Day trips

We went to CuChi for a day with a group of teachers we work with.  It is an amazing system of tunnels they used during the war to hide from the Americans.  The tunnels have kitchens, bedrooms, and storerooms in them.  They lived down there for years.  You could crawl from Cambodia to downtown Saigon!  The tunnels are so small that American soldiers could not fit.  (The one Julia's in has been dug out more)  Pretty amazing.

We took a little roadtrip with 7 friends about an hour and a half out of town to visit a waterfall.  It was kind of a "state/national park" type place.  You could rent a big tent and stay there overnight; that's our plan for next time.  It is the middle of the rainy season, so the waterfall was raging and full of sediment.  We got into a small part of the river, but the current was still strong.  Philip took a ride down the stream and one of the rocks took his wedding ring clean off.  Unfortunately it was the day after our 5th anniversary.

Around Town

Working full-time in a school, we don't have too much time off.  We are trying to make the most of it by going places close-by.  One of the sites in town is the Reunification Palace.  It's the site of the old French palace when they used to rule and it's the place the North took over to end the civil war.

Typical Saturday night traffic in Saigon.  They say there are about 34 million motorbikes in Vietnam.  Sometimes it seems like more.

Since we missed the 4th of July, we celebrated during Vietnam's independence day.  There were fireworks and a big production in the park.

This is the "Floating Pagoda," a pagoda on a tiny island in the middle of the Saigon River.  It was beautifully decorated with shards of pottery in mosaic.  We took a tiny boat out to it.  There were a lot of turtles living there and a friendly cat.

Saigon has a great zoo.  It has every animal imaginable: monkeys, tigers, hippos, giraffes, leopards, and a lot of rats.