05-13-08 Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam: 2121 hrs. Back in my room. This is my last night in Vietnam. Today was good. I went on a very long boat ride on the Mekong and took a lot of pictures. I sat at coffee place tonight and checked things out. I have been doing this ever night I’ve been here. One coffee place I sat in the first three nights I was here seemed to be a meeting point for white men and prostitutes. It seems to be some of kind of ritual where the pair hangs out at a table, don’t speak, has some coffee and leaves. I saw at least half a dozen couples do this. It was easy to see they didn’t know each other. It was strange to watch the mixture of her boredom meeting his nervousness. Yesterday I crawled through some of the tunnels at Cu Chi. It’s amazing what these people were able to do with what little they had. At the site, they show a 1968 propaganda film about how the Vietnamese were kicking ass and taking names on the American forces. It was intense to see the conflict from another point of view. In Vietnam, the war is often called the “So-Called War”. I have been lucky here, it’s been raining and overcast for the most part, which spared me the sun’s punishment. It’s been an interesting two weeks and I think it will take me a long time for me to get my head around all the things I saw.