Vegetarian chickens' feet???

Today we took a city tour; a small group there were 5 of us altogether plus our guide.

First stop was the Chinese market in an area called Cholon, HCMC's rather large China town (500,000 inhabitants). We spent an hour squeezing between the jam packed stalls, we especially enjoyed looking at the food sections and for some truly bizarre reason the butchery section always has this almost magnetic pull on us. Women were in the thick of it squatting on top of counters hacking away at carcasses, pigs' trotters strewn around and innards spilling out all over. That said, surprisingly the smell wasn't too bad, it may be a different story by noon. More pleasant and colourful were the vegetable and spice sections. There were a couple of counters selling mock meat. Examples include relatively normal (and very realistic) vegetarian prawns and beef (both of which we have sampled), moving on to slightly more unusual vegetarian snails, pork liver and baby squid, culminating in the truly wacky vegetarian chickens feet, pig ears, stomach lining of cow and (and I quote from the packet) internal organs of a chicken. To add the finishing touch to these appetising treats you could buy a disturbingly large bag of 'Masterchef Gourmet Flavour, new generation flavour enhancer.' Delicious.

After the market we visited the Thien Hau Temple, a Chinese buddhist temple. We visited the Central Post Office and Notre Dame Cathedral, both built by the French, where we had the misfortune of witnessing a drive-by camera snatching incident.

We had lunch together then in the afternoon we visited Reunification Palace, the former Presidential Palace of the southern Vietnamese state (the picture accompanying the entry shows this). Following this we visited the War Remnants Museum which was quite a sombre experience. Outside the museum were the showy exhibits of captured US helicopters, tanks etc. Inside the museum was a large collection of photographs taken by American, Vietnamese and International army and press photographers. Many of the photographs were shockingly explicit; families, children, elderly men and women photographed in the seconds before they were shot, soldiers in combat, people (dead and alive) having been burnt by napalm and phosphorous bombs. It was pretty heartbreaking.

I didn't know a lot about the Vietnam/ American war before I came here and neither did Matt; we have definitely gained a better understanding of it. Interestingly our guide fought in the southern Vietnamese army so was on the same side as the American's; he worked for them as an interpreter. He was one of the many southern Vietnamese soldiers who surrendered following the US withdrawal and fall of Saigon. His reward for happening to be on the 'wrong' side was 3 years of hard labour in a 're-education' camp. When he told us his name was 'Charlie' we realised this was meant with more than a hint of irony.