I am staying in Pham Ngu Lao district, the backpacker area of Saigon because it full of interesting people from every corner of the world and every kind of background.
The old guys who judging by their sun damaged skin have spent a lot of years living here permanently and enjoying the cheap beer and other distractions.
Tourists.
- Chinese couples with their children.
- Korean and Indian couples and groups.
- Asians who when they speak English turn out to be American or Australian.
- Young women in pairs with a big backpack behind and a small one in front.
- Young couples on locally rented beat up motorbikes with a big seabag tied on the back touring Vietnam.
- Malaysians at a table on the sidewalk figuring out how to eat the Vietnamese version of tacos.
And there are the Vietnamese who on a slow evening come and drive down Bui Vien Street with their children and look, in a zoo like fashion at the strange foreigners.
While I am enjoying my stay here in Saigon I am struck by how much everywhere increasingly looks and feels pretty much the same, be it Barcelona or Saigon.
In the centre of town the very outrageously expensive big name international hotels and stores; Dior, Ferragamo, Coach, Versace and the rest for those Vietnamese needing to be defined by conspicuous consumption. See Thorstein Veblen for details.
And everywhere the spread of McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, 7-Eleven chains or local copycat versions of cheap mass consumption. In most instances it cannot be the quality of their products, locally produced food here is tastier, cheaper and much healthier. It must be related to a kind mass suspension of critical objectivity and the belief (it has to be advertising ? See Edward Bernays for details) that to be modern you must frequent their premises or be seen in the street with their product in you hand and maybe moving it toward your mouth.
In down town there are busloads of older folks, some European or N. American but increasingly Asian, being shepherded from one local tourist site and shopping opportunity to the next. The huge buses queue for parking spots, motors running to sustain the air conditioning.
In Europe it is increasingly the same with cruise ships of older Westerners, but increasingly Chinese saturating cities like Venice and Barcelona. And Airbnb, I am staying in one, pricing out locals and destroying the ambience of old city quarters
So I am in agreement with the Vietnamese who drive through the backpacker area to look at the foreigners, one remaining pleasure in travel is observing the other travellers.
Could I be becoming aged, definitely and consequently unhappy with world as I find it today, probably.
Too old to die young.
John