Ho Chi Min City!

Hey all. Currently writting this post from Laos but I'll keep the summary to one country at a time. Vietam was amazing. I flew into Ho Chi Min city, my mom met me at the airport, and we took a taxi to Kevin and Tracy's appartment. The first thing you notice about Ho Chi Min is the motorbikes. There are about 3.5 million motorbikes in the city compared zith only 350000 cars. Ho Chi Min; formerly known as saigon, has an estimated population of 10-11 million people. It zas the former capital of South Vietnam before the communist party took it over in 1975 marking the end of the Vietnam war. There are 19 districts in Ho Chi Min, Kevin and Tracy live in district 7 where many of the ex-pats in the city live. You can see Kevin's school from their window it's so close. was greeted with a care package mom brought all the way from the US for me and a delicious home cooked mexican dinner (the food I had missed the most). Sunday we visited the orphanage Kevin goes to almost every weekend. A bunch of teachers and student from Kevin's school came aswell. The orphanage is run by all these buddist nuns and is set beside a beautiful temple and gardens in the middle of the bustleling city. There are 94 girls at the orphanage and when they are 16, they are givin the option of whether or not they want to become a nun. This is a really cool aspect of the orphanage because in many other orphanges run by some religious affiliation, the children become practacers of that religion whether they want to or not. That afternoon we visited some seriously depressing war museums. The really depressing museum was the War Remmanants Museum. This described in detail the war crimes of the French from 1887-1954, and the American war crimes from 1955-1975. It showed gruesome pictures of the war and terrible consiquences of the bombing like agent orange, where a high number of Vietnamese had horrible birth difects due to the bombing. The museum is of course completely one sided and all of the "facts" must be taken with a grain of salt, however there is a lot of sad truth in that museum. The next day after stuffing my face full of sushi for the first time in more then three months, (for the insanely cheap price of 20 bucks for the three of us, man I love Asia) we flew to Hanoi.