Ho Chi Minh City- City skyline

Bitexco Financial Tower is a skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. At its completion in 2010, it became the tallest building in Vietnam and kept this status until January 2011. It was surpassed by Keangnam Hanoi Landmark Tower. On the 52nd floor, the EON Helibar is a great place for a drink and to see the city through glass windows. Photos were taken from there. Enjoy!

Saigon Water Bus ride

To reach another part of downtown Saigon and by doing so, also to see the city on the water bus.  My cousin calculated where we should get off so we can have the best view.  However, by the time we got there, it was not really what we expected.  Somehow, the taxi driver took us to a nice resort for lunch and we ended up visiting a gallery nearby.   Here are the photos taken on the water bus and couple of pieces in the gallery from the art exhibit called “Necessary Fictions”

Here is the description for the work:   The circumference of the exhibition tells a tale of Narcissus who falls in love with the mask he wears to the world.  He is re-birthed as a daffodil and soon re-populated the land. This is a land whose sense of rationality reigns supreme (though slightly askew), whose purpose is mapped for you to decipher, with its towers and fortresses and doorways providing curious order for its people.  Beyond, nature watches, as human desire struggles beneath its destructive renewal, the daffodil eventually consumed by its descendants, again.

Ho Chi Minh City

Like all other tourist, we did the following standard City tours: 

-Notre Dame Cathedral Saigon Notre Dame Cathedral, built in the late 1880s by French colonists, is one of the few remaining strongholds of Catholicism in the largely Buddhist Vietnam. Located in Paris Square, the name Notre Dame was given after the installation of the statue ‘Peaceful Notre Dame’ in 1959.

 -Independence Palace Also called Reunification Palace. It was the base of Vietnamese General Ngo Dinh Diem until his death in 1963. It made its name in global history in 1975 when a tank belonging to the North Vietnamese Army crashed through its main gate, ending the Vietnam War. Today, it's a tourist’s site in Ho Chi Minh City. 

 -Old Post Office Located right next to Notre Dame Cathedral, the Central Post Office was constructed between 1886 and 1891 and once inside, the looping arches, marble floors and antiquated telephone boxes are a reminder of the importance the post office played in days before email and mobile phones.


                                                                       Old post Office

                                                        Notre Dame Cathedral

                                                          Independence Palace

A New Year's Resolution

At every beginning of the new year, your friends would always ask that question, “So, what is your new year’s resolution?”. Well, as much as a world traveler as I wanted to be, we often forgot how good we have at home already. For example, each year we travel to faraway lands to visit some wonderful museums, but we forget in our backyard, we already have plenty of them. 

 There are hundreds of museums here in Washington DC. How many of them have you visited? I had only visited a few of them. So, it is my new year’s resolution to go visit them as much as I can and to appreciate what we have right here at home. 

This weekend, we visited Freer Gallery. It’s a warm and rainy day, most of the things were in grey colors. But as someone had once reminded me that grey and winter can still be cool and beautiful. So, here are some photos taken from a walk from Fords Theater to Freer Gallery on a rainy winter day. 

You can see the colorful buildings on 10th street, FBI building, the cool door of the Department of Justice, the very wide walkways along Constitution Ave, cool lamps off a building, a giant wooden mushroom, African American museum, the Smithsonian institution castle, colored cabbages, few of my favorite pieces seen in Freer Gallery and finally a small garden behind the Smithsonian institution castle which to me was like another secret garden! Enjoy the photos taken along my journey!