Saigon Day 2

After our adventure at the tunnels, Mom and I decided to go a bit more low-key. So we did a bit of touring thru town...visiting things like the reunification palace (where the communists stormed in and took away power from the former leaders), the opera house, the post office (which has really cool architecture), the Cathedral (which is modeled after Notre Dame), and Chinatown...

Chinatown was my idea, as the book made it seem like an area filled with nostalgia and kitsch...I guess it all depends on one's idea of nostalgia, but I found it to be one of the most disgusting Chinatowns I had ever been too. Plus, I caught a guy trying to pickpocket my mom...(there was a bit of yelling on my part, and my mom looking at me all confused as to why I was yelling at the guy...but everything worked out okay.)...but other then the grime and crime, we did find a really cool herb shop...that sold all sorts of wierd stuff (some of which was illegal or endangered...i.e. ivory tusks, dried seahorses, snakes, dried sea turtles, etc.) and while we were waiting to ask the guy about Saffron, we watched as the pharmacists (it was a strange chinese drug store of sorts...with alot of natural remedies) followed some sort of ancient recipe and compiled a bunch of random herbs for a man (it included blades of grass, dried flowers, leaves, seahorses, and a dried turtle) then packaged the whole thing in a huge paper parcel for the man to take home, and I assume toss into a boiling cauldron...I'm not exactly sure what it was all for, as we tried to ask, but everyone spoke Chinese...and the pharmacist was a bit mystified that I did not speak Chinese. (I am regularly mistaken for every type of asian person on the planet...not that I am complaining as it often works in my favor.)

At the end of the day, we made it home safe and sound...without any saffron and completely confused about what we had just seen...but happy to be out of Chinatown (where we hope we did not catch SARS or anything horrific like that.)