The kids are most definitely the former, while I am decidedly the latter!
Just got back from our family vacation to Vietnam and it.was.freaking.
amazing! I fell in love with Saigon from the moment we drove from the airport to our hotel, and my love affair has not abated. Saigon is one of the coolest cities I've been to in a very long time. Being there among the mix of old and new reminded me of why I fell in love with Asia in the first place. The neon lights and the smells of street food cooking in the hot summer night, the public parks (well maintained and brightly lit with lovely bushes trimmed into various animals and other objects) teeming with people enjoying their evening meals, taking a stroll, or doing some tai chi. The streets filled with motorbikes, taxis, and pedestrians, yet actual traffic jams are few because everyone follow the basic rules of the road. And the food. Oh the food! I gained 8 pounds in a week (no joke!) gorging myself on bread (Banh Mi is my new most favorite food ever!) and rice noodles (our guide delighted in taking us to local, off the beaten path places once he discovered our penchant for adventurous eating) like Pho Bo and Bun Bo Hue. And then, of course, there's the coffee. Even the shitty coffee in Vietnam is still pretty fucking good. The French influence in the food is astounding. A delicious mix of East meets West with a little cafe culture thrown in. It was so incredibly exhilarating. It was everything I had hoped Manila would be. I knew from the minute we touched down that this was a place I could live. So, yeah...I fucking loved it. :)
Besides just getting to hang out in Vietnam for 8 days, the other half of our vacation awesomeness was hanging out with my little sister and her husband and my little niece, L, who is about 1 1/2 now. It's always difficult vacationing with others, especially when you're doing it as an entire family, since everyone has their own needs and desires, but I think we managed ok. And I was thrilled to have the chance to hang with them a bit and really get to know my niece since we hardly ever get to see them thanks to our crazy lifestyles (we live in Asia, they live in Europe, and we all have family in the US that we also need to allot time and money to seeing), and I don't think we'll be seeing them again in person until Christmas 2014. So that was really, really great.
We started out our tour in Saigon for a few days, taking in the sights and sounds, and visiting the various war monuments and museums.* We even took the kids to a traditional
Vietnamese water-puppet theater, which I was worried they might be bored with, but turned out to be highly entertaining. All of them were entranced! Then we left Saigon for a two day tour of the Mekong River. We cruised up the river stopping at various tourist-y sites (here's where the indigenous people make rice paper, here are some local fisherman making their daily catch, and here's a traditional song performance while we serve you hot tea in the sun with no aircon while it's 37 degrees out, etc. etc.). It was soul-suckingly hot, but everything we saw was interesting and I really felt no pressure to buy things (even though we did) as we left. We bought a crap ton of the coconut candy we saw being made (we got to try the fresh out of the pot stuff - it was soooo yummy!).
Then we stayed overnight in
Can Tho and left very early the next morning to see the floating market where we had one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had ladled to us from the side of the boat by a floating mini-market dude. Crazy. We also crammed in a whole buncha Buddhist pagodas, although my sis and I were both surprised to find that most of these had been built within the last few hundred years. Not a lot of old stuff seems to be left in South Vietnam.
From Can Tho, we returned to Saigon for a day where our awesome guide, Alex, took us to a local joint in a different part of the city for Pho Bo. Hands down one of the best meals I've ever eaten!
After that we were off to
Mui Ne for a few days of beach relaxation, which we managed to turn into another marathon of activity by packing on the tours. First we went to the red sand dunes and fairy stream, which was a 2km hike through some truly gorgeous countryside. This was by far the kids' favorite tour. A got so dirty he practically blended in with the dunes, which made it difficult to pick him out when they went sand sledding! Bizarrely, this is also where the kids had the opportunity to ride an ostrich.** C's favorite part of the whole vacation? Getting to ride and then eat an ostrich all in one day.*** The Pu foodie genes run deep in that one!
Our second tour took us to an 8th century Hindu temple of the
Champa people (the indigenous peoples of that region), which satisfied our need to see old stuff. I find the incredible mix of religions and cultures in Vietnam to be fascinating. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity sit side by side, along with a good amount of old Chinese beliefs like ancestor worship. I never realized what a veritable mixing pot it is. We also saw local fisherman, a fish market, and a temple to the whale god with a 500yr old whale skeleton, along with other local markets in the area where we stopped to haggle over some rubies and jade.
To top it all off, the 4 girls all took a cooking class and learned how to make Pho Bo. It's a bit time intensive but actually pretty simple to make. It was really fun for the girls to make their own food and then slurp it down! Best of all? They videotaped the whole thing for a promotional tool for their hotel, so we'll get a copy when it's all done.
Our final day was spent traveling back to Saigon from Mui Ne where we said goodbye to my sis and her family (they were headed on to Hanoi for another week of holiday). We hooked back up with our old tour guide Alex, who took us back out for some intense market shopping (and a stop at a Hello Kitty store!) and a hearty meal of
Bun Bo Hue, which I thought was even better than Pho Bo.
It says a lot about the Vietnamese people that Alex not only offered, but happily came along for our last few hours of tour. He did it solely out of the kindness of his heart and his desire to show us more of his city ( and his food - he's from the Hue region!). We tipped him anyway since it meant a lot to us, but this was just one of several things that struck me about the Vietnamese people. Everyone was so kind, and they love children (as in most Asian cultures). There was one restaurant in particular in Mui Ne where we stopped for dinner (fresh fish and scallops on the grill for sis & I!), J was upset about something and crying when we walked in. The elderly owner fussed over her for a while, fixing her hair into a traditional bun, showing her the restaurant's puppy, Lucky, who hung around under our table throughout the meal (much to J's delight), and even painting her nails! It just blew me away.
Anyway, since no one will ever read all the way through this anyway. I guess what it boils down to is, we had an awesome time and had to come home way too soon. I absolutely fell in love with Vietnam, and Saigon in particular. The vibrance, color, and culture of the city just sung to me in a way I haven't felt since the first time I went to China. I would live there in a heartbeat! Too bad Vietnamese is even harder to learn than Chinese!!
*Pu review: very depressing, and totally worth seeing, but naturally a bit one-sided. It's much like seeing WWII historical sites in Japan.
** A: Nooooo, I don't want to. Get me off, get me off! *ten seconds later* THIS IS AWESOME!!!! Buy me an ostrich, mama!!!
***She also tried alligator among other local delicacies.
