Woke up and it was still raining. We could tell that it's probably true about Hué being the Seattle of Vietnam from the way that every single wood door in our room creaked from being slightly warped. And the musty smell.
Having lived in Seattle myself for many years, I kind of liked this. The only problem with trying to hit a lot of sights in one day is that the grey kind of sucks your energy and the wet ground makes you move slower. This would be the only stop on the trip that I wished I had packed my boots. Instead, like so often when I lived in the great Pacific Northwest, I would be walking around in the rainy weather wearing Chuck Taylor's. I don't think there is a worse shoe in the universe for walking in the rain. But I love them so.
We decided from the get-go that trying to go down the river and see some of the temples and tombs would be pointless since it just wasn't nice enough out to go do that. The visibility wasn't very good but we really wanted to take a ride in dragon boat on the Perfume River.
We walked toward the river where the boats were lined up and, as is the case when you are an obvious tourist, it wasn't long before one of the boat guys walked up to us. We agreed on a price with a couple of guys that appeared to be a father/son team. Not a lot of business on the river this day. The son, who spoke better English, really wanted to take us on a whole day excursion to the temples and tombs but we really just wanted about an hour on the river to see the city and then get dropped off on the banks closest to the Citadel. It would have been a better tour in nice weather but it still wasn't bad, despite the guy trying to sell us silk paintings and clothes while we rode.
We then got dropped off on the banks of the river and walked through the mud and across the street to the Citadel, the moated and walled old Imperial City. Hué was the site of the bloodiest battles of the Tet Offensive during the war and much of the Citadel was destroyed. But still not a bad place to explore on a rainy day in Hué.
There is this one spot close to the entrance that you can buy bags of fish food to throw in a pond and watch the feeding frenzy.
Toward the end of our time there we came across an area in one of the buildings that had guys selling the works of a couple of local artists. We bought a few cool rice paper paintings for ourselves and for gifts. After hanging around there for a while we headed back toward the main part of town to try to find food, watching how the locals dealt with the rain as we walked.
We hit a place for lunch that was really cool. We were led up a small winding concrete staircase to a second floor dining area with a balcony over the street, passing a a woman cooking in a cubby-hole kitchen abut halfway up (floor 1-1/2?). We had a nice view of street life from up there.
After that it was time to shop again! We walked down to the market.
We checked out both the inside and outside areas for a little while and I again tried in vain to find a pair of sandals. That was another fruitless try, though at least this time nobody tried to squeeze a two-sizes-too-small pair on me like in Saigon. Most just looked at my feet and said "no big."
A woman started talking to Lisa and asked her to come to look at things in her shop on the second floor. Lisa told her we were just looking and didn't want to buy anything. The woman said, "You come just look, maybe buy if you like something."
We got upstairs and a guy showed me a shirt that looked pretty cool. I turned to show Lisa and the women had, in a matter of seconds, started wrapping her in a silk get-up thing. I kept looking at shirts while they wrapped and unwrapped my wife in various colors. And she loved the stuff.
We weren't going to buy anything there and ended up walking out of there having spent $170 after the bargaining process. I got an awesome shirt that I'm still kicking myself for not getting more of in several different colors.
We got the hell out of there before we spent more money. Stopped back at the hotel to drop off stuff and put on dry socks. Then we walked down to the vegetarian restaurant on our block, which was really full of a bunch of local teenagers. So often at the vegetarian restaurants we were hitting on this trip we were surrounded by other Westerners, so this was cool to see.
It had finally stopped raining by nighttime and we were able to take a nice walk around town. Any worry about the war being a sensitive topic in Vietnam was laid to rest by seeing things like bars named after the DMZ, which was not too far way. (There is a club in Saigon named Apocalypse Now)
We had dessert and drinks at the restaurant across the street from our hotel while watching a traditional Vietnamese folk music band play.
I was able to sit on our balcony and keep listening to the music after we went back to the room. A tour group came out of the place at the end of the night, Germans I think, and their bus picked them up right at the door and whisked them away, taking care to make sure the tourists don't interact with anything not pre-planned, packaged and processed for Western consumption. You might as well be at the Vietnam exhibit at Epcot Center.
I sipped a beer and watched the street scenes below. My night ended watching the man who runs the shop across the street, a convenience store basically. He kept putting his son of about 4 years-old to bed in their little house next door and the kid kept getting out of bed and walking over to the store. And he was usually wearing one of his dad's pair of sandals. He must have put that kid back to bed about a dozen times by the time I called it a night. But he was still smiling about it.
Next - Hanoi
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