Think the holidays are crazy?

Check out this Saigon Buffalo ~ December Lite #3

This week’s “photo lite” is a glimpse of a Saigon Legend. I took this photo in 2015, delighted to happen upon the restaurant that my cousin-in-law, Dave Fox, had written about a couple of years earlier.

For better or worse, the place was not on fire (see video here) when I stumbled across it, though it had met with that fate more than once, quite possibly because the place is haunted.

“Oh yes, that place is haunted. So many ghosts. So many stories. So many mysterious fires,” wrote my cousin Kattina Rabdau in a social media post earlier this year.

Fox added:

Kattina explained things well. When we first came to Vietnam, it was a hotel. It became the Crazy Buffalo bar in 2010.

There was a grizzly murder in the hotel in around 2000 . . . In Vietnamese culture, a person who has not given a proper burial will walk the earth as a frustrated ghost, and cause mischief.

The sign on the façade caught on fire three times. Many people have told me that people in the neighborhood believe the bar is haunted, but nobody would tell me directly that they personally believed it.

The closest I came was in an interview with a woman who ran a noodle stand outside the bar. She placed offerings of food in the street every day to appease the potential ghost.

We often call the holidays “crazy,” but I say they’ve got nothing on the Crazy Buffalo story.

I hope your December is treating you well and you are finding moments of peace and, possibly, joy amidst the usual hustle and bustle.

As always, thanks for reading,
Kat

P.S. Those of us in America may think of “bison” when we read buffalo, but in Vietnam, the term refers to the water buffalo, which was often a central part of family life and prosperity in rural areas.

This book, “Water Buffalo Days,” by Huynh Quang Nhuong offers a light-hearted but realistic glimpse of the role of these guardian animals who only went crazy when their families were threatened.