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Ho Chi Minh City - War Remnants Museum.
We had breakfast in the bakery this morning, it's become our favourite place! They have loads of cakes and they make really good smoothies! So we wasted a couple of hours in there before taking a taxi to the war museum.
It was very upsetting to read about the torture inflicted on the Vietnamese prisoners. Some of which is unimaginable, worse than what we had learnt about from the S21 Prison in Cambodia.
The museum displays tanks, planes, helicopters, guns and bomb shells left behind from the Americans. It was really interesting to see them up close and chilling to think they were once used in action.
There were three floors inside the museum. One of the floors displayed photographs of young adults and children affected by the chemical Agent Orange which the Americans used when they bombed Vietnam. Thousands of people have been born with deformities and abnormalities due to the affects of the chemical. It is believed that the chemicals affects will be genetically passed down through at least five generations before the affects stop.
Descriptions and photos of the different techniques used to torture the prisoners are in our photo album, so if you would like to learn more please take a look. There is also a copy of a heart felt letter written to Barak Obama from a person that has been affected by Agent Orange, pleading for financial aid because the Vietnamese government can only afford to give each sufferer $10 a month!
We're glad we went to the museum, but it did seem to be a one sided account of the Vietnamese war from the Vietnamese side.
On our way back to our guest house, our taxi driver tried to rip us off. I had been watching the price on the meter jump up really quickly. He tried to charge us seven times the amount we paid to get to the museum! Chris refused to pay him so he got angry. Chris kept his cool and told him to make it a reasonable price otherwise he wouldn't pay him at all! The driver said he would get the police and Chris said alright! He began to drive so I told Chris to get out of the car. I didn't want to take any risks so I took a photo of his number plate and the company name on his door, MaiLinh. I had read a bad comment about this company on Wikipedia, advising not to use them because they speed up the meter, we obviously now know this is true. The driver shouted at me because I took the photos. Realising he wasn't going to win he accepted our money which was just over what we paid before and sped off.
We have spent the rest of the afternoon in the bakery, the staff laughed at us when we came in again. We need to get a taxi to the train station now, hopefully it will be as nice as the one from Thailand.
Charlotte & Charlotte
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