Day 44 - Hanoi, Vietnam

Lindsey and I arrived safely in Hanoi, Vietnam, the capital city, this morning on a flight that took about 2 hours from Bangkok. We had a bus drop us off in the middle of the Old Quarter (the tourist district) and we found a nice guesthouse to stay in for the night. We decided to get oriented with the city that has very narrow, confusing streets with lots of traffic and people walking around (you actually have to walk in the streets cause the sidewalks are full of vendors). We first went to the Hoa Lo Prison which was a Vietnamese/French torture Prison before the start of the Vietnam war for citizens who went against the political reigns. The forms of abuse and torture that those people endured were graphic and disturbing, especially for the women. Then during the Vietnam war (or as the Vietnamese refer to it "the American War") it become the holding area for the U.S. POW, including John McCain. The museum had a whole exhibit that showed the POW's being captured, enjoying their free time playing basketball, enjoying feasts of food, receiving presents and letters from their families and finally being released. It gives the world the idea that they were not harmed and life was good as a captive when most people would probably believe that they were tortured everyday and reduced to confined living areas. I would now believe there is middle ground to both sides of the story.

(Picture of the hallways of cells in the prison and the suit that John McCain wore when he was captured)




We then went to the first Confucius temple I have seen in Asia. Northern Vietnam is very influenced by the Chinese culture. The temple actually use to be a school where they taught the Confucius students, so there was beautiful writing carved into walls along the walkways that were ways they preserved the beliefs of the teachers.


That night we enjoyed an internationally recognized water puppet show at a theater, which is an ancient Vietnamese form of entertainment for rice farmers. The puppets are actually dancing in the water and portraying different stories about the children, the kings, and the Vietnamese way of life on the river beds.