I'm back at home in NorCal, sitting in the comfort of my old room with a healthy dose of jetlag keeping me up. I promise I'm actually going through all my 1,300+ pictures (curse you, 2GB memory card), editing them and working them down into a reasonable number for an online album. It will go up soon, or eventually. In the meantime, you can enjoy stories of our last 3 days in Vietnam.
Haisun and I only really had one full day in Hanoi, and we packed in as much sightseeing as we could. In fact, we saw so much the only reason I have now to go back to Hanoi is to eat. (That is no insignificant reason, you must know.) We saw: the Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple that was the first National University of Vietnam; The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum (from the outside, since "Uncle Ho" is in Moscow for maintenance); The Ho Chi Minh Museum which is quite propagandistic and rather abstract at times and would have made a lot more sense if I knew more about Vietnam's revolutionary history; the One Pillar Pagoda, which was much smaller than we thought it would be; Hoa Lo Prison Museum, a.k.a the infamous Hanoi Hilton (more on that later); Ngoc Son Temple, which is on a wee island in the middle of a lake; and, finally, after dinner, a water puppetry show. If I ever felt we were taking it easy with the sightseeing in the rest of our trip we certainly made up for it that day.
Most of the sights were just visually interesting, but Hoa Lo is an interesting testament to what my dad calls "writing your own history." The site was originally a ceramics-producing village, taken over by the French and turned into a prison during colonial times. A majority of the museum focuses on the cruelty of French colonial rule, poor prison conditions at the time, and Vietnam's revolutionary leaders and thinkers who were imprisoned and/or killed by the French. These parts of the museum and spookily lit, with unfinished walls, original cells intact, and a dramatically lit guillotine. Then there's a couple clean, nicely lit rooms that mention, oh yes, I do believe we had some Americans come visit this one time. Well, they weren't visitors, they were CRIMINALS, shot down and arrested by 'the army and people of Vietnam'. But we treated them really well, in fact everything was up to Geneva Convention standards, see they even got to celebrate Christmas! And even if we couldn't treat them as well as they should have been we had a poor economy at the time because we were BEING BOMBED and we didn't sign the Geneva Convention anyway. Without the buttons to push to drop their bombs, the imperialists no longer had a purpose in life, so we taught them how to do things -- simple things any Vietnamese child knows how to do. (I kid you not, that last sentence is pretty much verbatim from a video at the museum.)
Walking out of the museum, I couldn't help but think, "Huh. I don't think that's quite how it happened..." Wikipedia sums it up pretty well, and I'll spare the nasty details here. Basically, the American POWs were tortured in order to force them to produce statements saying they were being treated really well. Oh, irony.
Anyway, our next two days were spent on a cheap-as-chips tour of Halong Bay. We opted for "Standard" instead of "Deluxe" or "Premier", but really it was substandard. Don't get me wrong, Halong Bay is gorgeous, I had fun when we went kayaking, and I find cruises kind of boring anyway, but the trip itself was pretty craptastic. All of us tourists on the boat bonded over the misery, and became fast friends. When we got back to Hanoi we swapped tales of our steerage class -- sorry, standard class -- tours with other travellers. Them: "Oh my god, and breakfast! That was just unbelievable -- the one egg and the giant pile of stale bread with just jam and butter!" Us: "You got JAM?!" (We got margarine.) It rained a lot, drinks on the boat were expensive, there was one light bulb on the deck, two of the girls couldn't sleep in their room because it was full of giant cockroaches, we were hungry a lot, and the crew ate a better breakfast than us (fried rice > stale bread and an egg). And then I left my nice rain jacked on the bus coming back. Grr.
It kind of sucked that the worst two days of our trip happened right at the end, but it probably made it easier to climb onto that plane in Hanoi on the 15th. The trip as a whole was amazing and I wish I'd had twice as long to spend in the area. Now back to real life...
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