Holiday Trip

Their infamous war and triumphant victory against USA in world war II, or perhaps their steady information growth might be the only reason people around the world take notice of this country. Although its a part of ASEAN, not many of us cared about our neighboring country, Vietnam. On the Lebaran holiday in the past few weeks, my family went there for vacation.

Of course, before we even went to the airport, I had already protested and endlessly complained about our holiday destination. I couldn't really see what could be so special about this country, moreover, we only went to the capital city which i presumed was quite boring. After arriving at the Ho Chi Minch city, we went straight to our first hotel which was quite nice. Its called Equatorial hotel, a five star resort in the heart of the city. We checked in and settled in a room, big enough to fit all 4 of us with 2 bathrooms, tv, cooler, and lots of complimentary items.

After a few minutes in the room, we decided to went downtown to see what this city can offer. My dad told the cab to just circle around the city while we enjoy the sightseeing. The first thing that would most probably be quickly noticed is the number of motorcyclist. Compared to Jakarta where traffic is more dominated by cars, Ho Chi Minh city is dominated by motorcycles, not only that there are loads of motors, but they are also reckless and honks in every turn. Traffic was no much different with Jakarta except that there were no traffic light in the city. The setting of the city and the people's face looked very familiar those you can see in Jakarta. Even though, tall buildings are a lot less and perhaps people look in a darker shade, the city itself feels very familiar. We were dropped in one of the largest mall, one of the main project Ho Chi Minh government is trying to expand on. Its diamond mall ( or something, i forgot ^^), inside was no different to Supermal. We walked around and tried to find McDonald, we were going to save up our appetite of Vietnamese cuisine for tomorrow. After walking around, and of course the ladies were window shopping and stopped every 5 minutes, we couldn't find any McDonald, which later in our trip that we relized McDonald is a scarce resource here. Tired of searching, we went to their rival, KFC. After we were all well fed by the greasy chicken and fattening coke, going back to our hotel and take a long rest was the best idea.

Early next day, we were up and eagerly walked down to the restaurant to try some of the special Vietnamese breakfast. Their food were really good, less fried and grease. We also tried their special beef noodle, Pho. Its unique in the way its cooked. The beef, beansprout, and everything else were raw and placed on the raw noodle, then the cook pour in some sort of fragrant soup on it. The beef were quickly cooked. What made this Pho more special is that they put mint leaf and some special black soy sauce on it that added the aroma and taste of it. After we indulged in the breakfast, we set off to go to the city's most famous war museum gallery. When we first arrived in front of the gate, all of us thought it was a bad idea, but we went in anyways because there were nothing to lose and all places were expected to boring except the few other malls that we didn't go to. In the not-so-big frontyard of the building are some of the old war machines such as US tank, bombers, bazooka, and humvees. That was not the attraction of the museum though. The real deal was the photo gallery where they showed the absolute cruelty of war. Most of the pictures were taken by a famous photographer from life magazine ( again i forgot the name). After scanning quickly at the photo gallery, we went outside to the souvenir shop just beside it while my dad was still captivated by the somewhat inhumane pictures. Then when he was finished looking, we went inside the small museum building. It was still renovated and looked very dull but after looking around it and examine some of the sickest and yet sad objects, we were stunned. What the great war has produced were only sadness and sorrow everywhere, there were some unborn babies that were affected by the orange bomb and were kept sealed in jars of formaline, a picture of a soldier's body part thrown in all directions shot by a grenade launcher that will only explode when it hits a body, many pictures of children begging for mercy so that their parents can be released from death, and a lot of children born with horendous mental and physical parts missing from their body. After looking at those sad objects, we realized that war could bring nothing but sadness. Our day was occupied with the trip to the museum and new hotel, which were more like a service apartment. It was Caravelle service apartment. The place was really nice with everything more luxurious than our own house. We stayed and ate instant noodle because we were too tired to go anywhere else. The next day we flew back to Singapore to do some more shopping.

Looking back to the trip to Vietnam, despite the very little amount of places we visited, the trip was very educational. We learnt a lot of things we didn't know about Vietnam and also some moral about wars.

James A2 HL