Day 11: Thursday 19 Oct 2000
Hanoi

This entry posted on:
22 OCT 2000 at 1900	Vietnam
22 OCT 2000 at 1200	UTC
22 OCT 2000 at 0800	EDT
22 OCT 2000 at 0500	PDT

Well, we woke up this morning and... hey! Surprise, it was raining... but good! Well piss. Anyway, today was a day to catch up on all the Hanoi we missed on our first exhausting day in town. We started out with a cyclo ride to Uncle Ho's mausoleum. Cyclos are a bit different here in Hanoi. Much wider than they are in HCMC, almost such that you could fit two people in one of them, on a good day. But today was not such a day. We couldn't even really enjoy the ride because it was raining so damn hard. And both cyclos had these plastic sheets over them, which were nice because they kept us out of the rain, but bad because they made it almost impossible to see anything. By the time we pulled up outside Ho's final resting place, I had a headache from straining to see through the plastic, and Mike commented that now he knew what it was like to have cataracts Bad news on Ho though. Apparently, for two months out of every year, they take his corpse up to Russia for maintenance so, Ho's old bones being out of town, the whole shebang was closed. We had to settle for the Uncle Ho museum, which is, hands down, the most boring museum we have ever visited in our lives, and we've visited them all over the world! Not that it isn't a beautiful building with beautifully rendered artistic displays, it's just that the substance of the displays are inconceivably dull. Stuff like the bowl Ho ate rice out of as a kid and endless pictures of Ho addressing Party conferences. Ugh! I mean c'mon, didn't the guy ever get in a sword fight or anything!? On our way out, we passed the entrance to the tour of Ho's stilt house and I made an executive decision to pass on it, saying that if it was half as interesting as the museum, well then we would have hated it twice as much. From there we hiked on down to the Army Museum, which is mostly dedicated to the air defense units who defended Ha Noi from American bombers during the war. The museum is jam-packed with Surface-to-Air Missiles, MiGs, pieces of downed US aircraft and the uniforms/helmets of captured pilots. And, as with most of the Vietnamese museums we've visited, it's packed with misrepresentative photos of American G.I's "running in terror from the heroes of the Vietnamese Revolution." Funny, funny stuff. But the trip was deemed a success after Lars' severed head was spotted hanging around near the old Vietnamese flag tower. The body was discovered moments later in what is believed by most experts to be the first vertical body discovery in the history of the LSH. The rain had started again in earnest as we left the Army Museum, bound for the infamous Hanoi Hilton. Most of the former Hoa Lo Prison complex is gone, but the main administration building and a few of the cell blocks have been preserved. Interestingly, the sign above the front door, as well as most of the exhibits, suggest that the prison was only in use through 1954, which is, ironically, the year the Vietnamese took the prison over from the French and started replacing the Vietnamese prisoners with downed American airmen. There are several horrific displays depicting atrocities committed against Vietnamese prisoners by the French (some of them surprisingly poorly guarded), but only one tiny room dedicated to the prison's 200 American guests. There is a plaque assuring visitors that all Americans were treated well and not abused or tortured in any way, a claim that recently led former guest John McCain to remark, "That's entertainment", as well as a half dozen photos of the US Captives having just a good ole time in jail, cooking, receiving gifts and mail from home, etc.. Funny enough though, the Vietnamese (out of ignorance of the gesture's meaning, most likely) have actually put on display a photo of the pilots attending a mass in which one of them can clearly be seen giving the camera the middle finger, which is well known in these modern times as a coded gesture of POW rebellion. From the Hilton, it was on to the water puppets. Now, we were gonna skip the water puppets... I mean, would you wanna see something called, the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre, if'n ya didn't have ta? I didn't think so! But then, we got this incredible review from Mark and Norman of all people, who said we shouldn't miss it. So we didn't. Hard to describe, those water puppets, but what it is, is a group of puppeteers behind a screen, standing hip-deep in water, and the puppets are at the end of these metal bars that stay hidden beneath the waves so that you have the illusion of watching all these bizarre characters walk around on the surface of the water. Pretty cool actually. And that was it really. We had dinner afterwards, but the service was very slow and by the time we got back to the hotel, we needed to hit the sack in order to be ready for our 8 am TF Handspan pick-up for our two-day trip to Ha Long Bay. See you when we get back as we expect to be far removed from the internet for at least the next 48 hours.

On to Day Twelve...

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