The heat is on in Saigon.

I'm in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. That, friends, is good ol' Saigon.
I have no idea what to do here, but I'm free for the next 27 hours. Go.

We might go see some stuff, but I'm just really not in the mood to see more war/evil stuff. Yesterday morning I went with the Professor and Callie to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge just outside Phnom Penh. I have pictures, but it was really a bizarre place. There is a huge stuppa (Buddhist structure to honor the dead) there, and inside are thousands of human skulls that have been exhumed from the mass burial pits on the premises. Ten stories of rows of skulls. There are signs telling the age and gender of the skulls in each section. Many are crushed from the top-- the Angkar did not want to be wasteful of bullets, so they used hammers, hoe heads, machetes, and axes.

As we wondered around the trail that goes around the campus, we saw the sights: emptied grave pits, the tree where they lashed children, the tree where a loudspeaker was hung to mask the people-sounds. Around in the back of the perimeter kids started begging from us. This is more an issue that one might guess, because my official stance is to never give to beggars. It's harsh, but there's a whole reasoning system behind it, and underneath is the fact that if you give one kid a quarter, his 23 closest friends are going to show up. I watched it happen to the Professor. Anyway, we didn't give the kids money, but one of them had a pop-gun. He was probably 8 years old, and he had a gun at a torture sight where his people had been killed by the thousands a scant few decades ago. I asked to take his picture, and being a good Cambodia kid, he agreed to do it for a small fee. I got a couple of pictures, and we gave all 7 of the kids 500 riels, which is about 12 cents each. The kid shot me with his pretend gun. I died on the Killing Field, if only for pretend.

Today we had a very stressful morning and finally got on the bus to get from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. HCMC was the capitol when Vietnam was divided. The bus took about 6 hours, and the drive was not bad. I finished reading Steinbeck's The Pearl and I finished listening to Rob Bell's Sexgod. I also took a nap.

Tomorrow night we board a double overnight train and get spit out in Hanoi at 4:30 a.m. on Monday. In Hanoi we are looking to see something called Water Puppets. I don't know, so don't ask.

T