Saigon Hotpot

One of the biggest gripes that I hear from my colleagues in the tourism industry is that there's a need for more certified tour guides, who are proficient in foreign languages. Certification is an issue in and of itself, but please allow me to introduce a group of college kids who have ganged up to exercise their language skills on foreign tourists. 

Started in November of '06, Saigon Hotpot is a group of 11 core members, all matriculating at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities here in HCM City. They are all in the language program and are all at least trilingual -- some speak four or five languages. They volunteer their time to show visitors a side of Saigon that they normally wouldn't experience. Since its inception, Hotpot has taken over 90 tours with over 200 travelers from around the world. And they do it all for free, saying that they only want to share their culture with visitors and play a part in the future development of the city. They'll even do one-on-one tours, as I found out yesterday. 

I met up with one of their youngest members, Phuong, who was to be my buddy for day,  and we went out to Cu Chi, which is where the National Liberation Front staged their military attacks outside of Saigon. Famous for its network of underground tunnels, Cu Chi is an underground labyrinth that totals about 75-miles all added up. To be honest, the experience was a little numbing, and it made me curious to know the emotional challenge for American veterans to visit the site. They probably would have done the same thing I did: blow off some steam by shooting a gun. 

Albeit, I have to give credit for the ingenuity of the NLF for its guerilla tactics and perseverance against a more sophisticated opponent, not to mention the challenge it must have been to build and defend this underground camp. For every bomb the Americans dropped, these guys would turn around and use the scrap metal to create their own arsenal.

But going there with a Vietnamese "buddy" (the Hotpot crew consider themselves as friends of their guests, not tour guides) at least allowed me to see the experience from a different perspective than most travelers. We even took the local bus out there, and when the guy next to me hocked a loogy on the floor, 2-inches from my foot, the ticket agent who rides along reprimanded him saying, "there's a foreigner next to you. Show some respect." The guy smiled and said, "what does a foreigner have over me, a Vietnamese." (All this was being translated to me by Phuong.) 

At the end of the day, he was right. I have no claim over how he or anyone else should conduct themselves in public. Only the Vietnamese can determine their standards for public decency.  

When we got back to the city, Phuong and I went for a traditional hotpot meal, and I forgot all about the troubled past. 

As I was told by the Hotpot crew, they chose the name of a traditional Vietnamese dish because it symbolizes the diversity of their group. A hotpot is like a make your own soup, where you pick the base broth and then add beef, pork, fish, squid, veggies, or whatever you like, and cook it table-side. It's a melting pot of different tastes and is exactly what Saigon Hotpot is, a group of different minds and cultures coming together with strangers, who will eventually become friends.