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Published: February 12th 2012
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Yesterday was spent traveling from Beijing to Hanoi, Vietnam. We met up in the airport in Hong Kong with Jim our host and the CEO of Destination Asia. He assures us he has planned many exciting surprises to come! We will see him again in Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) on Tuesday. We also met up with the four other couples and flew to Hanoi arriving in the early evening. A drink to enjoy being together and off to bed. Our accommodation is the Hilton Hanoi Opera (not the prison but very close to it). Once again it is a five star fabulous hotel. We started our day with a great buffet offering Asian and Western fare and then boarded twelve rickshaws and headed into the Hanoi traffic!!!! Motorbikes, cars and people move like the RCMP musical ride and the best advice I could give would be to never look left or right and keep moving and you will avoid getting hit. Very exciting. Hanoi is a city of lakes and we rounded the central lake passing wonderful French architecture and arriving at the old French Quarter. We continued on foot through the busy morning market. The people live in very tall
skinny and long buildings with several families in each. There is little or no room inside for a kitchen so cooking is done on the streets. They go to stalls for a breakfast of Pho(pronounced fur) which is a broth with meat, vegetables and noodles. Then they will move to the stall next door for coffee where they sit on small chairs that look like kindergarten chairs to visit and watch the world go by. They will shop twice a day for lunch and supper and the market is filled with fresh produce, meat, flowers brought in from thecountryside everyday. Usually this is done on a motorbike and then transferred to baskets carried on a pole over a shoulder. The smells, sights and sounds are overwhelming and you feel you are part of daily life. Then we were loaded onto buggies and again driven around the streets until we arrived at the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. Our guide Hong filled us with the history of Vietnam showing us how long Vietnam has had to struggle for independence. Japan, France, Russia and the USA have all stood in the way of the unification of Vietnam. We visited the French botanical gardens
where Ho Chi Minh lived in two homes for several years. After devoting his life to the unification of Vietnam he died before the end of the Vietnam war and did not see his dream realized. The people still remember and honor him much like Chairman Mao in China. We walked a short way and saw the single pillar pagoda and then had a wonderful lunch at Koho and sampled Vietnamese local beer and food. Next stop was the Temple of literature. This was a place during the time of the king (before the French occupation) where the very best students from the country came to study. If they completed the final exams successfully they became a part of the royal inner circle and were given positions of power. We were treated to a group of musicians performing with traditional Vietnamese instruments. We ended the day with a visit to the Hoa Lo Prison where US pilots were held as prisoners of war. We were treated to our guide's vast wealth of knowledge today and saw and heard the story of Vietnam from the people's perspective. This is a fascinating place! The things that stand out in my mind as I write are the sounds of the streets....honking, the wonderful smells of the market in the morning, the respect in the faces of the people as they walked past the body of Ho Chi Minh, the beautiful fresh flowers, the haunting sound of the single string Vietnamese instrument, the tears streaming down the face of the Vietnamese woman praying to the female Buddha at the single pillar pagoda, the faces of the dozens of people sitting on the street on their tiny chairs sipping coffee from tiny shot glasses, the chilling reproductions of the prisoners tortured by the French for resistance in the same prison used later for US prisoners of war.......what an amazing day!
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