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.