Saigon

I needed a weirdness break after a few weeks of mostly being around Asians. I had too much staring and strange one-sided conversations for my taste. So, I headed to Saigon, the big city. No one stares at me here. In fact, there are actually a ton of foreigners here, both travelers and expats. It’s been a nice change. I’ve also done some slight sightseeing at a very modest pace.

They got a museum here on the Vietnam War, which they actually refer to as the American War. The museum showed a lot of the horrors of the war and made me feel really terrible as an American. Chemical weapons are really awful and need to be eliminated.

I went to eat some dinner at a little cart on the street next to my hotel. While sitting down, I started speaking to another guy sitting at my little table. He was from Thailand and visiting his uncle who now lives here in Saigon. He was there with his sister and they were incredibly nice. We talk for a while and decide that tomorrow they will have me over for lunch. No problem. We agree to meet in the morning.

At the appointed time, I am out on the street still a little drunk from the night before. My new friends spot me and we jump in a cab. We get to their uncle’s house and have some lunch. He tells me that he is a casino dealer and that because I’m white, I can go to his casino and we’ll have a system to cheat. Then, we’ll split the profits. Since the casino was like 2 hours away and I’d never go there, I agree to learn his system. It was ridiculous and any pit boss would have caught it in seconds, but I played along.

After I learned it, some gambler came along to see if there was a mah-jongg game happening and decided to play me a few hands of the game that we’d fixed. The uncle bankrolled me and we start to play. I win and the numbers we bet keep getting more insane. I’m actually getting excited, but then during the final hand, the gambler, who was flaming gay and kind of staring at me, decides that he wont continue to play while I was playing strictly on credit. The uncle pulls me aside and says that he will get the money. The gambler says that we’ll postpone till I come up with the $80,000 that is up on the last hand. I have 21 and I know he has 20.

If the numbers weren’t so high, I might have fallen for it. The uncle tells me that I need to put up some of the money. I said sure just take me to an ATM. Really, I just want to get out of the house and back to my hotel. So, weird story, but I only lost 50,000 Dong ($3) in cab fare. Yeah the money here is called Dong.

The only other thing I want to mention is the absurd amount of motorbikes in the city. There are millions of them and the only way to cross the big boulevards is to just keep and a steady pace and let them move around you. They are literally inches away from you. Also, I have seen a full sized refrigerator on the back of a motorbike, not even tied down.