Hue

Our next city was Hue. Hue is like the Pittsburgh of Vietnam. If Saigon and Hanoi are the New York and Los Angeles. And Hoi An is like…Hmmm…Yale Michigan, a small city known for one thing. In Hoi An the one thing is tailors. The one thing Yale Michigan is known worldwide for is it’s annual bologna festival, ok instead of “world” wide I should have said “metro Detroit area” wide). Hue is in between these two levels. It’s a city, but not a giant. It has parks, and a river, and city-ish stuff. It even has a stadium. Nothing like Heinz field. But comparatively, to the Vietnamese Hue would be at about the Pittsburgh level within their country’s city hierarchy.

We had a day tour where we went on this riverboat that took us to a pagoda where we learned all sorts of things about Buddhism, but not really. We learned that turtles are important and the number 108, and all multiples of 3 for that matter. But our guide was not really good at explaining why these things were. But whatever, they had a giant bell that weighed eight tons, this bell would make the city of Philadelphia feel like a little girl, a little girl with a bell that’s tiny in comparison to the one that they have in Hue (this little girl would also say things like ay yo because that’s what people in Philadelphia say. Oh and she would eat cheesesteaks.)

The actual pagoda was pretty cool. It had nine levels. Each level representing a different king, or something like that, I was too busy imagining how big I would have to be before I could wear that bell like a big hat, and let me tell you, I’d be really big, god I wish I had super powers.

Then we learned something really cool that managed to keep my attention, the layout of this complex was set to mimic a dragon. The pagoda was the tail sticking out of the ground, but once we walked past the pagoda to the rest of the grounds we saw different buildings that made the entire area seem like a dragon frozen half in and half out of the ground. Then I stopped listening because dragons. And anyway this is probably way more blog space than this particular site deserves.

One other interesting note. We saw kids training to be Buddhist monks. Their parents bring them to this pagoda because they can’t afford to feed them. So, the monks take care of them. It’s nice but kind of awful at the same time. They’re not allowed to eat meat their entire lives. They have to do all of the manual labor around the temple. They sleep on wooden palettes. They have to get up at three am every day to ring a bell (not the giant one) 108 times. The rest of their time is spent studying. And it seems as if they have no choice from birth through death, they are brought up to be Buddhist monks. That’s it. No switching majors and taking that fifth year of college. No thinking, I’ll either be a fireman, a cowboy, or superman when I grow up. You’re going to be a Buddhist monk. I could be wrong but I don’t think they have 401K’s or vacations, just spiritual enlightenment. It’s a close call, but I really like vacations.

We left the Pagoda and went to a tomb for one of their kings. But it wasn’t really a tomb in the Indiana Jones sense. It was more like a nice park with statues all around, and a few temple-esque buildings. This area was also set up so that all the buildings together would resemble the king laying down on the earth. This is a popular theme in Hue I guess. It was a really beautiful area, with a lake and gates and statues of crazy firey hellish cats (which our guide told us were unicorns, this started a debate in our group as to whether a Vietnamese unicorn could beat one of our unicorns. I said our unicorn would win because it doesn’t matter how fast that cat is our unicorns horn is SHARP!) but in the end I was a little disappointed. I mean, when I think tomb, I’m thinking I better get to make a torch from a skeleton’s arm and some crude oil that’s seeped into the lower levels of this tomb. Or at least like a mummy or something. But none of that happened. Also I was starting to get sick.