Its official name is Ho Chi Minh City, but even the people who live here tend to call it Saigon, because it's shorter and easier. You will at times see it abbreviated as HCMC.
It is the largest city in Vietnam with over 8 million residents who work very hard. That is the overwhelming impression the place left with me. Whether professionals working for private firms or the government, street vendors, store or restaurant owners, the city never stops from early morning until late at night seven days a week. Everyone seems ready to do business and everyone is looking to do business. If you are not interested in buying what a street vendor is selling, he will quickly ask if you want something else. If you do, he'll arrange it.
When compared with Hanoi, the nation's capital, Saigon is a bit more modern and pushing harder toward something that looks like pure capitalism. There are more office towers here and more people working office jobs as opposed to hustling as freelancers on the streets. But there is plenty of hustle. It is the one consistent characteristic in all of Vietnam.
Whether in Hanoi, Da Nang, or smaller cities and towns along the way, the people always seem to be multi-tasking. They set up shop where they live. They may have a primary job, but they also can provide hair-dressing services, nails, sell soft drinks and water, or homemade pho and other Vietnamese take-away dishes. As a result, even a major city like Saigon has hints of a rural lifestyle and the ways of the past.
There is a constant push and pull between old women in conical hats and young people racing around on scooters conducting business on smart phones. Sometimes you will see a woman in a conical hat using a cell phone and sometimes you will see a young woman wearing a conical hat as a fashion statement.
Everyone knows that the north won the Vietnam War and the country was unified under control administered from Hanoi. But if the war was about communism versus a free market system it looks as if the south won and Saigon is the country's financial center.
Saigon was the capital of the south and many of the iconic buildings Americans learned to identify from news coverage of the war still exist as reminders. The Hotel Continental and the Caravelle Hotel served as unofficial headquarters for the American press and visiting diplomats.
The former Presidential Palace is now known as Independence Palace. It's often confused with the former American Embassy, which was knocked down in the 1990s, because the palace and embassy are similarly shaped with a rooftop structure that can serve as a helicopter landing pad. There are also French influenced avenues and buildings like the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Old Post Office that remind visitors that the French were kicked out of Vietnam before the Americans were.
As economically advantaged as Saigon is, everywhere you look there are thousands of people operating as part of an old fashioned economy. People selling baskets of goods on the street and others doing back breaking work by hand even as construction cranes raise new skyscrapers in the background. I saw the same disconnect throughout the country.
If you simply track the new architecture you can see the direction things are headed. In Saigon (and perhaps Da Nang), I saw evidence of past building and planning practices being replaced by a more thoughtful modern approach. There were fewer instances of work crews jamming new buildings into small spaces and more signs of entire city blocks being pushed away for major multi-building office campuses.
It is very interesting to see the side by side existence of the new and old and understand that Vietnam is slowly moving toward modernity as older generations pass. It is simply understood, especially by the internet connected younger generations, that there are better, healthier, more efficient ways to do things. Tradition is apparent everywhere, but so is technology and its effects on quality of life.
Saigon is a tourist town. People from other Asian countries, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States are everywhere. Tourism is an important sector and a major reason young people want to learn English. I heard a bit more English being spoken in Saigon than in the north. It seems that every fourth storefront is a travel agent helping people get to other parts of the country, Cambodia and Thailand.
There are lots of restaurants serving Italian food as an alternative to traditional Vietnamese menus. Spaghetti is the universal connector that spans languages, continents and taste buds.
Street life in Saigon is a constant circus. In one district of the city, bars are serving balloons of laughing gas to young people and there are concerns about whether it's healthy. I saw one woman in her 20s inhale three large (beach ball sized) doses of the gas in the amount of time it took me to have lunch. I didn't see her laugh though.
Hidden away behind the main streets of the city are miles and miles of alley neighborhoods. I stayed in one. It was like a small town behind a small doorway. People live their whole lives in these small spaces where you can reach across the alley and touch your neighbor in the next house. Walking through you will see people watching television in their underwear, or just standing in the doorway - similarly dressed - watching others walk by. Dogs wander around off leash. And of course scooters race through with inches to spare on either side of the handlebars.
Every few feet on the city's main streets there is someone on the sidewalk trying to entice you into a restaurant or a retail store; trying to give you a scooter ride to the other side of town; sell you sunglasses or Buddha beads; and if you are not interested in any of that marijuana is offered as if that is the one thing everyone needs.
I suppose I can see why. If you don't have the ability to let the chaos wash over you Saigon can be overwhelming. It might help to have a little something to calm your nerves.
Credits:
© Dean Pagani 2019