HCM

Tim, Laura, Sara, Martin, and I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon, on Monday night.  In combination with the surrounding towns, HCM is made up of more than 9 million people, making it not just the largest city in Vietnam, but the largest city in all of the territories making up the former French Indochina - Laos, Vietnam, most of Cambodia, and small parts of Thailand.  There's fascinating history with regards to this region and it all makes sense in the context of what happened with the French and the Japanese during World War II.  This is something I need to study up on more when I get back home.

The border crossing was quite interesting.  We crossed over at the Vietnamese town of Moc Bai.  Just before the crossing though, we passed through the town of Bavet, Cambodia that seemed to be comprised of only casinos.  Really large, fancy casinos.  It turns out that border casinos in Cambodia are big business.  Thailand doesn't allow gambling within the country, period.  In fact, their laws regarding gambling are quite strict.  However, that does nothing of course to dissuade its citizens from partaking in  private gambling - cock fighting, muay thai boxing, etc.  It's estimated that at least 70% of the Thai population gambles regularly.  After all, life is short and laws are meant to be broken in SE Asia. Vietnam and Cambodia don't allow gambling by their own citizens, but foreigners are allowed.  Which means casinos can be built if they only allow foreigners in.  And so, in Cambodia, casinos have been built on border cities (e.g. Poipet and Bavet) to capitalize on citizens from neighboring countries.  The casino business is doing okay for now, but there is speculation that Vietnam will soon partially legalize gambling for its own citizens.  Depending on the form the new law takes, it may mean the end of the casinos at the border towns.

We went through a customs check, but it seemed to be mostly for show.  I walked through the "metal detector" with my 5 lb full brass/steel camera in my hand, and the machine didn't even make a peep.  I'm not even sure it was on.  And if it was, there wasn't an officer in sight to stop and search me.  It would perhaps save the TSA quite a bit of money if they also had similar setups.  And likely, equally effective.

On the other side, we piled back into the bus for the remaining 3 hour ride into Ho Chi Minh City.  Vietnam's contrast to Cambodia was immediately apparent.  The roads were twice as wide, and twice as smooth as Cambodia's.  As we approached HCM, there were still small huts on the side of the road like in Cambodia, but they were constructed much better and there was a lot less garbage in the streets.  The contrast continued to grow as we got into the city.  It was easily apparent, even at night, that HCM was much more developed and modernized compared to any of the Cambodian cities.  It was also a little strange to see the signs in Vietnamese.  The Vietnamese language has an interesting history and derivation.  It originally started off being quite similar to Khmer and had similar roots in Sanskrit.  However, in the past 150 years, it became heavily influenced by Chinese, in particular the Cantonese dialect.  The written language has evolved as a result of the region's French colonization and has developed a interesting Latin form with additional diacritics (accents and other glyph symbols) to accomodate the additional vowels and sounds that are not used in Latin-derived languages.  Thus, when you see the Vietnamese language, you can almost read it.  Except that you probably can't because there are very different rules of pronunciation for their alphabet.

This results in some rather awkward and comical attempts at speaking (comical at least to our immature Western minds).  For example, the money is called "dong" (VND).  1 US Dollar is exchanged for roughly 20,000 dong.  The first night we got here, I exchanged $50.  Which got me 1 million dong.  Hell yeah.  For about half an hour, I became a millionaire.  :)  And then I bought a shake.  So then I wasn't.