City tour Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) or what fits on a moped (Vietnam part 8)

On our tour through the old French quarter, we first visited the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. It was built in the early 20th century and is still one of the landmarks of the city today.

Directly opposite is a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh on a square, smiling friendly into all the cameras that are photographing him with the city hall or a tour group in front of him.

Then we turned into the former Rue Catinat, which is now called Dong Khoi. We are currently reading Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" and wanted to take a look at the Hotel Continental. This is where the two main characters of the book first meet.

Right next to it is the opera house built in 1899, where the South Vietnamese National Assembly met until 1975. Performances have been held here again since 1976.

On Dong Khoi street, we continued walking towards the river, passing by the numerous luxury stores that have settled in the city's main street.

During our walk, we also had to practice crossing the streets. In Ho Chi Minh City, the traffic was even more chaotic than in the smaller cities in the north or center that we had visited. Here, one had to be brave and step onto the road when the flow of mopeds wasn't so big and, of course, you couldn't stop if you didn't want to be run over.

It was impressive to see how much can be loaded onto a moped here. It's amazing that we used to have trouble transporting several crates of drinks in a smaller car, when eight of them can easily fit on a moped... So not only families, but also motorcycles loaded with sacks or ladders passed by us. Occasionally, fallen goods would block an intersection. They were calmly collected again while the rest of the traffic snaked around the obstacle.

In the evening, we spontaneously went to the opera and watched the performance "Teh Dar", a successful combination of dance, acrobatics, and music.

The story told about the Vietnamese tribes, and although we didn't understand the few lines of text, we still found the performance impressive.

With our ticket, we also received a voucher for a beer at a craft beer brewery, so we made a stop there on the way back to the hotel. The place didn't look Vietnamese at all and could have easily been in Berlin in terms of ambiance. The beer (brewed without the German purity law, but with coffee roasting flavors) tasted very good in any case.