Tet Celebrations, Saigon's Year of the Tiger

When I'm in Ho Chi Minh City during Tet I always make a point of going up to Nguyen Hue to take pictures on the first day of Lunar New Year. This year was the busiest yet as the traffic bears testament to.

The rest of town was incredibly quiet. Here are some pictures of what everyone wanted to take pictures of:

Tigers of course.

Large and impressive tigers at the entrance to the floral display.

Well hell-lo! A debonair tiger with a touch of the Lesley Phillips about it.

A more traditional Vietnamese tiger.

And a Disneyesque tiger to complete the set.

At Tet everyone's a photographer.

There are flowers, tigers of course, calligraphers and family members to be captured.

And when all that pales there's always practicing walking in your new shoes.

Or talking your tiger for a walk through the streets of Saigon.

Chúc mừng năm mới.

Happy New Year

Last night we climbed onto our roof via the chrome spiral staircase mentioned in earlier posts to watch the firework displays along the river. Very spectacular, and today we ventured uptown to take advantage of quiet, by Saigon standards, roads and join the promenade up and down Nguyen Hue.

The entire four lane road has been blocked off and planting extends from the central reservations right out onto the roads.

As always the main attraction is posing in front of displays for photo opportunities and as always I sneak up and take pictures of other people taking pictures. This trio is outside the Kinh Do Conference Centre. Kinh Do is the confectionary king of HCMC.

Of course it's year of the Ox so we have lots of bulls to see, these ones are cunningly formed in concrete and lack certain features only noticeable from behind. You're getting the front view as it's more attractive.

More posing, but this time look carefully. You see the security person in the background? He has two jobs; to make sure people keep to the one way system - very successfully done and to stop people sitting on the temporary walls. The latter is not so well enforced, they tend to give people enough time to snap the all important picture before very politely requesting them to move on.

Clearly it's an exhausting job.

All this was played out to a background of recorded birdsong and latin classics. I like Tet!

Tet flower market, Saigon

As Tet approaches it seems like everyone goes flower crazy. The biggest market I've seen so far is in the park between Pham Ngu Lau and the New World Hotel. The plants are incredible and I was sorely tempted to buy some but we're going away over Tet and it's never pleasant to come home to dead plants so I limited myself to taking pictures of them.



Yellow and red are the predominant colours being sold but there's lots of variety of plant related objects, like fruit rats.



These stand about a metre and a half high and are made from a yellow waxy fruit which I don't recognise. They're sold in pairs and are, for want of a better description, striking. You might be able to see that they're entwined with fairy lights too. Nice.

Kumquat trees are very popular, I don't know if this shape is traditional of if it's borrowed from Christmas trees. They'll look spectacular when the fruit ripens.



Orchids are popular too, here's a perfect white blossom:



Of course, at times something a little more decorative is required, so why not buy an orchid planted into a straw dog's head on a plate?



Just to be on the safe side...


... the police maintain a presence. You never know when flower buying could turn nasty and I'm sure stall holders can sleep more peacefully knowing that they're there



That's it, I expect the next posting will be on our jaunt to Singapore and Cambodia, Happy New Year.

So grow

Foxgloves and broken fence
Originally uploaded by amasc

I think I've set up a link between my flickr and the blog, if you can see this, I have.