Another day in Saigon I still maintain the opinion that, overall, Ho Chi Minh city is much easier to negotiate than Hanoi, and the hassle factor is less. The kids here, however, are much pushier. That said, the kids here, and over all of Vietnam, have been the best parts of our journey. Here are two opposing, yet striking images of kids burned into my memory now: 1. Little kid on the road in front of Reunification Palace holding a very real looking silver gun and pointing it into traffic. This kid would have been dead in the states. The police would have shot him. Very menacing looking image; 2. A very little boy (must have been 3 or 4, looked about the age of the kids I work with) tried to sell Mark some gum last night while leaving the very good German Restaurant (Gardenstadt- no kidding, the best German food Mark and I have ever had outside of Germany, In Ho Chi Minh City!!!!). Mark manuevers to get around him, kid manuevers to stay ahead, they both break into a run in front of me, the kid continues to chase Mark down the block (a game at this point). This was one of the most adorable things I've ever seen in my life. Really, made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, wish I'd had the camera out.
As a result of little guy number two I bought some stickers today to give to the little ones when they attempt to sell us something. This is nice, but doesn't work well. You end up with a crowd of whining kids around you begging for one more. And they're pushy, going so far as to put their little hands in pockets and feel you up to get to the stickers. Poor little guys. Really, they shouldn't be hustling on the streets at so young an age. They're so tough, but they're just babies. Sadly, Mark saw a little fellow about 6 or 7 yesterday selling cigarettes of all things.

Still confused as to why people think Ho Chi Minh City is more hectic than Hanoi. HCMC is a piece of cake, and has so many more places to dine and shop and drink than Hanoi. We're getting bad, though; we just ran out of the rooftop bar at the Caravelle Hotel after only peeking at the menu, because they were charging 46,000 dong for the cheapest beer. That's outrageous! We paid half that at the previous place. Then, riding down the elevator, we realized that that's only $3.00. What's become of us?

We went to the Czech restaurant in town today for a real beer. Then we got caught in a downpour on our way to try the Mexican restaurant in town (the Tex Mex Cafe); it was, uh, not very good. Serves us right.

We've settled into Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and it's not half as hectic as we were expecting. Everyone we talked to said it was worse than Hanoi, but it seems everyone we talked to was smoking something. There are wide sidewalks here, and traffic lights, and a lot less honking of horns. And, we found a supermarket! It was very exciting, after seeing nothing of the sort for weeks. We loaded up on goodies.

I was reading a book I bought in Hoi An called "In Siberia" by Colin Thubron, but I left it in the taxi when we got dropped at our hotel here. The blurb on the jacket reads that this guy was one of our greatest travel writers, which is a load of hooey. But I think I can do a pretty good imitation now of his style of writing, so I will describe our final day in Hoi An as he would:

We slept in on our final day, then camped out under beach umbrella to soak in a last lingering look at the majesty of the wind-swept ocean. The weather began to turn, and Marjorie internalized it; her illness an unhealthy portent for the trip ahead.

The car arrived to take us to the airport. He drove us down a street in the proximity of the hotel that had lurked nearby, invisible to our concious minds, perhaps visible only to those who sprung from the native soil. The road was an artery for the local village; each motorbike a corpuscle, carrying life-giving sustenance to those who dwelled there. Nearly half the houses were painted sky-blue, in defiance of the weather, as if to say to the Fates, do your worst. We will subsume you and rise above.

ESSCH! We're in Ho Chi Minh city. This is supposed to be the tough city, but so far Mark and I find it much more modern, clean, and manageable then Hanoi. Just goes to show......
Went to the War Remnants Museum today. Pretty disturbing stuff. Got stopped by a guy outside one of the halls, who was missing both arms and an eye. He was very pleasant and spoke English very well. He seemed to just want to make conversation and sell some books or postcards, but given the situation and my nationality (which he immediately inquired about) I felt very depressed and manipulated. Mark showed up shortly after I encountered the guy and gave me a graceful exit. The man did nothing wrong, but I still feel so horrible about the encounter. Guilty, is really how I felt. The museum really pushes the crimes the "Americans perputrated against the Vietnamese". Funny there's no mention of the re-education camps and the way south Vietnamese (ARVN) veterans are still being oppressed here today.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!! Marjorie and I are sitting together at the Hoi An Beach Resort, and would like to send our warmest holiday greetings out to all, especially to our families who have been so wonderful for us this year.

Our Christmas wish came true for today; all we did was hang out at the beach, and the pool, and had wonderful weather the whole day. Other highlights of the day:

The next resort down has an elephant named "Darling" that we saw walking up and down the beach all day. We went down and had pina coladas at their bar.

Our hotel has an area of the beach that is free of people harassing you to buy things. It was fabulous.

Marjorie came out of the restroom after dinner tonight with a baby gecko on her shirt.

The weather looked threatening as recently as an hour ago, but now we see a multitude of stars.

Merry Christmas! Our xmas will be rather anticlimatic if the weather here doesn't clear up. We've no presents for each other and no special plans, but we have moved to the Hoi An Beach Resort. Unfortunately it rained all day today, hopefully we'll have better luck tomorrow.
Hope you are all having a wonderful holiday! I miss being a part of it all, but I'm sure this will be a memorable xmas in it's own right.
Very sorry to hear about Joe Strummer's passing. Sucks for us all, but especially for his family this time of year. Mark, I'm sure, is even more depressed than I, as he was a fan of Strummer's recent solo work as well as the Clash.
We are very out of touch with any global news or news of celebrities so we appreciate the updates (thanks Jenn!) about anything that might be important. The English newspaper here is rather bizarre, with an interesting twist on reality, tries to neatly summerize whole societies and such... you know, I'm sure our own papers do that but I don't pick up on it because the generalizations probably fit into my schema. Who knows.
We're here (in Hoi An) until the 26th, then we are off to Ho Chi Minh city/Saigon.

I'm so bummed! One of my musical heroes has died. Joe Strummer -- whose two recent solo albums are two of my favorite albums of the last few years -- has, like phony Beatlemania, bitten the dust. What a Christmas eve downer. Before even hearing the news, I was planning on coming in here and quoting this bit from "Straight To Hell", just because it's relevant to our current time and place. I guess it's now a tribute.

When it's Christmas out in Ho Chi Minh City
Kiddie say "Papapapapapasan, take me home.
See me got photo- photo- photograph of you and mamamamamamasan,
of you and mamamamamamasan."
"Let me tell you 'bout your blood, bamboo kid:
It ain't Coca Cola, it's rice."

Three Shirts, Two Pairs of Shoes, One Skirt, One pair of Cari Pants, and a Nightgown later.... I'm finished shopping. It's nice to have new things, but the custom-made experience is not without risk. The skirt I had made yesterday is already sort of falling apart as a result of wearing it out into torrential rain last night with another new shirt which leaked black dye all over the skirt. I frantically washed away at the dye on the skirt when we got back to the hotel and now the material is fraying(and the dye's still on it). Oh well. Also the shoes I had made look pretty cheap, but what do you expect for $20.00. I had Manola Blahnik dreams only to settle for something that looks like it's from Payless.
The weather has been very rainy for the last 24hours. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrow will be nicer as we'll be moving to the beach resort then. It doesn't feel at all like Xmas here. Part of me really misses all the shopping and stress and Holiday specials on TV. I'm a bit homesick still, but things have definitely been easier for us here in Hoi An the last couple of days.
We've made our reservations to leave for Ho Chi Minh City/Siagon on the evening of the 26th from Danang. Hopefully we'll have time for a boat tour of the Mekong Delta.

We happened into the same restaurant last night as Helen, our fellow traveler from Australia who we saw several times in Hanoi. So we dined and chatted into the night; she's a hoot. Hi Helen!

The long walk back at night, in the rain, was creepy; there was not a cyclo driver to be found, so we had to hoof it. Besides the "suburban" location, we realized our current hotel has these disadvantages:

1. The air conditioning doesn't work (despite our insistence on a room with AC).

2. Roosters. I've come to hate the filthy buggers. The myth that they crow at dawn is purely anecdotal; they crow all night. The fact that I had pho ga (chicken soup) for lunch today is just a coincidence, I assure you.