War Museum

We went to the war museum and on the way we stopped at Trung Nguyen, the leading Vietnamese coffee chain, to have some coffee and breakfast fried rice. The coffee was good - Vietnamese coffee usually isn't - and Guy decided he shall buy some of it to bring back with us. We also stopped by a pharmacy to find out everything is cheaper there. I bought saline solution to clean my new piercings, and Guy bought some Vietnamese imitation Airborne. He chose the cheapest one because he says none of them do anything anyway. When we got out of the pharmacy it was rainy, so we stopped at a cafe called Sharing Coffee and I had some peach tea out of a mason jar, with pieces of canned peach in it. It was tasty.

The war museum is mostly a photography museum. The top exhibition room was called "historical facts" and was displaying charts and maps trying to explain what motivated the French and American interests in Vietnam and caused the Vietnam war. It was supposed to be pretty objective, but it still ended up sounding one sided.

The second space was a photography exhibition dedicated to photojournalists. The photos were taken by American and French news photographers, most of whom died on duty. This mainly demonstrated how terrible war is, but also the strange things news photographers like to photograph. There was another exhibition dedicated to the use of deadly DNA-corrupting chemical defoliant Agent Orange, and its effects on Vietnamese and also American soldiers who were exposed to it. This was mainly a collection of photos of horribly deformed babies and children, with associated captions.

The bottom floor was all about propaganda posters of solidarity with Vietnam from many Communist and anti-American organizations throughout the world. This part felt like exactly what it was: propaganda.  There was a small special exhibit on the maintenance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the network of trails that supplied North Vietnamese troops in the south) which would have been interesting if we weren't so tired by then.

Outside was a collection of tanks, artillery pieces, and planes - mostly captured American ones - that was more of interest to Guy than to me. There was also a small section devoted to South Korean prisons for North Korean terrorists and POWs, but this wasn't really any different from the prison museum we saw in Hanoi.

After we came back from the museum we tried some dinner at a skewer street restaurant called "Saigon Night BBQ." Some of the skewers were pretty good, but here too they tried to bamboozle us: I ordered Japanese tuna and they gave me a weird little river fish that looked to be all bones. I sent it back and they gave it to someone else but still tried to charge us for it. Guy refused, and pointed out that when he ordered some more skewers they also tried to pass off pork as deer, and chicken as pork.

From dinner, we went out for drinks at a rooftop bar called the Rooftop Bar, which is on top of a hotel in our district and offers a decent nighttime view. There were many young people there dressed up nicely, but we met and had a long chat with a Vietnam war veteran who's older than both of us together, and who had come back to revisit Vietnam for the first time after 50 years. He lives in the Philippines and is married to a younger Filipino woman, and they have three children he proudly told us all about. He even showed us a picture of his family. He was excited by the felt coasters they had at that bar, since the damp cups never stick to them. We had "local" cocktails: Guy had "Mekong" and Leia had "Miss Saigon."