The Chinese Market and Flower Market
Covered this topic mostly the other day. Here is Hue’s version.
Nope, still not gonna eat the fish. Kinda off our feed on most everything – Americans are not used to smells like this.
The Citadel
So today we got a little Vietnamese history. Don’t panic, you’re not going to get a lot of it. Mostly you get pretty pictures.
Although Vietnam existed in some form or another for about 1,000 years, most of what we think of as the current country was built by the Nguyen Dynasty, which was the name of the family of ruling emperors from 1792 to 1883. After that, it wasn’t following a distinct family chain, but they were sliding around to brothers, nephews, and, in the case of one emperor (the guy in the 2nd tomb we wrote about yesterday) there were no children but named three adopted sons as successors, causing no end of problems.
About this same time French missionaries showed up and started interfering with the locals. They were soon followed by the French officials, who decided to “colonize” Vietnam, much the way Europeans did with the Native Americans in the US. The French attacked the Citadel on May 25, 1885, starting 25 years of conflict. Eventually the Emperor fled and made it to Saigon in 1877, but after that they were pretty much reduced to being figureheads.
The Vietnamese weren’t especially thrilled to have these meddling foreigners in their country, but also didn’t have the ability to boot them out. You can see a lot of the French influence in architecture and cuisine.
Eventually, on September 2, 1945 when the French had other problems, the Communist Party organized and declared independence, with Ho Chi Minh as the first president. He had some success, especially in the northern part of the country, and ruled until 1959. He eventually died of natural causes in 1963.
So back to the Emperors. Incidentally, there were only 14 of them, with tenures ranging from 3 days to 35 years.
They needed a capital, and decided on Hua. Fung Shua and Taoism and Confuscism were all involved in their decisions, and the fact the location had good water access and was fairly defensible probably didn’t hurt any. The Citadel is designed to be an exact replica of the Forbidden City in Bejing.
The main thing to get out of this is that it had places for the king, his mom (who was the most important woman in the kingdom), the Queen / Emperess and his concubines, along with government offices.
This treasure lasted from when it was originally built until some of it got blown up during WWII (by the French) and then the Americans finished it off afterwards in the 1960’s. What exists today has been refurbished or saved from the remnants.
The cannons just inside the front gates (there are 9 of them, each weighing about 20 tons) were made after one of the earlier victories (against the Chinese, I believe), when their weapons were gathered up and melted down.
To make the French nervous, the cannons at the Citadel were pointed at Le Residence (our hotel), which happened to be where French officials stayed when they came to meddle. I mean visit. The cannons are purely ceremonial and don’t shoot, but the point was made.
There’s a double moat system designed to protect the facility.
Thien Mu Temple (Pretty Lady Pagoda)
Not far from the Citadel is the Thien Mu Temple, which was our next stop. This was built in 1601 and, like western cathedrals, has associated buildings, libraries, etc. all around. Originally there was a Golden Buddha on the 7th (top) level, but it was stolen under the French regime.
There are several bells there, which used to be able to be heard 10 miles away and were used as an alarm clock for farmers. Now, when it sounds you’re reminded to re-center and refocus on what is important.
Blog 49 – Lunch
Lunch was near the Thien Mu Temple, and was not at a typical western tourist location. It was instead very much local cuisine, found after you walked down a street, cut through an alley and followed the crowd.
Think Denny’s on Mother’s Day morning.
The food was good, although we aren’t sure what we had. The first course were spring rolls that had pork and vegetables in them. You were supposed to put fish sauce (which is clear with just a little pepper bite to it) on them.
The second course was a bowl with noodles, lettuce, carrots, sprouts, more pork (and quite possibly other things in it). This had a peanut sauce dressing and was pretty good, too, although there was more food than we could eat.
Oh, and they only had one cold beer. The 2nd was at room temperature, although they offered us glasses of ice if we wanted.
We’re also getting pretty good at using chopsticks.
That ended our formal activities for the day, which was fine because we were tired and it was hot (about 82, but the humidity was about the same – it felt like NC in June!)
Dinner
We went down by the pool for a bit, figured out that it wasn’t heated and was waaayyy too cold to do more than dip your feet into. Eventually, we decided to venture out on our own.
Nothing targets you more than trying to read a map on the street. Fortunately, we adept at saying, “No, thanks.”
It is hard to imagine that there is a market for all of the flowers (real and fake) that are being peddled here.
Eventually, we found our way to the recommended restaurant – La Carambole – a French – Vietnamese place that was about a 20 minute walk from our hotel.
The food was great – started with a Salad, then a slice of Pizza, Spaghetti with an amazingly rich cheese sauce, and a chocolate cake that didn’t have any icing. All of that with two large Tiger Beers -- $22.33.
We opted for a cab back – when you consider that it was an accomplishment for us to cross the street unassisted when we were on our walk, plus we’d walked a LOT today, it didn’t seem like a bad investment.
This is where I made a significant money blunder. The cab driver wanted “22”. I thought he meant 220,000 Dong, which would have been about $10.32, entirely reasonably for the cab ride. I tried to hand him 300,000d in 100,000d notes, and he just looked at me confused.
After a minute, I ran in to the front desk to ask for help and the lady came to my rescue. She thought we were objecting at first because he was trying to overcharge us – she confirmed that 22 was about right for that ride.
Then she saw the money and handed all of it back to me except for one note, and she said, “Wait, he needs change.” Back in to the counter, where she broke it down and handed him 22,000d and gave me the rest.
Turns out that cab ride was $1.03. I tried to tip him what I thought was $5.00 just because we were confusing and he had to wait which he took, but still looked a bit confused.
Turns out the 10,000d note I gave him is worth 47 cents, US.
Money is hard. Especially with that many zeros on it.
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