A guide called Tu sat down at my restaurant table where I was eating a bowl of noodles with one fried egg and showed me his business card, which read, "Touris guide." I explained to him that I was here in Vietnam to teach English and would he like me to correct some of the small errors on his card? He was not insulted and seemed appreciative, and then we agreed for him to take me to some pagodas around Saigon, mostly in what he called Chinatown, where many immigrants live. We hopped onto his scooter and he navigated the insane traffic here quite well, I thought, except for a near knee brush with a genteel lady on her motorbike (the streets are jammed with slow-moving mopeds and the flow never stops, not even at most intersections.)
I was hoping to take some photos, but my camera's battery died very quickly, after just four shots. Here is one of the Buddhist shrines at the Giac Lam pagoda, the oldest in Vietnam, built in 1744. It has a seven-story stupa (which I wanted to take a picture of with people praying in front, but oh well) that you can climb up and check out views of the city and see how flat it is around here.
Other adventures that did not get recorded was a trip to the Chinese market in Cholon, which seemed as large as several football fields, at least! And dark and crowded with so much stuff. It had a lovely Buddhist shrine in the center courtyard, though, with a dragon head spouting water and lots of incense burning. Also undocumented was another quick visit to a second pagoda where Tu and I tried to help an ailing bird dying on the pedestal of a statue by giving it some water. The bird was an offering people can buy outside the pagoda to let free once they cross the threshhold. But many of the birds are sick, Tu said, from living with so many others in small cages, and they often die inside the pagoda or nearby. (On a happy note, inside the pagoda I saw one fat little bird chirping, in seemingly good health, which hopped from the edge of a fish pool -- filled with one monstrously large pink fish and many tiny ones -- over to a bench where he found a few crumbs.)