Twenty-sixth Day - Hue 11/27/10

Sumner

Today we had our first day in Hue. We had a buffet breakfast in the restaurant and then met our guide at the front gate. His name was Phong, the same name as the guy that took us on our tour of Ba Be Lake and Phu Tho. We got into the car and went into town and went on a boat trip to a pagoda. It was like all pagodas basically lots of altars and incense and buildings. Then we went to the old palace of the emperor of Vietnam. (FYI, Hue was the old capital city of Vietnam.) On  the outside was a mote system and a wall that was supposed to look like a star (I didn’t look like a star to me but it must have to someone). Then there was another mote system with another wall that enclosed the palaces. We went inside through the gate. One interesting thing was that there were three gates. One for the mandarins (government officials), one for the king, one for the commoners, and one for the elephants and tigers and wild animals. We went through the mandarins gate. We got in and there were two pools with fish on either side of the path. You could buy some food to feed them. It was amazing when you did because literally hundreds of fish fought for the food! Then we went up above the gate where the king would give speeches to his people. Then we went down and went to some palaces. It was sad but allot of the palace was bombed during the war. Since it was only one hundred kilo form the DMZ it got bombed from both sides. We toured around all the palaces and saw where they were trying to restore it. I was glad that we had a guide because we would have been clueless on where to go and what everything was. After touring the grounds we went back outside (this time through the elephants gate) and saw nine “sacred cannons.” They were sacred because they were never used and nine is a lucky number. After seeing the palace we went to a tomb of one of the kings. there was a lake and a nice island in the middle. We learned that this tomb was not only a tomb but before the king died he used to come to his tomb to wright poetry and just enjoy the area. Then we went to a place that had some statues and had an autobiography of the king. After seeing that we went to the place where the coffin was. Nobody really knows if the body is actually there because nobody has opened it. After the tomb we got back int the car and he asked if we wanted to see another tomb. We had had enough tombs so we said that we just wanted to go back to the hotel. Then dad, Hannah, and I went swimming and then we hung out for a while in the resort. When it became tome for dinner we went to the hotel’s restaurant for dinner. Time to hit the sack!