Day 8

With the success of venturing for breakfast yesterday that became the plan today. Conor and I skipped breakfast at the hotel to find something new to eat. We found some kind of corn dish with fried garlic and sugar on top, and a sandwich. We stopped in a small coffee shop to enjoy our food. It was all very good. Afterwards, we headed to a branch campus of UEF for a language lesson on bargaining before heading to the Ben Thanh market. The stand owners could smell the tourist on me and were determined to pull me into their stands. I was able to work my ways through all of them to find cool little souvenirs to take home and give to friends and family. After the market, some of us headed to a small soup place across the street. I had a very good bowl of pho before walking back to the hotel to set my things down before heading to the Buddhist pagoda. The first thing we saw at the pagoda was a kind of exhibit on these rocks that I remember hearing took 20 year to collect. These rocks were unaltered by human hands, a sort of natural art. I had fun looking at them and trying to find what i thought they could represent or embody, and I tried to see what the collector deemed them in theirs names like "infinite universe." After this, we were lead through the pagoda. We took off our shoes and walked into the first room that contained a huge, awe-inspiring Buddha.

Here is the Buddha statue

I donated some money and got a stick of incense to burn. We continued the tour through the pagoda we saw rooms dedicated to the martyrs from this temple and rooms filed with relics. From the pagoda, we walked to the sight of where the monk Thich Quáng Đức burned alive in 1963. There were two sites deicated to him on two separate corners of the square. There was a newer larger one with a mural behind it that painted the scene of the burning. It was a powerful scene of police beating women and monks.

a portion of the mural

 After taking all of the site in, we walked back to the hotel and got ourselves ready for dinner. I went to a shellfish restaurant. Everything was so delicious and fresh, so much so that you could see it alive right before it was brought to the table. After dinner we went back to the hotel for a minute before exploring the city briefly. All in all, it was another great day. The market reminded me of something i would see Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmerman would do, which I liked because shows like theirs excite me to travel. The pagoda was also interesting to see a place that fostered arguably the most memorable protesters of the war, and the corner where Thich Quáng Đức burned himself alive was a powerful historical site.