Day #4
Today we went on two trips. The first trip was a visit to an art gallery that hires handicapped persons to handcraft the artworks. Anything from plates, vases, and wall art. Very intricate and beautiful work, and I decided to purchase 2 plates that will go well with the plate display that I have back home in Dallas. I’m fascinated by this place because it’s a perfectly engineered tourism trap. . By exclusively hiring people with disabilities and explicitly stating they do so because these workers have no other employment options, the gallery gains massive leverage to suppress wages. They have essentially commodified a sob story to justify what is likely a lower-than-average overhead. On top of this, they offer workers a commission on items sold, even though there is no transparent system to track who produced what. On top of that, they position themselves as a manufacturer-priced gallery to create a sense of value, despite the fact that the exact same art sells for a quarter of the price, as I saw 3 hours after our visit. It is a good combination where high tourism markups are disguised as a charitable mission. I still got my plates, but I was a bit stunned when I saw the same artwork at the gift shop at the Cu Chi Tunnels.
And here is the same art being offered at around 1/5 of the cost at the Cu Chi Tunnel gift shop.
After the art visit, we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The longest wartime tunnel is about 155 miles long. The place was lots of fun. Very hot, but fun. We learned how they were able to deceive US troops by having part-time fighters who only fought for the Viet Cong at night and differentiated themselves by wearing a different uniform than the full-time troops, which made it more difficult for the US to determine who a soldier was. I think that part-time soldier idea backfired because, as they frequently mention, the US just killed the civilians anyway since they couldn’t tell who was a part-time enemy vs a full-time one. I feel like that system made it easier for civilian deaths to occur. But after the tunnel visits, we went to the shooting range at the tunnels, and I got a few rounds in with the Kalashnikov. First time at a range, but I enjoyed it.
The trip to the Cu Chi tunnels really put into perspective how brutal the war was for the Vietnamese. They lived in tunnels deep underground, which were brutally hot, extremely narrow, had no light, and had no way of managing sewage. Living like this for nearly 20 years is something that I couldn’t even imagine. Thankfully, this war has passed, and we are now given the warmest of welcomes into the nation as Americans.