Early in the morning, before the heat overcomes our slowly time-adjusting bodies, we hop a taxi to District 5. It’s way too far to walk, and our map doesn't bridge the areas between Districts 1 and 5. We ask to be dropped off at the main market, Binh Tay. The streets are swarming with activity. Inside the actual building structure we first wander through meters and meters of fabric stalls. These morph into artificial flowers, pompoms and all sorts of fabric/sewing accessories. By the time we come out of a side entrance, we’ve hit the rice paper wraps for springs rolls, in a variety of sizes, along with sauces and condiments. And then we’re on a side street of the market, which is nothing less than a feast for the eyes. The traffic jam is constant. Mostly motorbikes, who pull right up to vendors, buying, selling, dropping off goods, but in addition there is a sea of pedestrians, a wall to wall mix of vendors and customers, all of whom are busy conducting their business early this Sunday morning. Besides fruit, vegetables, rice, noodles, eggs, and wrappers for food, there are chopsticks, cooking vessels, bowls, fresh fish(most of which is lying in shallow trays with a minimum of water to stay alive), all kinds of dried fish, squid, octopus –either whole, shredded, bagged, in huge piles—, and then in some quarters, large hunks of indeterminate meats, live chickens and roosters housed in grass-fiber cage-baskets, and on and on. We wandered the immediate area for a couple of hours, simply taking it all in. No-one pays us the slightest mind—all of them far too focused on their respective tasks at hand.
From here we ventured into the hard-core chaos surrounding the market. Much like the center of the city, but now interspersed with Chinese herbal shops, eateries, motorbike repair shops, and a strip of sidewalk barely wide enough to walk on, for all the selling and commotion. We visit a few of the local pagodas, and after admiring the garish colors, ornate roofs and clouds of incense, head in to try to get a sense of what is going on in the busiest of the lot, the Thien Hau Pagoda. Hordes of locals are making their way through the different areas of the pagoda, lighting fistfuls of incense sticks, holding them to their foreheads, bowing repeatedly, then scurrying up to altars, planting some of the incense in the large urns, moving off to different areas, sometimes with small bottles of oil, which are then liberally poured into the candle stands, other times lighting huge, thick sticks of incense. Meanwhile, scores of others are busy at yet other altars, burning fake money, making circular motions around different items on the altar, then rubbing oil from the altar on their hair. In short, completely incomprehensible and confusing, but still fascinating. People make offerings of fruits, others buy medallions to add to a spinning medallion cone, and still others are hanging up immense incense coils from the beams in the ceiling. Everyone—not just us—appears to suffer from the thick cloud of incense smoke that stings the eyes. We leave the dizzying commotion and head back to a different whirlwind of activity, finally finding a taxi to take us back to the center of town.
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