Hoi An to Hue

Before leaving Hoi An I met a girl from Boston. We hung out in bars, the cheap ones with the $0.25 draft beers, and chatted a lot. It was nice talking to someone from Boston, but she was very career focused. It got annoying talking about jobs and school and real world things like taxes and insurance. Sheesh. I also find I'm getting really sick of running the 'just met while traveling in SE Asia' script. How long have you been traveling? Where are you from? Where have you been? How much longer do you have? Where's next? What do you do back home? I've met some great people and had interesting conversations, but the introductions wear me down, and I'm sick of talking about why I dislike China and why I'm no longer working at the UN. Actually, I don't like bringing up the UN at all. It always gets a "Really? Wow!" response, and it always feels like I'm bragging. The only time I don't mind is when someone asks me whether I'm teaching English in China. It's the same thing with school. If someone asks me where I went to school I always answer Boston, and only MIT if they follow up. But saying I work in China always leads to the next question.

I collected all of my clothing before leaving Hoi An. Of the 10 shirts, jacket, and pair of shoes I bought, the only thing I was really unhappy with was the tux shirt. I may do another one in China. I had a hard time explaining stud eyelets to them, the collar isn't as stiff as I'd like, and the fabric I picked sort of makes it look like a curtain. Since that last part was my fault, I paid for the thing, but I'll probably never wear it. I don't know whether I mentioned before, but for one of the more casual button-up shirts I ordered I picked a blue and orange striped fabric, and for some bizarre reason they made the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. I tried it on, and it looked ok. I had half a mind to make them re-do it, but I thought that maybe it'd grow on me, and all of my shirts are vertically striped, so I kept it.

I took a bus to Hue. I paid $4 for the 3 hour trip, which turned out to be almost twice as much as I could have paid.

I could talk a lot about Hue, but I'll keep it short. My hotel on the first night was a too-expensive $9. Its redeeming feature was the fact that it was on the 5th floor, a one floor walkup from the elevator to the 4th. Next to my room, one of 2 on the floor, was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to a skylight that opened up. At night I took a little bottle of Vodka Hanoi up and sat perched on the edge of the window, looking down on the city.

Hue was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, which I didn't know until I left the city and started reading a book called Dispatches. It's the old imperial capital, and the ancient part of the city is surrounded by a citadel with towering, meters-thick walls that go on for 10km. During the Tet Offensive, NVA regulars took the city and flew their flag over the citadel for weeks before the US could retake it. It was street to street combat with incredible losses, said to be one marine for every meter captured.

In the battle, and in a previous Viet Minh-French battle a decade or more earlier, the city took heavy damage from air strikes and shelling. The Thai Hoa Palace, Vietnam's equivalent of the Forbidden City, is mostly leveled to a foundation covered in grass, despite the hesitance of the US military to target it. What's left has been restored and reworked, and out front flies a huge Vietnamese flag. It's interesting for me to compare Vietnam's palace with the Forbidden City. The two-story gate here looks tiny in comparison to Tiananmen. The courtyards in China in which the emperor could review his mandarins and troops would hold armies, while the courtyard here would fit into a soccer stadium. Instead of 27 steps, split by a huge tablet carved with dragons, leading up to the Chinese throne, there are 3 unornamented steps here. It's fairly obvious where the power in the region was during the imperial days.