SHADES OF WAR

I cannot be in Vietnam without thinking of the Vietnam War, which was such a big part of my teen and college years.  It is called the American War here.  The people here are very friendly and you would think we had not been at war with them for 25 years,  pretty much destroyed their country and left a whole lot of orphans, as well as unintended offspring of American soldiers.  

I visited the War museum, which is slanted to their take on it, of course.  There are pictures of people protesting the war all over the world.  I knew we were protesting in the US, but it did not really sink in at the time how unpopular the war was in other countries.  The exhibit on war photography featured pictures by western news media and I had seen many of them before, but it doesn't lessen their impact.  It also noted that 73 Western photographers died in the war.  There was writing on the wall with quotes from various people, such as General Curtis LeMay's "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" and President Eisenhower's statement that the tin and tungsten in Vietnam was needed for security reasons (like oil in Iraq?).  They also had the part of the Geneva Accords (1954) up that stated that no foreign powers would intervene or establish a base in Vietnam.

War Remnants Museum

On another floor was an exhibit about Agent Orange with pictures of the damage it caused, as well as of many children born subsequently, in Vietnam and the US, with horrible birth defects.  This actually made me feel worse than the museum in Hiroshima, because I felt some personal guilt that I didn't feel about the bombing in WWII, probably because I wasn't alive then.  Did the Germans feel this way when they learned the full extent of the Holocaust?  Why do things like this keep happening?

At the end I saw a video made during the war of villagers trying to cope.  It was definitely propaganda, but broke my heart seeing the children going to school in trenches.  They had to carry a homemade first aid kit and made straw hats to protect themselves from bomb blasts.  No wonder those kids became soldiers and sympathizers when they got older.  Their country was under siege, whether they lived in the North or the South.

The next day I visited the Cu Chi tunnels, about an hour and a half out of town in a rural area.  The tunnels are famous for hiding thousands of  Viet Cong during the wars against both the French and the Americans.  They extend 200 kms and go between the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Saigon River.  There are three floors, a cooking room, areas for munitions storage and manufacturing, a school, a hospital, and a deep well (the above ground water was contaminated with Agent Orange).  We saw examples of the hidden entrances, the pit traps for the enemy, and leafy trenches for above ground protection.  The people were farmers by day and soldiers by night.  They could launch attacks then seemingly disappear.  They were tenacious and clever.  A video showed teenage girls getting medals for killing multiple Americans.  

Model of tunnels

Hole too small for most Americans

The tunnels are very small but some have been enlarged ("Burger King sized", according to our guide) for tourists.  They also had an area where visitors could pay extra to shoot an AK47, and M16, or an M60.  I have experience with the last two from my time in the Army, but some of the guys took advantage of the opportunity.  Only one girl, though.  Guns have always been a fascination for guys and I don't know why.

At the end of the tour we sat at outside tables and had a "soldier meal" of cooked cassava and a sugar/salt dipping mixture.  After that we went back to Ho Chi Minh City and had lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant including tempura spinach, boiled spinach, rice paper wrapped vegetable rolls, chicken and onion, sticky rice with mung beans, and custard pudding.  Not as good as the cooking school food, but still delicious.

Rice at lunch came in a nice package

Finally, a pic with Desmond Tutu

Vietnam SAS stats:  Zero people drugged, 35 robbed, 18 credit cards stolen or lost, one passport lost (later found), 5 people hit by motorbikes (no serious injuries), two leg burns, many cases of traveler's diarrhea.  Twenty nine cell phones were lost or stolen phones, 100% of which were I phones.  These seem to be an incredible target.  A lot of people get them whisked out of their hands by people on passing motorcycles while standing on a curb looking at their phones instead of their surroundings.  Hopefully this statistic will decrease, especially as the passengers are running out of phones.

VIETNAMESE COOKING LESSON

I don't know what it is about Vietnamese food, but it tastes different from anything else.  The main thing I think of is freshness, like nothing came out of a box but straight trom the farm or sea.  And it always tastes good.

Tools to get started.  Chop, chop.

I took a cooking class at Hoa Tuc restaurant in Saigon.  Instead of just watching the cook prepare food, the 12 of us each got our own cutting board, knife, etc and repeated everything he did.  We used some vegetables I was not familiar with, like mustard leaves, lotus stems, bon bon, tine vua, kumquats, and mung beans. We stir fried, deep fried, barbecued, mashed, cut, diced, etc.  In the end, we made three dishes:  mustard leave rolls with crunchy vegetables and prawns, fried sticky rice fritters with pork and carrot, and rice noodle with BBQ pork and vegetable salad.  I will give you the salad dressing recipe:

8 tablespoons kumquat juice (we used the fresh fruit and squeezed)

2 tablespoons water

5 tablespoons fish sauce

6 tablespoons sugar

4 teaspoons chopped garlic

4 teaspoons minced red chili (medium spicy)

Mix all ingredients, stirring well until sugar is dissolved.

Mustard leaf rolls with prawns and vegetables.  Yummy!

I learned that fish sauce comes in different strengths, and a higher number is less water and more fish sauce.  He used number 60, which I think is the highest strength.

If you are really lucky, I will make some of these dishes for you when I get back to the US.

Teacher/chef shows us how to deep fry rice balls

Enjoying the barbecued pork salad

The next day my roommate Susan and I took the shuttle to town and wandered around the Ben Tranh market for about three hours.  This is an indoor market about the size of two Walmarts.  On one side is food, from fresh fruits and vegetables to fish, meat, snails (the French influence), etc.  The meat is butchered and hangs on hooks, but the chickens are alive and the fish and shrimp are still wriggling.  This is fresh!  We also went down the narrow aisles looking at clothes, art, hats, shoes, etc.  Whatever else you can think of, it was probably there.

I bought a shirt from these girls in the market

Fresh prawns, still wiggling

We stopped at a few tailoring places to see about getting some clothes made.  I love the aio dais, those sleek calf length, long sleeved tops slit up to the waist over long pants.  Unfortunately, I don't think they were meant for me.  I settled for buying a new silk shirt.

We went back to the ship for lunch, but I returned to town later to get a manicure/pedicure for $12.  My friend said she got both for $8.  One thing I noticed is that they don't use lotion when they do the hand and leg massage, which I didn't like.

HO CHI MINH CITY

Getting from Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City (the locals still call it Saigon) involved three days and then several more hours sailing up the Mekong Delta.  The skyline of Saigon probably looks similar to what it did in the 60's; nothing like Shanghai, where they seem to put up a new skyscraper every week.  Of course, we did such damage to the country that a lot had to be rebuilt before they could think about skyscrapers.

They obviously had a severe inflation problem, since one US dollar equals 21,000 Vietnamese dong.  It makes you feel like a millionaire until you actually try to buy something.  When I got 10,000 in change I felt pretty good, until I realized it was only about 50 cents.  They do not even have coins.

We are here during the Vietnamese New Year celebrations (Tet).  This is good in that there is much less death defying traffic, but bad in that many places are closed.  They use a lot of flowers to decorate for New Year's, so the city looks very festive.  It is like seeing Rose Parade floats all over.

Water puppets

I took an all day tour of Saigon.  We went to the History Museum and got an overview of Vietnamese history.  Hanoi is 1000 years old and Saigon is only 300 years old.  We learned that the Vietnamese have always been good at guerrilla warfare and were able to repel the Mongols three times.  They were taken over by the Chinese for 1000 years, so many of the artifacts seem Chinese in style.

The History Museum also had a water puppet show, supposedly put on the way it would have been done in the 12th century.  The front pool is filled with water and the puppeteers behind the curtain manipulate the puppets with long rods.  This was not as good as the water puppet show I saw about ten years ago in Hanoi, where the puppeteers wore black suits and actually got under the water and swam around with the puppets, but was still entertaining.

The Reunification Palace was built by the French but rebuilt after being bombed in 1962.  The French controlled Vietnam from 1858 until the Japanese took over in 1940.  The latter are not well liked since they exploited the Vietnamese and 2 million people died, mostly of famine.  The British liberated the Vietnamese but the French stepped in and reclaimed Indochina until being defeated in 1954.   The subsequent Geneva Accords declared Vietnam independent and forbade interference by third powers.  UN monitored free elections were supposed to be held in 1954 but the US stepped in and halted them because the Cold War was going on and they were afraid the country would become Communist (Wikipedia says the Soviets halted the elections.).  Thus the whole region would become Communist according to the domino theory.  Ho Chi Minh, a popular leader in both North and South Vietnam,  admired the US Constitution and reached out to America but got no response because of the fear of communism running rampant in the US at the time.  The US supported President Diem in the South, a Catholic who apparently persecuted people of other faiths, particularly Buddhists.  After ten years he was assassinated and the US propped up some other dictators until the government in the south fell in 1975.  Of course the tale is very slanted toward the Vietnamese viewpoint, but they don't overplay the American aggression the way they could.  The statistics range from 3 to 4 million Vietnamese killed in the war, and about 58,000 Americans.  This is terrible whichever side you are on, but we were destroying their people and their country, not the other way around.  Those millions of dollars and thousands of young men could have been put to better use.

Reunification Palace

1960's era radios

War room

Helicopter on roof for quick getaways

President's meeting room.  Note raised chair for him, which  our President Washington had refused.

We then went to the Notre Dame Cathedral, a stone edifice built by the French in 1880 and looking like it belongs in a city in Europe.  This was closed, but we went across the street to the Post Office, also colonial French and looking like an ornate train station.  They have the names of famous inventors along the front and include Benjamin Franklin, a former American ambassador to France who was apparently quite a favorite there, especially with the ladies.

Post Office

Cao Dai Temple

Our next stop was the Cao Dai temple, built in  Chinese-Vietnamese style with a variety of other architectural influences. The nave has columns decorated with dragons and many statues.  The colors are unusual, with a lot of turquoise, pink and yellow.   Above the altar hangs a giant sphere containing the divine eye of Cao Dai with an eternal flame. Cao Dai's religious philosophy is a blend of Asian religions (Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism) mixed with Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, as well as animism and Theosophy.  It originated in Vietnam but is practiced in many other countries, including the USA.  A service was going on, with all of the participants dressed in white from head to toe.

Electrical system-which wire goes where

We stopped for lunch at Dong Khanh Restaurant in Chinatown.  This was supposed to be a typical Vietnamese lunch but seemed Chinese to me.  I tried the local beer, "333," which was quite good.

Cha Tam Church

After lunch, we stopped at Cha Tam Catholic church, where President Diem sought refuge and prayed right before he was assassinated in 1963.  Our President Kennedy had been withdrawing from Vietnam but was also assassinated around the same time and American intervention escalated.  I sat in the same pew that he had and said a prayer for all the dead soldiers on both sides.

Our next stop was the Thien Hau Temple, the oldest Chinese-built pagoda in the city, dedicated to the goddess of the seas and protector of fishermen and sailors.  After that we walked to the Quan Am Pagoda, a Chinese-style Buddhist temple featuring beautiful courtyard, gardens, a pond and a Jade Emperor.  Incense was intense at both temples.

Our final stop was the Central Park, where it was the
final day of the Flower Fair, a Tet tradition.  They had kiddie rides, a lot of bonsai, and flowers everywhere.  They played "Gangnam Style" on the loudspeaker and I watched the little Vietnamese kids do their best Psy imitations.  The best and worst of international culture pervades the planet.

HONG KONG

Explorer at Kowloon

It took us two days to sail from Shanghai to Hong Kong, where we docked at the international terminal on the Kowloon side.  The ramp from the ship went to the second level of the shopping mall there, a kind of forced shopping experience because you had to walk through most of the mall to get out to the dock.  Everything around the port is very upscale, with stores like Cartier and designer clothes like Gucci for kids and adults.  The only saving grace is the free wifi in the mall.  I had been to Hong Kong previously, so just walked around Kowloon a bit, spending a little money on beer and snacks at 7-11.  

Tai Chi lesson

The second day I went with fellow Semester at Sea people on a day in Hong Kong.  We started by having a Tai Chi lesson at the Olympics arena.  The breathing exercises were great, but it gets a little tough doing some of the balancing stances.  We had 23 people of all ages in our group, from 5 to 75, so it was fun to watch everyone falling over.

Next we went to the MingCha Tea Company for a tea tasting.  We started with a jasmine tea with leaves tied to look like a lotus blossom when you put it in the hot water and the "flower" opens up.  Then we had various kinds of black tea, a lot of it paired with different artisan chocolates.  The three young boys in the group enjoyed the job of breaking the chocolate into small pieces for us.  I am sure a lot of it disappeared before they gave it to us.  I still feel that chocolate goes better with coffee than tea.

...becomes a flower

Tea ball...

On to the Causeway, a big shopping area, where we enjoyed a dim sum lunch.  There were a lot of people, but we were the only tourists there that I could see.  The dim sum varied from fried to boiled to a sticky kind.  Most of it I liked, but the sticky stuff reminded me of glue and I didn't eat much of it.

The Causeway shopping district

China SAS stats:  5 people drugged, 14 robbed, 10 cases of credit card fraud, 11 lost or stolen cell phones, 3 lost passports.  These kids don't seem to be learning how to be careful.

SHANGHAI

After sailing for three nights across the East China Sea and up the Yangtze Delta to the Huang Pu River, we arrived at Shanghai.  This is a very modern city of 23 million people,which makes it the largest city by population in the world.  Some of the Chinese on board told us that when they were young, the East side of the river ("Pu dong") was all farmland, but now it is the new financial district and full of skyscrapers.  They were designed by architects from many countries, so similarities can be seen to other well known buildings.  I took a city tour the first day (9 a.m. to 10 p.m.) and the guide told us that 4,300 skyscrapers (over 15 stories) were built in Shanghai since 1993.  Many of them are up there with the tallest in the world, although Dubai still holds the top spot.

Shanghai skyline from the ship

The West side of the river ("Pu shi") contains the former European concessions and Chinatown, where the native workers that serviced the concessions lived.  It is dominated by the Bund (Hindi for "waterfront"), which stretches from the former British consulate to the Fairmont Peace Hotel.  One side of the street is classic British stone buildings, now mostly Chinese banks and hotels.  The other side of the street is now a park.  Another area is the French Concession, with a lot of department stores, restaurants, and bars.  We were warned that the department stores were very expensive, with a 40% duty of foreign goods.  We went past a lot of upscale stores and huge shopping malls, so the Chinese must like to buy Western goods.  Many places are decorated for the upcoming Chinese New Year's next week.

Our first stop on the tour was the Jade Buddha Temple, built in 1882.  It includes two beautiful white jade buddhas, one sitting up (3 tons of solid jade) and another smaller one reclining.  Both were brought from Burma by a monk and there is no knowledge of how old they are.  Inside the temple is the Fo Yuan Tea House, where we got to sit and watch a woman prepare herbal teas for different medical problems before trying a few.  They told us that Chinese do not use teabags, but prefer fresh ingredients.  It sounds like a good idea.

Jade Buddha Temple

Happy Buddha

Some of the numerous Buddha's helpers

Buddha stands on crane to keep Shanghai free of earthquakes

More helpers

Tea time

Next we went to Old Town to see the Yuyuan Garden.  A garden in China includes several elements, including trees, water, fish, and a house.  This one was built by a government administrator in 1559.  There was a large pond with rock formations as a background.  They did not have cement back then, so used sticky rice to bind the stones together.  They do not let kids climb on the rocks.  A centerpiece is the Exquisite Jade Rock, a porous 5-ton boulder. It's not jade, but the cool thing is that water runs out of all 75 holes simultaneously when it rains.  Rumors about its origin include the story that it was meant for the imperial palace in Beijing, but was salvaged after the boat sank off Shanghai. The fellow also got in trouble for putting dragons on his roof, which were only supposed to be used by the imperial family.  He avoided punishment by cutting off the toes of the dragons and calling them something else.  There are several buildings and open pavilions, where screens and curtains insulated in cold weather.  Apparently the Chinese were not as fond of sitting on the floor as the Japanese, since the furniture (original) consisted of many fine tables and chairs.

Yu Garden

Jade Rock

Governor's study

The garden is surrounded by Chinatown.  The buildings look like old Chinese style but our guide told us they were built in the last 25 years.  Lots of people were out enjoying the fast food restaurants and shops.  We went to the Silk Museum and learned about silk production.  The moths make cocoons, which consist of a single thread of silk.  We saw 100 year old machines that unpin the thread from the cocoons and form it into multi-strand thread.  We saw how they then put it together and make quilts of many layers of the threads put together.  You can buy a queen size quilt with plain cover for $100, which seems a bargain for the work involved.

Chinatown

100 year old machine makes thread from cocoons

Adding the layer of silk

Seagull Palace restaurant

We stopped for lunch at the Seagull Palace restaurant on the Bund.  Our group of 26 sat at three round tables with large lazy susans the food was put on.  You get a very small plate, a teacup,  a soup bowl, chopsticks and a fork.  We started with some vegetable dishes, then they just kept bringing more chicken, beef, rice, cabbage, etc.  Every so often a new dish would show up and we would spin the lazy susan around till everyone got some.  We ended up with a very large variety of food and felt very full, even though we got only a little bit of any one thing.  One exception was that Grayson, a five year old sitting next to me, wouldn't eat anything but the french fries, so he took a lot of those.   The rest of us were eating french fries with chopsticks, which didn't seem strange at the time.

Mongolian dress, Qing dynasty

After lunch, we went to the Shanghai Museum, designed in 1996 with a square base and a round top, to reflect ancient Chinese philosophy that the earth is square and the sky is round.  In the front of the building are massive marble guardian lions.  The museum reflects arts and crafts of China's 56 minorities, as well as the numerous dynasties.  There are bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy, paintings, jade and ivory works, bamboo and lacquer wares, seals, coins, furniture, etc.  I particularly enjoyed the textiles, with weaving, brocade, batik, tie-dye, and embroidery.  The embroidery used thread ranging from horse tail to gold.

Shanghai Museum

Wooden throne chair

Tibetan male, early 20th century

Close up of brocade ritual coat

We were getting on the bus after the museum when one of the professors on the tour, who had seemed fine all morning, apparently had a heart attack.  I was near the front of the bus but turned to where he was sitting in the middle as someone said, "Something is wrong with Wade" and watched as he gasped, rolled his head around, and seemed to faint.  The husband of one of the faculty had just arrived from the U.S. that morning to join her and had not even been to the ship yet.  He is an internist and was able to start CPR right away, as soon as they got the man off the bus and onto a flat surface.  CPR continued for about 15 minutes until an ambulance got there.  It was unsuccessful but they carried on anyway, since a dead body in a foreign country is no laughing matter, so they didn't pronounce him dead until he got to the hospital.   The other two nurses in the group helped with CPR, while I sequestered the wife (also an RN and Director of Nurses) away from the CPR site.  The tour guide was great and went with the wife in the ambulance to the hospital while the rest of us waited with the bus for another tour guide to join us.

Our scheduled walk along the Bund turned into a drive since we had lost a lot of time.  We drove to a restaurant in the old French concession for dinner.  This was a similar set up to lunch but the food was not as good.  We then got on the bus and went to the China Circus World to see the ERA acrobats, who are supposedly the best in the world after Cirque de Soleil.  I always enjoy watching Chinese acrobats, and these did not disappoint.  Back to the ship by 10 p.m., quite a long day!

The next day I walked along the Bund and visited the Peace Hotel.  It is amazing inside and has a 1920's art deco feel, even the stuff in the gift shop.  I can just imagine the men in their tuxes and the ladies in their cheongsams chain smoking in the jazz lounge or the chi chi bar.

Peace Hotel jazz lounge

The Bund

Peace Hotel lobby

I went to China Bank on the Bund and asked about buying a Panda gold coin.  Apparently foreigners are not allowed to buy gold in China.  They have been importing a lot of gold and don't want it to go the other way.

Getting back on the ship, the Dean told me four students got in trouble yesterday and won't be allowed off the ship again in China (four more days).  I thought the death yesterday was bad enough, what with dealing with the aftermath and finding a replacement instructor for his classes (marketing).  We'll see what trouble the rest of the kids get into here.  The administration has a tough job.