Hanoi

We got off the train at 4:30 in the morning. Needless to say, not the best night's sleep I've ever gotten. At times the train was shaking so much, I couldn't keep a single part of my body still!

After a quick shower, we left for breakfast at KOTO. It's quite a lovely restaurant with three separate floors. Hands down it was the best breakfast we had.  KOTO stands for know one, teach one. It's a culinary training center for street kids or kids from poor families started by a former ex-pat intrepid leader. It's an 18 month course and the older students teach the younger ones. Your servers are current students and there are pictures of former students in their new positions. It's quite moving. Clinton also visited here on his trip, so I am also on the Clinton restaurant tour!

From KOTO we walked over to the Temple of Literature. There is a tower there that is the symbol of Hanoi. On the sides are stone tablets where the names of the scholars of the court are inscribed.   If the scholar did something disgraceful, his name was chiseled out of the stone. For luck before an exam, students run the head of the stone turtles, on which the scholar tablets are placed and then rub their faces.

We next drove over to ho chi minh's mausoleum. There are a number of instructions you must follow to visit the mausoleum. First, no cameras or cellphones. You must be fully covered. No hands in pockets or wearing hats. And no talking or laughing. I figured Lisa and I were goners. You know when someone tells you not to laugh that it's all you want to do! You wind your way through the line and go through security and then March up to the mausoleum. It's a huge Soviet style complex. You climb the stairs, circle around his preserved, well-lit body and exit. It's more than a little creepy. As we got to the body, all the Asian people in front of us were bowing. So I was confused about whether we were expected to bow.....I really didn't want to bow! But the soldier pulled Lisa along just as we got there so no bowing necessary!

I'm not really sure how I feel about Ho Chi Minh. Clearly I need to do some more reading. On the one hand, he is clearly the hero of the Vietnamese people, liberating them from the french and later Americans and there are lovely stories about him playing with the local children. As the Vietnamese describe him to me, he seems to have lovely ideals, but I suppose it's always about how those ideals are put into practice.

Our final stop of the day was the museum of ethnology. I had the best version of french food yet at their cafe. The museum has collections from all the tribes in the country and outside has replicas of their houses. Some really interesting stuff! There was a tomb that was decorated with the Vietnamese kama sutra to make a connection between death and regeneration.

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