It's starting to feel a lot like ...

Frommer’s: “Avoid travelling during the Tet Holiday. … Tet is a Christmas and New Year’s celebration rolled into one, and everyone is going ‘over the river and through the woods.’ …. During this time, many tavellers find themselves stranded, hotels completely full, and roadways crowded with traffic and revelers.” Maybe. Some stores are already starting to shut down and many more have signs up that they’ll be closing for 4 days starting the 13th. (Tet falls on the 14th this year.) I took Frommer’s seriously and worked hard to make sure we would be out of Viet Nam by the start of Tet so, on the13th we will be on a boat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh and Cambodia. What Frommer’s (and the other guidebooks) neglect to say is how much fun it is to be in Ho Chi Minh City the week before Tet.
Despite everything we had heard, the traffic in HCMC is nowhere near as bad as in Hanoi nor I sthe pollution. There are a few more beggars in HCMC than there were n Hanoi but even in HCMC the numbers are hardly large. But HCMC also has some areas, including the dozen or so square blocks in District 1 where the large hotels (our included) all stand, that some genuinely prosperous. Gucci, Seiko, Caravelli, Esprit, Versace and dozens of stores selling silk are all on the very upscale street that leads from our hotel by the river (the Majestic, an art deco leftover from 1925) to the central square dominated by the opera house and flanked by the Caravelle, the 1950’s built hotel famous as a hangout for American journalists during the war. It’s disorienting: We fought a war to stop a communist takeover, right? We lost, right? The communists won, right?
The most interesting sight in HCMC, with the possible exception of the war remnants museum, is the Reunification Palace, the building constructed by Ngo Dinh Diem after his own air force bombed the colonial era Governor’s Palace that stood at the same site and had been taken over by Diem as his first presidential palace. There is a famous picture of an NLF tank rumbling though the wrought iron gate around the palace on the day in 1975 that Saigon fell/was liberated. It’s a sixties style building, including something that looks suspiciously like a rec room in the residential are, and would not be out of place in Brazilia. What’s astonishing here as, less strikingly in Hue, is to see so recent building—no excess of the 17th or 18th century French monarchy here—converted to a museum stuck in time. The helicopter, meant for a quick escape, sitting serenely on the roof just adds to the sense of being frozen in time.
We’ve been eating well but are starting to get sick of Vietnamese food. We found a branch of Quon An Ngon in HCMC, the same restaurant we ate in a couple of times in Hanoi ad that features street food in a various “mini-kitchens” with guarantees of sanitation that the street stalls do not make. What’s fascinating about the restaurant is that it’s one of the few places we’ve been that attracts both foreigners (it’s at the top of the ratings in Trip Advisor and also featured in Lonely Planet) and locals, a range of the Vietnamese middle class, some dressed up for a big evening out, some dressed hardly any better than the scraggly Westerners at neighboring tables. We also ate one night in our hotel, a massive buffet of sea food (oysters, sushi, sashimi, Pacific style lobster, tiger prawns) as well as various other dishes and all the wine (Australian, not great but a big improvement of Dalat Red) you could drink. For a bit under a half million Dong (about $25, including tax and tip) it seemed like a deal to us. We thought it might seem high to the locals but, to our surprise, we were half the westerners in the restaurant and there were two large groups of Vietnamese (one of about 20, the other about 30) there getting a slightly early start on Celebrating Tet. When we poked our heads in the next night, it was full and entirely Vietnamese.
The street our hotel is on, Dong Khoi, is lined with lanterns and lights. At the Opera House, Dong Khoi intersects with Le Loi, also lined with lanterns and lights. Parallel to Dong Khoi is Nguyen Hue, the center part of which is closed down as workers fill the closed off part with various statues of tigers—it’s the Year of the Tiger—and flowers. At night, the streets are jammed with motorcycles out on family expeditions. A motorcycle pulls up to the intersection. Dad stays on or, sometimes, mom. The kids are coaxed out in front of one of the plastic or blow up or plaster tigers. Mom, or sometimes Dad, takes a picture of the dressed up kid. Other people pose in front of other displays, usually holding up two fingers in what Winston Churchill would have called a victory sign and what people my age call a peace sign. What the sign means to the smiling Vietnamese who seem to use it almost universally in their poses remains, at least for me, one of the mysteries of the inscrutable Orient. (The pictures are blurred, not by intention but because our camera needs a longer exposure to take pictures at night. The blur might, however, give a better feel for the whole thing than a better camera would.)