Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) Vietnam

 

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) was a wonderful city to visit for three days. One of our booked excursions was canceled, which thankfully gave us a free day to explore on our own and visit the fine arts museum. You get a different perspective and feeling about a place through their art and this city's art museum was a really good one.

Included Excursion

There were some signs of communism around like the banner above, but the city generally felt like a very modern capitalist city. Several of our guides talking about the opening of Vietnam to international commerce and how it has transformed the country.

Vietnam is a unitary communist state that self-designates as a socialist republic, one of the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia. While Vietnam remains officially committed to socialism as its defining creed, its economic policies have grown increasingly capitalist, with The Economist characterising its leadership as "ardently capitalist communists". (Wikipedia)

The Jade Emporer Pagoda was in our included excursion and then it was unfortunately duplicated in a seperate paid excursion of the city. There appears to be plenty to see in the city, so I don't know why the cruise company decided that was a good idea. Oh well, it was rainy the first day when we visited and sunny on the other day. We got to see it with "different angle, different light" as we like to say as we take our many pictures.

rain outside the indoor market

second tallest building

Vietnamese Percussion Orchestra on the Ship's Stage

This was a really cool performance with a big variety of instruments. That xylophone is all stones and it sounded really cool with everything else they played.

HCMC Fine Arts Museum

We spent most of our free day at the fine arts museum enjoying life at our own pace without a tour guide or shuffling along with the rest of the herd. We'll do more days like this if we take another cruise.

a huge lacquer painting

love the lighting and shadows in this area

Paid Excursion Day

riding on sidewalks is illegal but overlooked during rush hour

What's this? Well, it's the Jade Emperor Pagoda that we saw on the included excursion. I guess we'll see it again...

we're going up in the tallest building in HCMC

There's an 81st floor that we took stairs to visit. I only got pics of us with that sign, so no pic for the blog. 

There's an open walkway at the top. It's surrounded by glass and you have to wear a harness to walk around. It was a cool experience. I hate heights, but as long as I feel like I'm enclosed enough then it's fine. This was actually fine. I didn't get near the outer glass. It was fine.

signs of communism with signs of capitalism

the first of three ports in Vietnam on our cruise

It's interesting to see news on the cruise ship's screens that there's "three dead in suspected virus outbreak on Atlantic cruise ship." We were on the other side of the planet, but still a bit freaky to see. It reminded me of when we were on vacation in Cyprus and we started hearing about that new Coronavirus thing that was spreading. You remember COVID-19, right?