Saigon flower wars

(Note: the photos went up in reverse order, so read them from the bottom up)

I thought it might be nice to be in Saigon for the Chinese Lunar New Year - Tet. Wrong. Everything in Saigon had nearly doubled in price, most hotels were full, and I didn't like the city at all. I took a Jr. Suite facing a park & could look down on the craziness of dealing in trees/bushes and flowers for the New Year. For a couple of weeks, every roadside, every park, every previously empty space was occupied by sellers of mainly dwarf orange trees, and a kind of bush like an apple or cherry in blossom without leaves, followed by many other kinds of flowers. Below my hotel window, in the park were acres of thousands of plants/flowers. Of course, the buyers all wanted to haul them away on their motorbikes, and they would refuse to get off of their bikes to shop - instead lines of scooters pushing their way between pedestrians and sellers and flowers. The law is that all selling must be completed by noon on N.Y. day, so on the morning I took these photos, they had only three hours to sell all these plants. I think a lot of the obsessive bargainers and cheap wait until that last a.m. to go in an bargain. You can see in the photos, buyers trying to ride with plants fore and aft and the frenetic attempts to secure the unsecurable on a two-wheeler.

After the initial 0900 photos, I went for a walk and saw among other things, the very colonial main post office with the big photo of Ho. When I came back to my hotel at 2 p.m. garbage trucks had arrived accompanied by police, to seize every plant left in the park and toss them into the garbage. Naturally, there were a group vultures who knew this would happen and they could rush in and grab plants in the turmoil of resistant retailers and determined garbagemen and cops and get something for nothing. After the screaming and fighting, there were a bunch of happy, tho wretched looking (out of Dickens) winners of free trees trying to figure out how to transport their spoils, and dejected retailers fleeing the battle to avoid a ticket for breaking the law. It was truly unbelievable that when the garbagemen left and peace returned, there was not one leaf, not an errant orange from the millions that had existed only an hour earlier.