Ho Chi Minh City

This picture, taken right down the street from us, captures our experience of Ho Chi Minh City pretty well:


And actually, we love it.

It has a huge variety of restaurants and street food. It has bookshops, coffee shops, ice cream shops, bakeries, and plenty of free wireless internet. Often, if you're sitting on the street (as I am now), the shops will come to you. I'd say once every 10 minutes or so, a book vendor walks past to offer me a book:

(Actually, these are illegal copies of books--nicely bound, but copied pages nonetheless). Yesterday we walked past a storefront where, for a fixed price, you can fill your ipod with music from their huge (illegal) library of tunes.

The density here is striking. Down the alley where we're staying there are probably about 20 different hotels. They are all one room wide, 4-8 stories tall, and several rooms deep. Here are some of them across the alley from us.



Almost all of them have either a restaurant or a tour-agency on the ground floor, so there are about 10 each of those. And that's all within about 100 yards of our hotel.

I've been eating delicious rice porridge for breakfast and pho for lunch for several days now and it's been fantastic.