And the band kept playing....

Yesterday morning we heard the blast of trumpets, the bang of drums and looked out our balconies to see a big hullabaloo outside the opera house across the street;  Flags aflutter, the marchers ebullience suggested some special inauguration or festival, none of which we could quite fathom.  After awhile, the music subsided, and life went back to normal, but while it lasted, it was an ebullient distraction~

We took a bus this morning to Vietnam's Academy of Social Sciences at Southern Institute of Social Sciences (SISS), where we had a lively conversation with the academics there.  Their talks were translated, as were our questions, and we had an informative session about the Chinese diaspora into southern Vietnam.  I photographed this pagoda because I was enchanted with the flips in its hair.

This was at the start of our SISS talk, and at each place at the table, we had plates of teeny bananas and rambutans (known as momochinos in Costa Rica).  We were poured some delicate green tea, and I took a picture of one of the professors, all of whom had come to this talk on a Saturday and wore jeans or other more casual clothes.  

In the afternoon we walked to the Chinese market called Ben Tay where we bargained (not I because I always feel they need the money more than I do).  These are ALL different kinds of coffee tinned up and ready to go; I keep thinking I should buy some of this to bring back, but who the hell wants to lug one of these through three countries, back to Hawaii and then home to Philadelphia?

A similar display of bags and other geegaws, dangling overhead; you get the idea that the place was really JAMMED.

Here is an example of the endless wires that have now been tied together instead of dangling three feet above the street.  Modernization in Saigon!

We got a chance to go inside Notre Dame, but it was the beginning of Saturday evening mass so we heard some lovely chanting even if we couldn't really go inside to the pews for a quick prayer.

These were names on slabs of stone along many of the walls inside the cathedral, and I wondered if people had been buried here - at least their ashes had.  It makes an interesting abstraction of markings, doesn't it?

Outside the cathedral this lady stands on a snake.  Who is she?  We couldn't figure it out, and we are travelling with two ex-divinity students!

Finally, as I was nipping out for a little frozen yogurt (you don't want to KNOW the price...), I saw these little cuties posing in the lobby.  Why, I asked the official photographer?  Because it was the grandmother's birthday!  So why, I wondered, weren't they photographing the grandmother?  The white logo on the woman's dress here is a heart.  Aww..

Over and out for today; We are off to temples, the medicine street and Cholon, the Chinatown, today, of course all piled into a bus.  Not much walking for this crowd, so I do my running in the mornings; today is a day off, but I'll be back on it tomorrow.