YYYSaturday, December 22, 2007
I should blog about my trips before I forget about them!
K about my first trip with my family to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam from the 4th to the 8th of Dec first :)
We visited the War Remnants Museum which was basically this museum about the Vietnam War. There was also quite a bit on the First Indochina War.
Here's the sign to the museum!
My dad and I :)
Yup and although they said that everything there were historic truths, the account of the wars in the museum was quite biased haha. But I guess in that way the museum really showed the wars from the point of view of the Vietnamese.
The things there were quite frightening. Apparently during the Vietnam War the Americans sprayed this pesticide thing called Agent Orange Dioxin on the Vietnamese using helicopters.
This chemical led to many horrible side effects like those in the photos below.
Some babies were born with terrible deformities as result too. Don't know if you can see it in the photo properly, but there was actually 2 glass jars with dead babies in them.
There were also many other gross photos which showed the suffering people go through during wars. This one shows an American soldier holding up the remains of a Vietnamese. I can't really remember what the English translation of the caption said, but it was something like, "American GI holds up shreds of Vietcong".
We visited the Cu Chi Tunnels as well. Its a very long and deep underground network of tunnels (more than 200km long!) which the Vietnamese used first in their fight against the French, and then against the Americans.
The tunnels were made really really small and narrow so that the western soldiers wouldn't be able to get in. Haha here I am getting into one.
The Vietnamese are super ingenious! They camouflaged their air holes to provide ventilation for the tunnels in termite nests so that they wouldn't be found. And because they did their cooking underground, they specially redirected the smoke from the cooking far away from the tunnels. In fact, because they were so clever, the Americans didn't know about the tunnels until very much later. They even built an air base right over the tunnels!
We got to try to crawl through a very small part of the tunnel system. It had already been enlarged to accomodate western tourists and some lights had been installed, but it was really difficult! The tunnels were very hot and stuffy, plus you had to alternate between waddling like a duck and crawling on your knees. I really can't imagine what it must have been like for the Vietcong who spent so much time in those tunnels- and so many of them inside too!
We also got to see a lot of the booby traps the Vietnamese used, like this one.
But I think, even after seeing all these Vietnam War stuff, I will never be able to understand what they really went through/ what it's really like in a war. At the Cu Chi Tunnels the guide was showing us bomb craters, and I knew that the tunnel I was in was the very same one so many Vietnamese soldiers had been in, but it just felt so distant and so surreal. Just like when I was at the Thai-Burmese border during my ISLE trip and the Burmese soldiers, the landmines, and the abandoned Burmese village was just there. Ah we in Singapore really have too good a life!
Aside from these, we did a little more sight-seeing. Vietnam has quite a lot of nice architecture left over from the colonial period. Like this Catholic church:
And this post office:
This is me inside the post office. See the photo of Ho Chi Minh at the back! He's everywhere. Kinda like the king in Thailand.
The rest of the time we did a lot of shopping and eating. Haha our hotel was near this very big market so we went there almost everyday to shop! Shopping's quite scary though, because the Vietnamese people are very aggressive. They will grab you when you walk past their shop and try to get you to buy.
Crossing the roads to get to the market was also scary! There are many many motor bikes on the roads of Vietnam and they don't follow the traffic rules! There is a lot of horning going on too.
Vietnamese food isn't very nice. Everything is very sweet. But we did eat a lot of nice non-Vietnamese food haha. Actually I think the district we stayed in was quite touristy. A lot of places accepted US dollars and there were a lot of western tourists/ business people walking arnd. We didn't eat at any of those road-side stalls and stuff and we took cabs everywhere because they were very cheap. Yeah so even though it was a trip to a not so affluent country I think we only saw the richer parts, and we lived very comfortably. So I guess that's kinda sad in a sense? Cos we didn't really experience
real Vietnamese life, whatever that is.
Ah okay that's about all for Vietnam! I shall end off with a photo of our whole family outside a very pretty Vietnamese fusion food restaurant:
Heh I hope I find my other memory card soon so I can upload my Chiangmai photos. Yay many photos of cute kids!! :D
1:56 PM
Here's the sign to the museum!
My dad and I :)
Yup and although they said that everything there were historic truths, the account of the wars in the museum was quite biased haha. But I guess in that way the museum really showed the wars from the point of view of the Vietnamese.
