Our trusty Lonely Planet guide assured us that the walking tour of downtown HCMC would be well worth it, so we set out this morning to explore, loosely following the suggested route. First stop was the Ben Thanh market. I have been told that this is the most expensive real estate anywhere in the world, per square meter or whatever. I cannot verify this factoid, but I can tell you that the salespeople there are particularly pushy. They not only try to lure you in with their verbal appeals, but they grab your arms and follow you. The t-shirt people are the worst, and so we had some fun by asking how much the shirts were and did our best to act alarmed and offended that they had the audacity to suggest a price as high as two dollars. The next stop was the fine art museum, housed in an old yellow colonial building with a tennis court in the courtyard. The lady at the desk told me the house used to belong to a wealthy Chinese businessman who lived there with his and two other families, for a total of 30 people. I got some pistachios at a street market and I sprinkled the shells throughout the city. It was a hot and humid day so we ducked inside a frigidly air-conditioned mall and sat beside a fake waterfall for a while, discussing how it would be great to have a moto back home in the States. We looked around at a few other old buildings of local significance and we took photos of posters and statues of Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as the communists affectionately say. After lunch we visited the Reunification Palace, where tanks rolled up and a soldier ran inside and up to the top to change the flags in 1975 when the North Vietnamese took over the country. The War Remnants museum was next, documenting the American War, as they call it, in a way that makes you feel like they’re talking about the holocaust. Jon and I then discussed what it means to pledge allegiance when kingdoms collide, and how these things are all a lot more complex than American or Vietnamese big wigs would have you believe. The last stop we squeezed in was to visit the Notre Dame cathedral, a big brick church that lost its stained glass windows in the second world war. It felt more like Italy than Vietnam, except for the altar. At the altar of the church, below the crucifix, was a statue of Mary, with a neon Ave Maria sign. I’m telling you, Asians love their neon in places of worship, but seeing it in an ancient cathedral was a first for me. Mass was starting so we stuck around. I made faces at the little guy sitting ahead of me but I must say his facial contortions proved far greater creativity on his part than on my end. We ate dinner at a Vietnamese-Italian-Mexican place down an alley and then walked back to our street, stopping at a place called Propaganda, which sells posters with communist slogans and pictures of doves and machine guns and other things that go well together, using a lot of yellows and reds. We chatted with the guy at the store about the governments of our country and his. It was cordial, we thanked him, and then headed back toward the hostel, kindly declining offers from people on the street with stacks of travel guides for sale, who whisper in your ear offers of substances that might be smoked in order to obtain sensations not experienced by law-abiding citizens.