After 18 days of the 6am (or earlier) wake up call, no one complained about having a sleep in this morning. No rush to breakfast, no guide to meet, no strict schedule for the day… bliss!
Or agenda for the day had only 3 items – shopping, a visit to the exercise park for Alex, and a trip to the Reunification Palace. Oh, and heading to the airport for the trip home 🙂
We headed to Saigon Square – a large market filled with clothes, souvenirs and bags. Even though it’s inside, it still is just hundreds of tiny stalls packed solid with the same items over and over again… piles of Polo shirts, Gucci bags and other designer brands. Emma picked it right when she spotted 3 belts – Chanel, Dior and Dolce & Gabanna – identical in every way except for the name embossed on the buckle! I suspect a lot of the items are seconds, or specifically produced for the local market, and some are just rip offs. Regardless, tourists and locals haggle their way around – making sure they get the $6 Polo for a bargain $5!!!
Wandering the streets was also our last opportunity to marvel at the bikes. We heard there are 55 million motorbikes in this country of 90 million people. Wow. It’s just like watching schools of tiny fish weave in and out of each other – speeding up, slowing down, changing direction, but never touching. Many of the streets in HCMC have dedicated motorbike lanes – very efficient!
Our final tourist stop was the Reunification Palace on 12 hectares in the middle of HCMC. The building is on the site of the original Indochina Governor Palace that was built in 1868 and then bombed in 1962. The new Palace was constructed to house the President of South Vietnam but only operated in its official capacity until the end of the war in 1975. Prior to 1975 it was known as the Independence Palace, but the name change reflected its role as the site of signing the documents to ‘reunify’ Vietnam – another piece of strong symbolism of the control of the North.
Today, it’s used to host the occasional reception or government event, but is primarily a tourist attraction, providing a step back in time to the architecture and interior design of the 60s and 70s. While it’s modern as far as world Palaces go, it was interesting to learn about some of the traditional symbolism and elements that were incorporated – most obvious are the hundreds of columns on the front of the building, designed to look like bamboo.
The palace also brought home the what life would have been like in the 60s and 70s in Saigon… The war room above ground duplicated in the massive underground bunker still has the maps on the walls, and information about the foreign troops. Surreal.
Another busy day immersed in HCMC! We’ve really enjoyed this city and surrounds, and its provided lots of opportunity to understand the combined history of our countries. Not all good, but hopefully we all learn from the mistakes of the past.
Off to the airport!
Love M & theBunch xxx
PS… Look who we found hiding out in Alex’s exercise park. We don’t think Alex saw him, but suspect our mate Otty (rescued during a trip to the Otway Fly in Victoria a couple of years ago) has been doing his own tour of Vietnam 😉
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