Morning in Chinatown

I am working on liking Ho Chi Minh City(or Saigon as the locals call it). Today we went to explore Chinatown with its busy markets, ornate temples and of course, excellent food.

A few pictures and one video to give you an idea:

Vietnamese coffee in the market. This stuff is strong and it is sweet.

Check out the knock-off Stanford shirt

Then it was time for a cyclo ride to a few temples.

It is an interesting, hot, slightly nerve racking form of travel.

Cyclo ride through Ho Chi Min from Kate Bedford on Vimeo. (note the poor video quality. That is because it was not taken with my Flip Video camera. I don't care what Cisco thinks, they are better than everything else and I am sad mine is gone.)

Isn't that beautiful? Isn't it romatic? Know why the air glows like that? It is filled with incense smoke. Each of the red things hanging from the ceiling is making smoke. So is almost everything else. See this picture

On the street:
This is not a calm place.

We had a fantastic lunch at corner restaurant filled with families. It was cheap. It was fantastic. It included 2 beers each. We went home and took a nap after all that excitement.