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Magical Mid-Autumn Festival in Ho Chi Minh City's Chinatown

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  F ollowing a notably lengthy absence (disruptions and adjustments caused by obvious reasons - hint! begins with 'C' and ends in '19'), the Jaded Empress is back with a vengeance!  And so it appears, is her beloved Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)!   After all the horrors and surreal-ness of Covid-19 and the global pandemic, or more precisely, the Delta Variant, which bulldozed through Vietnam from May 2021 onwards - the lockdowns, the curfews, the food stamps descending into the farcical citizen's weekly food shop by the  military,  the police check-points, the sanitized spray-downs by Hazmat-suited officials, the cordoned off city alleyways indicating rampant Covid-19 spread, as chronicled in my compelling Ho Chi Minh City: the Covid-19 diaries Part 2   HERE - this megacity seems  to be back to normal -  that's if you can class Ho Chi Minh City as 'normal,' ha ha ha!  Borders are open again, expats and visitors are flocking back, busine...
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Ho Chi Minh City: the Covid-19 diaries Part 2

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  W e ll... perhaps I / we spoke too soon!  A s detailed in my Covid-19 diaries Part 1  here  (imperative to read first), Vietnam and especially, Ho Chi Minh City, the nation's Covid-19 poster child, had done a pretty remarkable job managing the coronavirus outbreak, in fact one of the world's most successful in terms of relatively low number of cases and deaths.  After  just over a year,    in late May 2021, the  Covid-19 tally was roughly  42 deaths and 5141 cases out of a population of 90 million and   sheesh, e ven the economy is growing.  Overall,  compared to much of the rest of the planet during the global pandemic,  I was lucky to lead a fairly normal life in Ho Chi Minh City for a year or so and apart from scant work, dwindling funds, borders closures and witnessing some favourite venues forced to close, nay, even quite the enjoyable time.   How proud the Saigonese were of their 'normal se...
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