Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

I never posted about Saigon (as it's still referred to by the locals), which I visited prior to Hoi An. According to the guidebook it's the city of 3 million motorbikes. Crossing the street seems impossible at first, but eventually you get sort of used to dozens of motorbikes swarming around you.

Vietnam has been a great place for eating so far; more to my liking than Cambodia. The first night we were planning to have Vietnamese for dinner but then we passed Franny, a well-known ice cream shop, which just happened to be having an ice cream buffet since it was the first Friday of the month. So instead I had sesame, chocolate, lime, raspberry, passionfruit, chocolate chip, cinnamon and various other flavors of ice cream and sorbets along with fresh fruit and crepes. That should satisfy my ice cream cravings for the rest of the trip.


On Saturday we were more adventurous and had stuffed snails (the pork and snail meat were mixed together) for lunch. We shared a table with a couple of locals and they ended up ordering the dish after we got ours.





















We also had this great drink full of colored gummy things topped off with coconut milk and ice. The green worms are made out of pea flour, the yellow is bean and the pink blobs are water chestnuts with a jelly-like coating.















We splurged on a nice French dinner at Augustin: baguette! fresh salad! duck! fish!













Some motorbikes at an intersection. There were this many motorbikes at pretty much every intersection at all hours of the day and night.







One of the meeting rooms at Reunification Palace. The painting was done by the architect. Reunification Palace was built for the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and was then named Independence Palace. But North Vietnamese tanks crashed the party April 30, 1975 and it was later renamed Reunification Palace.