On my first morning in Ho Chi Minh City I got up as quietly as I could and put on some running gear to go for a quick trot around the city centre. Not far from the hotel is a large piazza, maybe a kilometre long and three hundred metres wide, at one end of which stands City Hall and a large statue of an avuncular looking Ho Chi Minh. It was good to join the locals jogging and walking around the piazza and the tourists taking photos of the fountains.
For someone brought up in the sixties on an endless diet of Vietnam war footage, the country today is a strange and confusing place. At one level it's like any other tourist destination full of landmarks and capitalist logos, but this co-exists with a totalitarian Communist government with loudspeakers in every village and town centre barking news/propaganda. Take the City Museum, which has an interesting collection of mementos of the recent past and some really strange stuff, which I guess concerns disputed islands in the South China Sea, including a really amateurish model of a some kind of island base, complete with the glass dolphins holding up the Communist party badge pictured opposite.
Our hotel has a rooftop bar with really good views over the city. After a day strolling around and taking in the City's atmosphere it's a good place to stand with a drink and reflect. Being high up it also catches some cooling zephyrs of breeze to ameliorate the hot and humid atmosphere.
Standing there sipping my brandy and looking at the City's equivalent of the Gherkin, I think to myself that from this perspective most cities look fundamentally the same, but that down at street level things get so much more contrasty, the "same same" and the different all juxtaposed and jumbled up. Perhaps that's why I feel such a compulsion to travel and why I love it so much, that constant search for the "same same" and the new constantly benchmarked against where we've come from making us feel part of something much bigger than ourselves?
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