The Marvelous Kirchner Adventures in Hong Kong: Ho Chi Mihn City

The last few days of our Christmas/New Years trip was spent in Ho Chi Mihn City. I can honestly say I loved this town. It was big and bustling, but it still felt homey and friendly. I would go back here in a heartbeat.

Our first order of business was to find some pho. After scouring a few blogs, we found this place, a pho cafe that had been open for decades making the same family recipe. Whenever a place has this many locals inside, we know we've hit on something great. This place definitely didn't let us down!

This was probably the best pho I have ever had! The secret is in the broth, and this stuff was fantastic.

After pho we went over to the old headquarters of South Vietnam from during the War. I am so glad we went here. It was incredibly interesting, both to see the building itself, and to see how the current government portrays history.

The ground floor had three massive conference rooms. This yellow one was used for state dinners. The golden decor was to achieve a look of opulence.

This green room was for large scale meetings and negotiations. The green decor was to inspire calmness.

This was the largest room in the building, used for large conferences etc. Funny that they currently display both their national flag (red with gold star) and the flag of communism, the hammer and sickle. The Soviet Union used that symbol on their flag back in the 60s-80s time frame. Now they have returned to the traditional Russian flag of three broad stripes of white, blue, and red. Why does a country need to so publicly declare what kind of state they are? I googled "flag of democracy" and all I could find was that there was a punk band called that in the 80s. Huh.

This was a really cool strategy room, where every spare inch of wall space had a map of some sort.

There were also several smaller meeting rooms on the 2nd floor for one function or another, including the President's private office with a staircase directly down into the bomb shelters. This really was a huge building.

Apparently this was the wives' meeting room. So while the men were downstairs discussing the war, the women were upstairs staring at flowers? I'm sure they were waging their own war amongst themselves.

The roof here had its own helicopter landing pad. This part was really amazing. Apparently towards the end of the war, one of the fighter pilots of Southern Vietnam was actually a spy, and one dark night he took his fighter jet and flew on a secret mission to drop 2 bombs on this very building. He succeeded, but luckily the president wasn't killed. There were so many plaques about the place commemorating this spy fighter pilot as a war hero, saying how brave he was etc. They even outlined on the roof where exactly the bombs fell. If the war had turned out differently, this guy would have a war criminal and called dishonorable and a coward. Interesting.

The third floor was the fun zone. There was an old school stage for shows and movies, including the oldest looking film projectors I have ever seen.

There was also an old school game room and bar, including a mahjong table, and hysterical 70s decor.

We then headed downstairs into the bottom of the building, to see the bomb shelters. There was a first level bomb shelter made to withstand a medium sized blast, then an even deeper one (which we didn't go into) for a super large blast. Talk about low ceiling and feeling claustrophobic... But there was lots of cool stuff down here, including more strategy rooms, radio rooms, correspondence rooms etc.

At the ground floor there was the coolest industrial kitchen I have ever seen! Look at the size of that stand mixer!It was taller than I was.

Everything was stainless steel and humongous. It must have been state of the art in its day.

The basement even had a shooting range.

After touring the Southern Vietnam government building, we went on to explore the rest of the city. This included the local market, always a must see.

I've seen lots of elaborate flower displays since living in Hong Kong, but I've never seen once made primarily out of orchids. This must have cost a small fortune.

This market also was selling coffee instead of tea! Did you know Vietnam is the second largest grower of coffee in the world, behind Brazil? So there were cafes everywhere throughout the city, and it made the feel very relaxed and cool. After Vietnam comes Indonesia, and then finally Colombia. Who knew.

This is one of the more modern buildings in HCMC. There were still lots of cool French colonial buildings around, but I'm sure a ton were destroyed in the war.