"I hate having to worry about motos running me over when I'm on the sidewalk"

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. Ah Ho Chi Minh City..or Saigon if you will. This place is huge. Very huge. You can keep driving for half an hour and the buildings don't get any smaller and the amount of people never dwindles down. There are people everywhere, most with face masks on. You can't walk on the sidewalk without bumping into people and sometimes it's even hard to avoid the motos on the sidewalk. The telephone wires look like some sort of valance that would hang above the window in some artsy person's studio in New York. They're fat bundles drooping from the wooden posts and they look like they could pull it down. So yes, we pulled off our changed flight without a hitch and arrived in Saigon at 10:30 am. The first thing we did was go to the War Remnants Museum. It is a museum documenting the travesties of the "American War." There is no way I could have felt worse about the Vietnam War. Another picture of a blown up baby or one more quote from a US Army general talking about how we should blow them all up could not have even had an effect on me. It was awful. I felt like such an asshole in there. There was only a small section about the protests in the US, very very small, and other than that it was just pictures of people being tortured, towns that had been bombed, babies crying, etc. I'm glad we only had an hour and a half in there because man, that was rough to look at.

By the way, I should mention we've been telling everyone we're Canadian while we're here (I'm from Victoria) so that we don't get scammed by people. It's funny how different the responses are from people when you tell them you're from the US versus Canada.

After the museum we headed to the market to meet up with the people from the cooking class we signed up for. We walked through the market with them and they explained what the fruits and vegetables and grains were and how you could use them whilst cooking. Then we drove to the Saigon Culinary Arts Center and learned about the traditional Vietnamese cookingware and how they store their food. They use a lot of clay pots and woven mats. We cooked a three course meal starting with 1) salad rolls (like spring rolls but not fried and rolled in rice paper) and the sauce to dip them in 2) tomato and egg soup (probably my favorite thing on the menu, it's a traditional dish that they can eat in times of low crop yeilds) 3) rice and carmalized pork. It was so good. I'm definitely making all this stuff when I get home. I also learned how to make roses out of tomatoes. An important life skill if there ever was one. When we were finished they gave us a quiz and when we answered the questions correctly we got our culinary institute diploma. We rocked that meal. I'm fit for the domestic life now.

Once we got back to the hostel we headed right back out for the night market (which they seem to have in every town/city we've been to). We had to escape death a few times along the way and it ended up being kind of lame compared to the other ones we've been to. It has been really cool to see Vietnam up close and personal. I always just thought of it as a place we fought a war in but it's so much more. It's full of cute old people and places to eat that only have one thing on the menu and busy streets with neon signs. I can't say it's a place I would ever want to live but I'm really glad I saw it. However, tomorrow is another day, another country. Bring it on Cambodia.