Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Hello, all. Katy here again. This week I want to tell you all about Ho Chi Minh City, and Tet, which is the Vietnamese celebration of the Lunar New Year. This post is going to have a lot of good, and unfortunately, some really bad in it. It was a complicated week to say the least.

First of all, some of you might know that Ho Chi Minh isn't the only name the city holds. Many also call it Saigon. So let's clarify. Ho Chi Minh has been the official name of the city since the American War ended (the Vietnam War from our perspective) and the city was renamed to reflect the name of a beloved communist revolutionary leader. Vietnam's relationship with Ho Chi Minh the man is an interesting one. There are statues of him everywhere, and student read about him from a very young age in school. He is said to have never married, and this is very important to many people, for he was married to the revolution. He is purported to have had no other attachments but the communist revolution, and is loved for it. Of course, not everyone was on the side of the revolution, and many were out of country, so there are still those who call the city Saigon. But it does seem pretty widely accepted that the name is now Ho Chi Minh (HCM), and boy do these folks love that guy. It is good to know, whenever you may visit, however, that HCM and Saigon are used interchangeably in conversation, as names of hotels and restaurants, and the like. This is all still pretty recent in history, remember.

The view from our hotel's rooftop bar

Traveling to Ho Chi Minh this time of year was deliberate on our part, as I especially really wanted to celebrate the lunar new year somewhere where it was a big deal, and there were lots of public events to show. Tet is the name of the holiday here, and much like New Years in the states, the eve before is a big deal as well. Jamie and I spent Tet eve at a flower festival that, if you remember our pictures of the festival in Busan for Christmas, rivaled Korean's enthusiasm for crowding and selfies. Keep in mind that it is quite warm here. Not as close to the equator as we were in Indonesia, but just as warm minus the humidity. So we went to the festival at night to beat the heat, and wound up sitting by a lily pond watching a magnificently detailed light show of flowers blooming and butterflies projected onto one of the facades of a huge white city building. The whole show was set to music, big booming Tet music with a heavy drum beat, and took full advantage of the shape of the building. Often the projected images were made to look as if they were coming out of the windows, or contained by the shape of the building. I was thoroughly impressed!

On the day of Tet, once again at night, we celebrated by going to a Tet fair in a nearby city park. The set-up was enormous, and involved every inch of the park which took up multiple square city blocks (much like the park blocks in Portland, OR if you happen to have been there). There were some rides for the children, mostly including small circular rollercoasters and play trains, but mostly the fair was for people more interested in cultural displays. For example, bonsai tree competitions. We saw more bonsai trees in more shapes and sizes than I knew possible. The largest ones grew in what looked like porous boulders, and I'm very curious to know what kind of rock forms like that - like swiss cheese. The were decorated with small porcelain figurines, ponds with little boats on them, lights, and flowers. The whole display was incredibly impressive. But back to those rocks... Whatever they were, they were a work of art all to themselves, as there was a separate judging platform just for the rocks. People seemed to be cultivating? growing? these stones into strange shapes with holes and protrusions. I didn't understand the judging, as from my perspective, awards often went to some of the most boring looking rocks, but I can only assume I simply don't understand the art of manipulating stone. Being a fair, there was also food. Food everywhere! Street vendors set up their own streets within the park with lights and music, all fighting for your attention as you walked by. Street food in Vietnam often involves meat on sticks, bao (though a bit different from Chinese bao), and bahn mi which is a sandwich on a simple Vietnamese roll with meat, vegetables (not lettuce) and something pickled (maybe radish?). Oh and there were dragon dances! I've never seen a dragon dance before, but these were two to three people under a classic dragon costume, hopping from platform to platform, about 5 feet in the air, and preforming all sorts of jumps and movements I wouldn't have thought possible. And then there was the pagoda. There was one pagoda in the park, and several around the city... but pagoda's deserve their own paragraph...

Just outside a pagoda, after having just seen a dragon dance

Much better. So, pagodas. Tet here is a very unique holiday, and pagodas take a central role. If you've followed this blog since we moved to Korea, you may remember a post about Chusok, the Korean ancestor and harvest festival. Well Tet has a similar tune, with the harvest consisting of flowers only, and the ancestor worship happening in public, rather than in family plots. To understand a Vietnamese Pagoda, and the ancestor rituals there, and Tet as a holiday, it is going to be important to understand a bit about Vietnamese religion. Vietnam is the only country I've ever been to where the predominate religion is a folk religion. And it's not easy to explain. J did a bit of research while we sat observing rituals on a park bench outside a pagoda one afternoon and found a bit of clarifying information. Vietnamese folk religion often looks like a combination of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Many variations on the religion exist, much like in most religions, that give some sections a heavier emphasis on the values and ideals of one of the three above mentioned larger religions. Vietnamese folk religion recognizes many gods or spirits, and these spirits vary from nature gods of mountains and rivers, to immortal figures in the heavens. Often, a beloved family ancestor is said to have ascended to such god-hood or spirit-hood. There are also some prominent mother goddesses in the ideology to the best of our understanding. It is thought that the religious practices of Vietnam are very similar and perhaps related to those folk religions of Southern China. This makes sense given the long history between China and Vietnam. I wish I could go into more detail, as I did a good deal of reading about the history of Vietnam while in HCM, but I'm afraid this post would become very long. If you are interested though, the history, religion, and culture of Vietnam are well worth some time and research. They are certainly very unique from a western perspective.

So Vietnamese people's celebration of Tet, and particularly their visits to pagoda's are colored by this underlying folk religion. People gather at ornately decorated pagodas (think gold and red and jewels and carvings everywhere), which look like small temples with incense sticks, and jars of an unidentified thick, yellowish liquid. The ritual is done by the young and old, and from a foreign, observing perspective, looked something like this. At the entrance to the pagoda vendors sell incense sticks and old glass soda bottles filled with our mystery liquid. Every person gets as many incense sticks as there are rooms in the pagoda, and each family gets one jar. Everyone moves through the pagoda from room to room and stops at each icon (usually a large and golden statue, surrounded with flowers, and central to the room), raises the incense to their forehead and bows repeatedly while holding the incense at head level. Then an incense stick is left in a prepared pot at the foot of the icon to continue burning while the person moves on the next room. The jar of liquid is reserved for the main room, the largest, usually in the center of the pagoda, where it is poured around a large candle, by an attendant whose job it is to speak a certain phrase as the liquid as it is poured. I don't know what the liquid represents, or who it was for, but each family that visits would tell the attendant something different when they handed over the jar. The attendant however, always said the same thing in response, giving me the impression that you offered the jar in honor of an ancestor, and the attendant said something like a blessing. Again, it was all very difficult to understand, and J and I stood quietly in the corner, not wanting to interfere or gawk at something so clearly significant. The process was ritualized and meaningful, and with the candles and the drums and the incense the whole placed smelled sweet and smoky and had your heart pounding in rhythm.

Tet decorations at a nearby cafe

And now, to address the question as to the lack of photos in this post. With so many beautiful, significant events attended, why so few pictures? Well, as we left the Jade Pagoda on our last day in Ho Chi Minh City, we had a bit of an experience that I've never quite had before in the last 7 or so years of globetrotting. I got my purse snatched walking down the sidewalk. As in, a motorcycle wheeled around on the road and came up onto the side walk to rip off of me the purse that I had slung across my body and was carrying in front of me. The encounter was incredibly startling, scared me in the moment (as I was pulled forcefully until the strap gave way) and utterly miserable. Fortunately I had my phone in hand, and our passports were in a safer location. But the thief made off with my wallet, money, camera, and a few other sentimental trinkets I keep on me at all times (think wallet photos, and such). We were very shaken, and are still recuperating as it has made it a bit hard to fall asleep for a number of nights now. But neither of us were hurt physically, and vital travel documents were all safely stored elsewhere. So there's a travel lesson well learned: make sure the straps on your bags are strong, and short enough to be able to carry them closer to your chest than your hip.

Additionally, J and I were recovering during our stay in HCM from a virus that had us bedridden for a few days of the trip, with fevers and a cough that took our breath away, and though we were on the mend, after the robbery, we plummeted for a few days again. Fortunately, as I mentioned, it was our last day in HCM, and boy were we ready to leave. The festivals were beautiful and the holiday was fascinating, but the city is absolutely enormous, and it left us a bit exhausted and defeated. So we moved on. We hopped on a sleeper train headed north that night. And the rest, is for another post :)

Cheers!
-K