Day 7

Our first weekend in Vietnam began in Ho Chi Minh city where we got to "sleep in" a little bit... breakfast at 8am.  After breakfast, our tour guide Thanh led us to the Independence Palace, otherwise known as the Reunification Palace. We snapped pictures and took videos of the different rooms and sections of the palace as we followed Thanh throughout the building, we learned about the history of the rooms and the purpose of each of them, the most interesting room of them all was obviously the cinema and the projection room. 

As our time at the Palace came to an end, we took the bus to the museum dedicated to the American War; the name given to the Vietnam war by the Vietnamese. In the museum, we walked through different exhibits and examined pictures of children affected by Agent Orange. Some pictures of the war which really interested us were pictures taken by American Journalists at harrowing moments, opening our eyes to the desensitizations of war upon humanity. Leaving the Museum, a stack of minimalistic movie posters caught our eyes at the gift shop on the way out and we spent a solid thirty minutes looking through our options. 

At one o' clock, as our hunger started setting in, we headed towards Pho 2000 where we had our favorite Vietnamese soup once again, at a restaurant where Bill Clinton once dined. As we noticed the pictures, Troy started to chant the "Bill Nye the science guy" theme song. "Bill! Bill! Bill!" and soon enough the rest of the group blindly started chanting along, embarassing Omeed and the tour guide.

When lunch ended, we headed towards our next destination, the Ben Thanh market. A tightly packed room filled with many vendors and merchants trying to sell us all of their products for a higher price, since they knew we were foreigners. But we weren't too easily fooled, as we masterfully bargained our way to the prices we desired, even lowering a price from 1.2 million Dong to 300 thousand. 

We concluded our time at the Market with all our new toys and headed to the post office, sending a few post cards, and took a slight detour through Chinatown to see the different cultures.

We finished the day with a light, traditional Vietnamese dinner of pork ribs, chicken and seafood.

The day has yet to conclude as we write this blog, but we are all excited to get some rest to wake up in the morning and venture to the Cu Chi Tunnels.