Sometime in the pm on Monday my roommate Briony and I decided to go to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam instead of the Cambodian beach town Sihanoukville. Miraculously, visas were arranged in under an hour the next morning (the last day before a 3 day public holiday, Pchum Benh) and good ol Bri secured us bus tickets for Thursday morning by greasing a few palms. The rest of Phnom Penh had already bought up every other ticket out of town. And let me tell you why... it's because Vietnam is awesome!
Even though we stayed in a backpacker ghetto and I was mysteriously parted from my $100 bill at our hotel I had the best weekend ever. Everything was exciting, wonderful, and beautiful. And HCMC is meant to be the uglier, noisier sister to Hanoi. If that's true then Hanoi is a dreamland of flowers and sausages and I will die of joy if I go there. From our PP-skewered perspectives HCMC was glamourous, cosmopolitan, clean, organized, orderly, accessible, full of things to do and tasty, varied food. We were country bumpkins all weekend, awed by the modernity and functionality around us.
First stop: Diamond Plaza - a department store whose cosmetics and accessories ground floor is indistinguishable from any Nordstrom or Bloomingdale's in the States. On the top floor, after getting soaked in a particularly nasty rainstorm (the rainstorms in this part of the world are usually short bursts of torrential downpour that lighten up after a half hour or so. On Thursday it was Hollywood rain for hours and we had to wade through knee deep water in the streets to get to a restaurant, then into a cab to Diamond. Yes, a metered taxi!) we took in a film in a real movie theatre! The film we treated ourselves to? Hell yea we paid to see Evan Almighty! It was so cold in there I had to buy golf socks in the men's shoe department!
More tomorrow!
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