Our first stop today was the building once known as Presidential Palace during the days of South Vietnam. It sits on the site of a previous French Colonial building, called the Norodom Palace, that was completed in 1871 and served as the Governor Generals residents during French colonial times. Following the French it was the Palace for the South Vietnamese President until damaged by bombing in 1962. Thereafter the construction of the new Presidential Palace was commissioned. After the war ended in 1975 the building was renamed the "Reunification Palace". It was again renamed to "Independence Palace" - I have not been able to find a date for this final renaming, but probably after or in anticipation of, normalization of relations with the USA around 1995.
So what about the building itself?. A wonderful example of 1960s decoration.
Following the Palace we paid a quick visit to the Saigon Central Post Office which we were told was design by Gustave Eiffel, but which (according to Wikipedia) is incorrect, see link. Of more interest to me was the close-by Cathedral being restored as a joint project between the Catholic Church and Vietnamese Government. This seems to me like a common cooperation between (Christian ?) churches and authoritarian Governments to use religion as a means of managing a population. A lesson from the playbook of modern Russia.
The "highlight" of a days tourism in Saigon is a visit to the War Remnants Museum. Like the Palace this building and its exhibits have undergone a series of name changes as Vietnam's relationships with the USA have changed. You can read the details at the previous link but I will give a summary:
Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes, an early version opened in 1975.
Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes
Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression, 1990
War Remnants Museum, 1995 with renormalization of relations with the USA.
The museum itself was a sobering experience. Let's leave it at that.
On a lighter note our next and last stop was a small house containing exhibits of Vietnamese traditional medicines and medical practices. The house is owned by, and the exhibit collected and displayed by a local doctor, who is also a professor at a local University and owner of a major Vietnamese Pharmaceutical Company. It is a wonderful collection of things some of which are easy to understand (like the grinder I am pretending to use) and many of which are perplexing.
The last three photos were a late addition to this entry. We had a light dinner and drinks at the 26th floor Sky Bar of Hotel Liberty Riverside to celebrate our 53rd wedding anniversary, and our guide gave us a small lucky charm gift (last photo) for the same celebration. It is a small denomination bank note folded to look like a diamond.