The flight to SE Asia was largely uneventful, with everything running smoothly. I arrived in Singapore on time at 4:15pm local time and having had six hours of broken sleep on the plane, I wasn't feeling too bad. However, being on time meant I had a five hour wait at the airport for my flight to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) which with jet lag wasn't a prospect that particularly thrilled me. None of the Singapore furs were free to meet me so I was largely on my own, although this didn't mean I was bored as I realized that I had forgotten to inform my bank about my trip. Fortunately I managed to nab some free wifi in the Crowne Plaza hotel next to the airport, where I paid an astonishing 14SGD for a half of beer. Still, it helped me pass the time and it was a nice introduction to SE Asia. I also took the opportunity to explore the airport, where there was a giant inflatable Pikachu as part of their Pokemon Go promotion. You could also get the chance to meet Pikachu every Saturday and Sunday, although frustrating the Saturday I was there, this wasn't available. For some reason I was able to check into my HCMC flight four hours before departure, so this gave me a little more liberty as I didn't have my heavy bag, but with about two and a half hours remaining I decided to go through security and hang around there. There wasn't an awful lot to do in Terminal 3 so I opted to buy an MLP luggage tag of Rainbow Dash and go to Burger King as the SE Asian canteen had a voucher system I didn't really understand. The food was pretty good for fast food, with the cheesy chips in particular a delight, and people watching and walking up and down the Terminal made for a pleasant way to kill the time. The flight to Vietnam boarded on time, although delays on the tarmac saw us leave and arrive half a hour late, causing some fear that my pick-up from the hotel would have just gone home. Fortunately we no longer need a visa to enter the country so this formality was pretty smooth, seeing me pass through customs quickly and to the taxi rank, where a man in a grey uniform with orange trim was waiting for me. He fetched his car as I waited and soon we were heading into what was still a bustling city even at midnight. I did all the checking in procedure and then headed straight for bed, with the jet lag setting in.
I had an early start though, as Graffiti Rabbit, one of the local furs, had arranged a group gathering at 9am on the Sunday. The meeting point was the Haagen Dazs cafe four blocks away opposite the compact 30/4 Park. Finding it was pretty straightforward so after a quick breakfast, with many options quite foreign for European tastes such as Pho, I walked the ten minutes to the rendezvous. Even walking for this short time in this heat was difficult, although I got more and more used to it as the day wore on. I arrived bang on 9am but no one was there to meet me, although I didn't have to wait long for Graffiti and her friend to arrive. A few others dripped in as the minutes elapsed, including M Wolf and his brother, with M being the main person with whom I had liaised ahead of the trip. By about 9:20am, there was six of us and we set off into the city to explore.
The first stop, the Notre Dame Cathedral, was just a block away but even on our way there, I was enthralled by the busy nature of the traffic, with the sheer number of scooters and motorbikes on the road. This made crossing the road particularly different as they come at you from all angles, competing with cars for the road space. The green man was largely ignored so you just had to step into the road and walk purposefully and slowly, hoping the bikes would serve around you. It was quite nerve wracking but manageable, and something you just had to get accustomed to. Built between 1877 and 1883, this large brick cathedral isn't too dissimilar in style to its namesake in Paris and dominates the roundabout upon which it stands. The 40m high square towers at the front were particularly impressive, as was the white state of the Virgin Mary out front, which legend says has been known to cry tears. Alas the building was closed, even though everything seems to open a lot earlier in Vietnam than it does back home, so we turned our attentions instead to the adjacent post office, which is again an example of French classical architecture. Designed by Gustave Eiffel, of tower fame, it was built between 1886 and 1891. It's a large barrel vaulted hall dominated at one end by a giant mosaic of the revered Ho Chi Minh, whose statue can be found throughout Vietnam. On the side of the walls there are also historic maps of South Vietnam while the green wrought iron and the huge ceiling gave the place an airy relaxed quality.
I had only taken one small bottle of water with me from the hotel room and I had already drank it, such was the intense heat, so we had to stop off at a street vendor to get some more. We then walked down Book Alley, a pedestrianized street with nothing but bookshops and associated cafes down either side. Most of the books were in Vietnamese of course but there was the occasional English section, with David Walliams's works proudly on display. At the end of this street we saw a kitten and two puppies, the latter of which were chained up outside their owner's place of employment. They were quite playful and definitely wanted to be friends, so much so that they kept coming back for pettings. On occasion, the duo were seen play fighting with each other, and it again demonstrated how everything is made better with a puppy dog. As we swung towards the Reunification Palace, we walked past a major department store, the Diamond Plaza, with a huge Christmas display. A number of stores in Vietnam seem to do this, even though there is barely a Christian population in the country, and indeed four out of five Vietnamese identify themselves as atheist. The big festival here is Tet, the Chinese Lunar New Year, but for now the shops are going mad for Christmas. This one had two dog statutes stood either side of the main doorway, one black and one white. Around the building there were posters of these two dogs doing Christmassy things such as putting up lights. Apparently the two dogs are a French phenomenon called Gasperd et Lisa and considering they live in Paris, I am not really sure what the hell they are doing here. Urging everyone to have a "lovely Christmas", they were quite sweet and I got some photos of the huge statues.
Our next stop was altogether more serious, the Reunification Palace. Built in the 1960s, it has very much been a hostage to events, with its kitsch interior of various meeting rooms looking quite dated. It was through the front gates on 30 April 1975 that the first Communist tanks to arrive in Saigon crashed through, captured by photojournalists for all the world to see. Similarly, so was a VC soldier running into the building and up the stairs to unfurl the VC flag from the balcony. It was here that General Minh ceded power after only being head of state for South Vietnam for 43 hours. He said to the VC officer who entered the room, "I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you", to which the officer replied, "there is no question of your transferring power. You cannot give up what you do not have." The building is largely a number of meeting rooms, and hosted a number of important dignitaries (particularly American) during the Vietnam War. There was also a number of domestic rooms for South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem who treated the building as his palace. He was so unpopular that this own Air Force bombed the place in 1962 in an attempt to kill him, while the bombing by an infiltrator in the South Vietnam on 8 April 1975, as marked by two red circles on the rooftop, marked a key turning point in the end of the war. Diem was well gone by then, having been killed by his own men in 1963, with the rebuilt palace with bomb proof bunker not being finished until 1966. The real highlight, however, was the telecommunications equipment in the bunker, most of which being American and installed in 1968. It was crazy to think that this was cutting edge technology for the time and yet now, less than fifty years later, I could take a picture of it on a device that can access the entirety of the world's information which can also fit in my pocket. Outside the palace, we saw a few items of military equipment before heading outside to pick up some motorbikes for a trip to a local street cafeteria.
I had never ridden on the back of a scooter before, but it was quite exhilarating on the back of M Wolf's brother's Honda. The traffic was such that you couldn't go particularly fast but the fact that it was coming at you from all angles made it a little disturbing. My driver however was good and we made it to the restaurant pretty quickly where I had a delicious bowl of beer pho, supplemented by a sprinkle of some communal herbs and thick long sweet bread which soaked up the broth perfectly. My friends commented again on my ability to use chopsticks, a common point made to me on my SE Asian jaunts, while we talked a lot about the nascent furry scene that is developing in the country. This was going to culminate in the largest furmeet ever to be held in the country, that afternoon, and it was a real honour to be the catalyst for this and the largest Fursuit walk they have ever done too. I'll detail this in my next entry.