I woke up and immediately felt the urge for street food. Without brushing my teeth, showering, and almost forgetting to put on pants, I burst outside of the hostel on the hunt for a good meal.
The menu said the meal was called "Noodles with Beef". I hope I got the pronunciation alright.
I met up with Michele and Marie and decided to go to the Ho Chi Minh museum. It was a long walk through a lot of traffic to get there but it was worth it. Once again the museum here shed very little light on the bigger picture of the Vietnam war and instead focused on smaller things like specific quotes, clothing and background of Ho Chi Minh.
Amazingly I wasn't museumed out at this point, so we all decided to go to the woman's museum afterwards. Along the way we ran into Sean (the Irish bloke I met before). The museum was focused on showing the contributions and expected roles women played in society from generation to generation. The museum was very positive mentioning that women have been treated as equals to men in Vietnam culture. My own experience of Vietnam so far makes me doubt this though; so far I have always seen men and women play very different roles - women are often in the kitchen cooking, and men are at the counter serving or doing manual labour. Maybe they earn equal pay, but there is still a large cultural gender divide. Marie (who has Vietnamese ancestry) confirmed my doubts.
Afterwards we had an epic street food meal followed by chocolate croissants and crepes. I'm so glad it was France that colonized Vietnam and not Ethiopia. While eating, Sean tried to show me the basics behind playing the harmonica. Put it this way, I'm a slow learner.
I'm really starting to enjoy using catch phrases here. A sign you'll find written in every bathroom is "have some fun, use the bum gun". I've also learned that 'hello' in Vietnamese is "sing chao" and 'thank you" is 'cam on'. This is really great because now I can rock up at any bar and just say "sing-tao, come on!" and still be polite.
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