Give us a city and we'll see all the major sites in 2 days. Day one of our whirlwind tour of Hanoi included 3 museums and was heavy on the American War (what they call the Vietnam War here). The Women's Museum is a tribute to the bravery and courage of Vietnamese women during the war. Imagine picking your child up at the underground nursery in the tunnels after having manned artillery all day. Hoa Lo Prison (the "Hanoi Hilton") is most famous for being where American pilots including John McCain were held during the war but was actually built by the French to house Vietnamese prisoners during the colonial era. It's interesting to compare the American and Vietnamese accounts of the war. According to Vietnam, American POWs played basketball and cooked Christmas dinner while in prison while the US sent women and children to concentration camps. But our American history classes certainly sugar-coated US behavior at times. I suppose the truth is somewhere in the middle. Lastly, after being ripped off by multiple taxis with rigged meters, we made our way to the Ethnography Museum which documents the remarkable number of indigenous peoples residing in Vietnam. In addition to the Viet, there are the Hmong, Muong, Black Thai, White Thai, Tay, Lao, Han, Yao, just to name a very few. Day two began with Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum (which is closed on Mondays but having seen a preserved Mao, we get the idea...) and museum. The museum lacked facts, which was frustrating for those of us not raised in Uncle Ho's shadow, but was big on symbolism. A deconstructed version of Picasso's Guerrnica was used to represent the struggle of the 1930s and one sign said Ho's cave hideout was "represented here by a human brain" (we never did figure that one out). After the museum, we toured the rest of the Ho Chi Minh complex including the One Pillar Pagoda and Ho's Stilt House. Then it was off to the Temple of Literature ("Van Mieu"), Vietnam's imperial college modeled off the Chinese exam system. We then worked our way east to Hoan Kiem Lake in the heart of the Old Quarter and visited the Ngoc Son Temple which is on an island in the lake and houses a preserved giant tortoise. The story goes that a tortoise took the sword that a 15th century king used to drive out the Chinese from Vietnam to the bottom of the lake, making the lake and the tortoises that call it home holy.
