the War Remnants Museum. This place was so disturbing that I could not take it all in. It really makes one question USA’s motive in the whole Vietnam war. Obviously this was strongly from the Vietnamese perspective but the atrocities that were committed on innocent civilians was morbidly shocking. Never mind, the after effects that this war has left the Vietnamese people with.

“Tiger boxes”, prisoners were kept in here for days on end. This seemed to be the least amount of torture done to the Vietcon.

We wanted to lighten the mood with our family so we went to Viacom Mall, in the hopes of bumper cars, arcades and fun. Apparently, all of this is shut down in this mall now.

Later in the night we went to the Ben Thanh Night Market and looked around. We walked further down the street and found the food market. They had two really good singers here and the food was really good.