As usual, I asked for a window seat on the flight from Ho Chi Minh city to Hue', but what I got was right in front of the emergency exit--with no window! So as soon as I thought everyone was on the plane I moved up two rows to a beautiful window seat, no scratches either. Soon the door opened again and more people piled in. An attractive young Vietnamese woman indicated I was in her seat, but she was happy to take the aisle seat, and she became a lively traveling companion for the hour plus of the flight. She lived with her husband in Phoenix, AZ, and spoke good English. I showed her some of the highlights from our trip--Cappadocia, Petra, Angkor--which she very much appreciated, though her two children, ages 6 and 12, prevented her from traveling as extensively as I had just done.
As we came down from the clouds the Hue' area from the air revealed some starling things. First I saw fields that seemed to be under water in a bay. These were not necessarily rice paddies. The water reflection extended over everything. It looked like the results of rising sea level. Second there were strange white areas on the land. When we descended some more I saw that these were sterile, ruined croplands, with different size circles in them, presumably bomb craters. These were scars of defoliants that would not heal for decades, maybe centuries, and they lay in irregular strips up the center of these tongues of land flanked on two sides by water. I could also see the long ribbon of beach and the mountains in the background.
I had booked our single night at the Camellia hotel online (booking.com), since it got excellent reviews, was 0.5 km from the center, and was very reasonably priced. It turned out to be much better than we expected. The extrelmely friendly staff couldn't do enough for us. We checked in on the 10th floor, where the reception desk was next to the main restaurant, and we signed up for the fancy 8-course "emperor-empress" meal that night at the special price of $7. We settled into our room on the 8th floor, and I set out to explore the Citadel, the seat of the former imperial capital. It was still before noon. On the ground floor a bellman suggested I borrow one of their bicycles for free. I had noticed this possibility in the on-line description of the hotel. He showed me how the lock worked--it was very simple: shut with one finger, and opened with a key that only came out when the lock was closed. We put my two camera cases (including my panoramic) in the basket, and off--with some trepidation but more determination--I went.
City streets in Vietnam are dominated by swarms of motor scooters. To cross a busy intersection one is instructed to wait for a breach in the traffic, then continue across at a steady pace without stopping. The scooter drivers will go around you, intuitively calculating your position by your speed. Stopping throws them off.
The same principle applies to a bicycle; however, as a vehicle, you flow with the traffic; you don't cross at crosswalks (of course, you can, but this is a fall-back position). When I had to make a left turn at a busy intersection--and since I was on a bike, from the extreme right lane--I first had to cross in front of the scooters going in my direction, then confront the phalanx of scooters coming at me from the opposite direction, some of which were turning into the lane I was joining. Each time I carried it off I had the impression that I had just barely squeaked by due to a favorable traffic pattern that I would not be able to count on the next time around.
So after a few wrong turns and with map finally in hand, I made across the Perfume River and pulled up into a rather downscale strip mall, where the manager of a people's restaurant beckoned me in. I sat at a table on the sidewalk, and was handed a menu in English with no prices! When I asked about the chicken with vegetables, I was told it was 70,000 VND, and that a bottle of water would be an additional 30,000 VND. I knew these prices were inflated from comparison with a similar restaurant near my hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. I got up to walk away, at which point the manager lowered the price to 50,000, with 10,000 for the water--$3 instead of $5--which I accepted. The chicken came with rice and cellophane noodles, but no vegetables. When I asked for them he brought a plate out of sauteed Chinese kale that was delicious.
Soon I was back on my bike headed for the Citadel. When I got there I learned I would have to park the bike and see the entire place on foot. It was quite extensive. Nothing I could do, so I paid my 5,000 VND parking fee (25 cents), and headed in. The entry fee was 105,000 VND for foreigners. Unfortunately, most of the structures had been destroyed by American bombs during the war, but a few good ones remained. The main buildings were in the Chinese style, with slightly different motifs from those of the Forbidden City in Beijing, but with the frills in the same places. There was also a lot of stone carving, favoring dragon motifs, less extensive than those in the Forbidden City, but in analogous places: the approaches to the main buildings. The complex was surrounded by concentric moats with lots of water lillies. In one area there were three fishermen with simple poles. It was beastly hot, however, and I was drenched in perspiration. This was work! Arguably coolie labor; plus I was tired.
I saw a very informative photography exhibit on the formal protocols surrounding the emperor and his court. I kept wondering what they did for laughs! Everything was so formal, with the seating arrangements by rank, the elaborate bowing, the 160 dishes prepared for the emperor, who dined alone, every night, the staff of eunuchs who managed the concubines and selected nightly bed partners for the emperor, the lugubrious music that passed for entertainment. As a leisure activity the emperor would sometimes have himself taken out to his tomb constrution to see how it was coming along. And there were lots of photographs of the funeral processions--as if this was what every imperial administration was leading up to, its culmination! The whole complex was begun in 1802 and funtioned well into the French colonization. It was clearly an attempt to imitate the pomp and opulence of the Chinese Imperial (Forbidden) City. And Chinese characters were the official script. It was the French who introduced the Romanization of Vietnamese writing in the late 19th Century.
The most elaborate room was the throne room, with a gold inlaid throne. Photography was formally prohibited, but I still managed a few shots. On display also were items of decor and everyday use by the emperor, that showed fine taste in the decorative arts.
But the most interesting features of the Citadel were its gates: towering, elaborately adorned with polychrome ceramic scenes and figures, with an angry dragon in the keystone position. What particularly interested me was the extensive use of blue-figured crockery fragments in all places where color was not specified. Where did they get all this Delft or whatever? It couldn't have been from accidents in their own kitchen. Was it from a series of shipwrecks, the way it was on the Northern coast of the St. Lawrence, where a friend of mine created a 6-foot sculpture covered in them?
A small museum outside the walls housed additional accoutrements of imperial life, including another throne, and the imperial bed; also a dining room set, numerous articles of clothing, a series of Limoges vases (gifts from France), bronze incense holders, and similar necessaries.
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I walked a good distance, rounded a corner, and found a breach in the moat where I could reenter the complex. It took me a while to find my ticket stub among all my pockets, but I did. Inside I found myself in a garden area, where the inner moat meandered. A metal footbridge took one to the central section, which looked across the broader moat water to another building in the Chinese style. This turned out to be a theater, and there would be a musical performance that night. There was also a collection of traditional garments, and for a small fee you could dress like the emperor and have your picture taken.
By this point I was wondering how to get back to the parking lot and my borrowed bike. Every trajectory involved about 300 meters. I rounded another corner with moat and recognized the construction I had seen when I entered. I had thought I was on the side, but I was really at the rear, so I had one more corner to turn before I was back where I started. There was the parking area, and there was my borrowed bike.
I decided to take a peak at their extensive market and at the traditional neighborhood located on a triangular piece of land right beyond the market. It was about 5:30 pm, and the sun was low in the sky. In the ... neighborhood I parked the bike and took advantage of the sun's reflection on the buildings to do a little street photography of the people working and eating in the neighborhood.
Then I turned around and headed back for the hotel, exercising my new faith-based techniques for making left turns in wide intersections. At one of them I encountered a man walking a bicycle laden with a long metal apparatus that reminded me of Parker-Harrison's extravagant and impossible satirical science projects.
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I was back by six and decided to have a swim in the hotel's modest pool that was a part of their fitness center on the 2nd floor. The water was refreshingly cool--the pool received no sunlight--and everything went well until I slipped on the chrome latter getting out and banged my right shinbone against it. It ached the whole evening but was better the next day.
When we arrived at the restaurant, the staff had us don the yellow silk embroidered outfits of emperor and empress, down to the pointy shoes and seemingly insect-inspired crown. We sat at the imperial table and had our pictures taken. I maintained the dour expression I had seen in every photograph of an emperor, but Barbara decided to be upbeat. Then we doffed the costumes and proceeded to be regaled with the eight courses, several of which were cleverly designed as animals, including a swan and a turtle. This meal was only the high point in the excellent, very warm personal service we received at the Camillia Hotel in Hue. Our waiter, Jack, couldn't do enough for us during the meal, and he helped me scout out places in the hotel to take my overnight series of photos. The manager on duty, Daisy, also made a very personal connection and was extremely helpful. I felt comfortable enought to discuss history and politics with her, and her curiosity was extremely refreshing, as we compared Ho Chi Minh with Gandhi as well as other revolutionary leaders.
As we came down from the clouds the Hue' area from the air revealed some starling things. First I saw fields that seemed to be under water in a bay. These were not necessarily rice paddies. The water reflection extended over everything. It looked like the results of rising sea level. Second there were strange white areas on the land. When we descended some more I saw that these were sterile, ruined croplands, with different size circles in them, presumably bomb craters. These were scars of defoliants that would not heal for decades, maybe centuries, and they lay in irregular strips up the center of these tongues of land flanked on two sides by water. I could also see the long ribbon of beach and the mountains in the background.
City streets in Vietnam are dominated by swarms of motor scooters. To cross a busy intersection one is instructed to wait for a breach in the traffic, then continue across at a steady pace without stopping. The scooter drivers will go around you, intuitively calculating your position by your speed. Stopping throws them off.
The same principle applies to a bicycle; however, as a vehicle, you flow with the traffic; you don't cross at crosswalks (of course, you can, but this is a fall-back position). When I had to make a left turn at a busy intersection--and since I was on a bike, from the extreme right lane--I first had to cross in front of the scooters going in my direction, then confront the phalanx of scooters coming at me from the opposite direction, some of which were turning into the lane I was joining. Each time I carried it off I had the impression that I had just barely squeaked by due to a favorable traffic pattern that I would not be able to count on the next time around.
So after a few wrong turns and with map finally in hand, I made across the Perfume River and pulled up into a rather downscale strip mall, where the manager of a people's restaurant beckoned me in. I sat at a table on the sidewalk, and was handed a menu in English with no prices! When I asked about the chicken with vegetables, I was told it was 70,000 VND, and that a bottle of water would be an additional 30,000 VND. I knew these prices were inflated from comparison with a similar restaurant near my hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. I got up to walk away, at which point the manager lowered the price to 50,000, with 10,000 for the water--$3 instead of $5--which I accepted. The chicken came with rice and cellophane noodles, but no vegetables. When I asked for them he brought a plate out of sauteed Chinese kale that was delicious.
Soon I was back on my bike headed for the Citadel. When I got there I learned I would have to park the bike and see the entire place on foot. It was quite extensive. Nothing I could do, so I paid my 5,000 VND parking fee (25 cents), and headed in. The entry fee was 105,000 VND for foreigners. Unfortunately, most of the structures had been destroyed by American bombs during the war, but a few good ones remained. The main buildings were in the Chinese style, with slightly different motifs from those of the Forbidden City in Beijing, but with the frills in the same places. There was also a lot of stone carving, favoring dragon motifs, less extensive than those in the Forbidden City, but in analogous places: the approaches to the main buildings. The complex was surrounded by concentric moats with lots of water lillies. In one area there were three fishermen with simple poles. It was beastly hot, however, and I was drenched in perspiration. This was work! Arguably coolie labor; plus I was tired.
I saw a very informative photography exhibit on the formal protocols surrounding the emperor and his court. I kept wondering what they did for laughs! Everything was so formal, with the seating arrangements by rank, the elaborate bowing, the 160 dishes prepared for the emperor, who dined alone, every night, the staff of eunuchs who managed the concubines and selected nightly bed partners for the emperor, the lugubrious music that passed for entertainment. As a leisure activity the emperor would sometimes have himself taken out to his tomb constrution to see how it was coming along. And there were lots of photographs of the funeral processions--as if this was what every imperial administration was leading up to, its culmination! The whole complex was begun in 1802 and funtioned well into the French colonization. It was clearly an attempt to imitate the pomp and opulence of the Chinese Imperial (Forbidden) City. And Chinese characters were the official script. It was the French who introduced the Romanization of Vietnamese writing in the late 19th Century.
The most elaborate room was the throne room, with a gold inlaid throne. Photography was formally prohibited, but I still managed a few shots. On display also were items of decor and everyday use by the emperor, that showed fine taste in the decorative arts.
But the most interesting features of the Citadel were its gates: towering, elaborately adorned with polychrome ceramic scenes and figures, with an angry dragon in the keystone position. What particularly interested me was the extensive use of blue-figured crockery fragments in all places where color was not specified. Where did they get all this Delft or whatever? It couldn't have been from accidents in their own kitchen. Was it from a series of shipwrecks, the way it was on the Northern coast of the St. Lawrence, where a friend of mine created a 6-foot sculpture covered in them?
A small museum outside the walls housed additional accoutrements of imperial life, including another throne, and the imperial bed; also a dining room set, numerous articles of clothing, a series of Limoges vases (gifts from France), bronze incense holders, and similar necessaries.
I walked a good distance, rounded a corner, and found a breach in the moat where I could reenter the complex. It took me a while to find my ticket stub among all my pockets, but I did. Inside I found myself in a garden area, where the inner moat meandered. A metal footbridge took one to the central section, which looked across the broader moat water to another building in the Chinese style. This turned out to be a theater, and there would be a musical performance that night. There was also a collection of traditional garments, and for a small fee you could dress like the emperor and have your picture taken.
By this point I was wondering how to get back to the parking lot and my borrowed bike. Every trajectory involved about 300 meters. I rounded another corner with moat and recognized the construction I had seen when I entered. I had thought I was on the side, but I was really at the rear, so I had one more corner to turn before I was back where I started. There was the parking area, and there was my borrowed bike.
I decided to take a peak at their extensive market and at the traditional neighborhood located on a triangular piece of land right beyond the market. It was about 5:30 pm, and the sun was low in the sky. In the ... neighborhood I parked the bike and took advantage of the sun's reflection on the buildings to do a little street photography of the people working and eating in the neighborhood.
Then I turned around and headed back for the hotel, exercising my new faith-based techniques for making left turns in wide intersections. At one of them I encountered a man walking a bicycle laden with a long metal apparatus that reminded me of Parker-Harrison's extravagant and impossible satirical science projects.
I was back by six and decided to have a swim in the hotel's modest pool that was a part of their fitness center on the 2nd floor. The water was refreshingly cool--the pool received no sunlight--and everything went well until I slipped on the chrome latter getting out and banged my right shinbone against it. It ached the whole evening but was better the next day.
When we arrived at the restaurant, the staff had us don the yellow silk embroidered outfits of emperor and empress, down to the pointy shoes and seemingly insect-inspired crown. We sat at the imperial table and had our pictures taken. I maintained the dour expression I had seen in every photograph of an emperor, but Barbara decided to be upbeat. Then we doffed the costumes and proceeded to be regaled with the eight courses, several of which were cleverly designed as animals, including a swan and a turtle. This meal was only the high point in the excellent, very warm personal service we received at the Camillia Hotel in Hue. Our waiter, Jack, couldn't do enough for us during the meal, and he helped me scout out places in the hotel to take my overnight series of photos. The manager on duty, Daisy, also made a very personal connection and was extremely helpful. I felt comfortable enought to discuss history and politics with her, and her curiosity was extremely refreshing, as we compared Ho Chi Minh with Gandhi as well as other revolutionary leaders.
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