Word: pedicab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pose a few logistical problems. Travelers from the Soviet Union and East bloc countries, seeking a winter refuge, come in droves. As current allies, they have the clout to book the downtown hotels, while Americans are often relegated to the Tan Binh, a tedious, hour-long pedicab ride from downtown's central market. Among the scant diversions of the place: tasty, small loaves of French bread, pint bottles of dreadful Vietnamese vodka and a nearby tennis club. For a pack of American cigarettes, the local pro will cheerfully run you into a puddle of perspiration on the single cement court...
Certainly, Ho Chi Minh City today preserves much of the resourcefulness of the Saigon of old, like a fading madam who still has jewelry to sell. Pedicab drivers offer Western passengers "beautiful young girls," while street entrepreneurs compete to buy dollars at several times the official (100 to 1) rate. In the black market along Nguyen Hue Street, a few trendsetters wearing body shirts, designer jeans and modish sunglasses wander among stalls crammed with the latest in color TVs and stereo systems...
Several peddlers of cold drinks and ice cream have set up shop, evidently without licenses, outside the huge gate. Their goods are sold from boxes tied to pedicabs and hand carts. Two uniformed soldiers walk slowly from the pyramid entrance across the plaza to the gate; as they approach, the peddlers pack their goods frantically and begin to run--actually run--down the wall outside, to another corner perhaps, to sell goods out of sight of the soldiers. One is not fast enough, or doesn't notice the soldiers until it is too late for him. He is taken...