Mood:
happyWell, I’m back from Vietnam. Actually, I got back on the 19th, but haven’t had a chance to write since then. With Sabrina’s arrival and no time off work after the trip, this weekend is the first “breather” that we got!
First, before Vietnam, the week was fine. We are pretty much finished with Counter Insurgency theory and are now ready to begin writing the doctrine. We break into our writing teams on Monday.
In other news, we had Toshi (Japanese exchange student) and his family over for Tex-Mex night on Friday. It was a great night and Toshi seemed to enjoy it! Plus it was really good food... J
Also this weekend, Jacoby had to go door to door with some school mates collecting money for the Salvation Army. He spent about three hours and collected about $250 or so. He has a hockey game tonight, but it is sort of a “pick up” game, outside of his normal team. His real team is playing in Sydney tonight, but he wasn’t selected to play this week.
Now for Vietnam...First off, it was a great trip. I learned an awful lot about Vietnam and enjoyed the markets and food immensely. Of course, it was work related, so it wasn’t all fun and games, and you had to be careful about WHERE and WHAT you chose to eat, but again, all turned out well in the end.
We started off in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) which is better known by us westerners as Saigon. We stayed there for a few days, travelling out to see the cultural, military, and shopping sites in the south of Vietnam. We visited Long Tan and Nui Dat, which are significant sights for the Australians. Long Tan is a sight in the middle of a rubber plantation where they fought their most significant battle, and Nui Dat is the firebase closest to Long Tan, which provided their fire support during this battle. We visited and crawled through the Cu Chi tunnels, out in the jungle. Also while in HCMC, we got some cultural and national briefs from government figures to make sure “got the message.” It is a communist country, after all...
-But is it? I was VERY surprised to see all of the activity in their markets and the people creating and selling their products. We learned from the Foreign Affairs Minister that Vietnam switched from a Command Economy to a Market Economy about ten years ago. They simply realized that the Command Economy wasn’t working, so they adopted the change. They also accepted/revitalized their need for open and private education. So let’s review...Free markets, open education...Both of which are strongly AGAINST their communist foundations. However, everywhere you go, you see statues and portraits of three people; Karl Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh. Looking at the people, though, I’d say that there was no evidence of any sort of government controls on the day-to-day life of the population. While impoverished, their economy is growing by leaps and bounds under the principles of free trade.
Here are some interesting facts before I go back to narration. First, 75% of the population of Viet Nam was born after the “American War” (their name for it). That means that right now, 75% of their population is under 38 years old. The population is growing, steadily. The government sets their poverty line at $1 (US) per person, per house hold, per day. While they still have a sizable percentage of people below that line, that number is shrinking. Finally, the Vietnamese people are friendly (even to us) and look to the future for good international relations. Actually, they thought we were peculiar for even asking about the war. It was a common saying...”That was the past. We look to the future.” Maybe I was fooled, but they really seemed to believe in that mentality.
Back to narration.
After HCMC, we left for Hue (it’s pronounced “way” with a hard “h” sound at the front). There we toured the Citadel and the surrounding area. Interestingly, Hue was the capitol of Vietnam for a few hundred years a long time ago. The citadel was the site of some pretty brutal fighting during the war. We saw and crawled through another set of tunnels that, apparently, the Vietnamese people lived in for SIX YEARS during the war. Six years! Living in tunnels! We saw the rooms, the kitchens, the medical facilities (to including birthing centers). Six YEARS underground. No life on the surface. In the vernacular of the resort hotels, these tunnels rated exactly no stars. I honestly can’t see how they did it.
After Hue, we headed off to Hanoi, the current capitol. We visited the war museums and even the prison (the Hanoi Hilton) where they kept the American POWs, including John McCain. We had plenty of time to walk through what was left of it and took a bunch of pictures.
Then we came home, following a long layover in Singapore.
Now, some of the unofficial stuff. The cheapest beer we found (for the group, not for me) was $0.20 per liter. Average price was about $1 per bottle/can from reputable stores/bars. Food was cheap and plentiful, centring mostly around seafood. Also on most menu was pigeon (not a joke), beef, chicken, and pork. Almost every meal we were served had some sort of seafood chowder, prawn, squid, and fish. Most meals took about two hours, as it was served in ten small courses over that time. We left each meal full enough, but not stuffed, and of course, we knew everything about everyone around the table. Lots of conversation...
I bought a North Face backpack for $20 that would have cost over $200 in Australia. $20 means a lunch to me, but to the Vietnamese, that’s about a month’s worth of income. I bought Kimberly several outfits, mostly silk, and some wooden coasters and chopsticks, and two coats, one leather, the other a Columbia ski jacket. Both cost $30. We also got some DVDs for next to nothing. Now, are these things real, or knock offs? Who knows. We were told they were real, since both Columbia and North Face are produced in China, and they both have reputable resellers in Vietnam. Either way, I can’t tell the difference in material or construction...
And that’s about it. Vietnam was a great trip. I feel no need to go back, but I’m VERY glad that I went. I have about 500 pictures of the place, so I’m still working through them. I’ll see what I can post, eventually.
Hope all is well for you!
- Ryan -
