Tuesday, February 8 – Water puppets. We took a tour of the sights of Saigon which included a stop at the local history museum where we had a demonstration of the art of water puppets. The puppeteers sit in the water behind a screen and manipulate the puppets in front by wooden sticks under water attached to the puppets. The action is kind of crude and dramatic. The stories are traditional dragon stories or other folk stories in Viet Namese so we could not understand them.
Other highlights of the tour included the oldest Chinese temple in Saigon, Reunification Hall, the French built Roman Catholic cathedral, the post office designed by Eiffel, and the US embassy where the Americans left Saigon. Our tour guide was a young South Viet Namese man who knew the history of the War very well and clearly was not a Communist sympathizer. He portrayed the events leading up to the surrender of South Viet Nam to North Viet Nam in terms of it being an unwinnable war. The Communist government tried to eliminate all cultural, societal and business aspects of the capitalists South but subsequently have become more liberal when they saw that their efforts were not working economically. Viet Nam is politically a single party socialist state that now has a capitalist economy. The Reunification Hall is where the South Viet Nam government operated during the War but is now a museum celebrating the reunification of Viet Nam into one country. It is architecturally very lovely with a somewhat modern open architecture. Outside are the two communist tanks that broke through the gates to seize the building and end the war.
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