From Hanoi with Love

After our usual gluttonous (not glutinous) breakfast, we walked around the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum with our guide.

The president's palace...

Ho Chi Minh's cars...

Ho Chi Minh lived in a prison for a while so he wasn't comfortable in the palace.  He lived across the way in simple quarters.

Then he built a simple house on the grounds.

Many important meetings took place under the house...

Then we toured the Ho Chi Minh museum...

It was surprisingly nice.  Our guide is enamored with Ho Chi Minh and very smart so he had lots to tell us.

Then we saw a temple on the grounds.  Very different.  Very ornate and lots of statues we hadn't seen.

They honor pH.D.'s like they do Buddhas.

People put little pictures of those who passed away in the temple...

Swastika means eternity...

Then we took a "cyclo tour" through the old market.  My guy was a little old and kept having to get off to push.  I felt bad.

Jen liked it at first.

Opera house.

Then she realized she was in the middle of traffic.

Statue of former king of Vietnam...

Then Jen got scared of all the traffic.  There are few traffic lights and they are rarely followed.  People just drive around each other.

Lot's of Christmas stuff...

 

I liked the bike tour.

Then a very good lunch at a Vietnamese/French fusion restaurant...

Then we went to a water puppet show.

The show was fun.  It was about the 53 different ethnic groups in Vietnam and how they all come from the "same basket of eggs"...

Then we saw a temple in the middle of the lake...

And the stuffed turtle that is associated with a legend about an important sword in the lake being found by the turtle after it was lost.

Pretty gross but well preserved.  There is a live one in the lake that we did not see that is 400 pounds.

Then we toured "Hanoi Hilton" which is prison used by the French then the Americans then by the Vietnamese to house Americans.  This is a letter Americans carry called a begging letter that begs for help in multiple languages.

A sewer that people escaped through...

It was pretty grim.  It made the Americans look very bad as it always referred to Americans as American imperialists and French as French colonists while Vietnamese were Vietnamese political prisoners.  They showed all the torture of Vietnamese and how well the Americans were cared for.

Guillotine...

Jen liked it but I didn't think the pictures belonged in a Honeymoon blog...

John McCain was imprisoned here.  There are pictures of him being cared for, returning to visit and this is his flight suit.

Then we had a drink and some food at the hotel.  It was chilly.  They did make perfect dirty martinis though.