Taken for a Ride

Goddamn xe om drivers with their goddamn motorbikes.

This morning I headed over to a shopping complex (improbably called Saigon Tax). Finding the famous Saigon traffic just as bad as people always said, I caved in after the twentieth motorbike driver offered me his services. When I asked him to take me to the department store, he told me it wasn't open yet (actually this was true). Suddenly faced with an hour to kill, I asked him to take me to the War Remnants Museum.

It was certainly gruesome. Pictures of dead Vietnamese. Deformed fetuses in jars. But also a room of children's drawings encouraging reconciliation and a lot of captured American military hardware.

When I got out of the musuem, he was waiting for me. Then, instead of heading back to Nguyen Hue street like I asked he decided to take a detour to the Saigon River and smoke a bit. The final cost wouldn't have been out of place in Manhattan. Shit. And it was only ten in the morning.

Well, at least I learned my lesson quickly.

Viet Kong

Since this political blog has been moribund for a while, I've decided to revive it with a somewhat different purpose: tracking my new life as a would-be English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I've only just arrived, so there's not much I can tell you.

- It's really hot and muggy, though that was expected. I was awoken by possibly the loudest rain I have ever heard in my whole life. I need to buy a dozen umbrellas pronto.

- On my way in from the airport I passed a number of parks, what appeared to be a mosque, endless shops, a KFC, and more motorbikes than there are in the whole universe.

- There are no traffic lights, no traffic signs, no traffic laws so far as I can tell. I take that back; the law is "If you can fit a vehicle into a space, you have the right of way".

- my guest house is basic but clean, which I guess is the important thing.