Checking in to this Ho Chi Minh City hotel is like going back in time
The Majestic is an original art deco hotel, decorated over with dubious Chinese bling. The marble lobby is almost convincing, with a pleasing row of wall clocks and some passable leadlighting, but it's brought down a bit by laughable statuary. Despite this, the public areas display a certain commercially savvy sense of the building's history. If you squint hard, you can almost see things the way they were. In the Colonial wing, a plaque by the door of room 103 remembers Japanese writer Takeshi Kaiko, who lived there for a time in 1965-66 and wrote a series of articles that fired up the anti-war movement in Japan. The hotel claims it has been preserved as Kaiko left it, although this seems unlikely since there are several large pictures of the writer on the walls.
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