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!