Family, Meet My Old Love: Saigon

Via Brother Henry

 

Tomorrow we’d be at a pristine beach resort, with a swimming pool and a villa twice the size of our Brooklyn apartment — easy fun for $500 a day. (Insane. While in Saigon try the Minh Chau $400 a month for everything. 4 1/2 stars.)

Almost as soon as we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I set out to make my family miserable. 

This was not difficult. It was late August, nearing 90 degrees and humid. All I had to do was propose we walk through the streets of the former Saigon to a restaurant for lunch.

 

At first, my wife, Jean, and our daughters Sasha, 7½, and Sandy, almost 4, were game. The road outside our Airbnb — an air-conditioned two-bedroom, with tile floors and brick walls, carved into a crusty ocher Art Deco building in central District 1 — was oddly calm. Shade trees spindled past skeins of electrical wire, while the low plastic chairs of an open-air cafe sat neatly in the shade of a long, blank wall. When we came to a busy avenue, we all held hands and stepped bravely into traffic, trusting that motorbikes would swerve around us with unthinking grace. (And they did!)

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