The Hanoi Tours

In the morning, Chrissy didn’t feel well. It wasn’t the dinner the night before or the talk the Diep had given us about problems in the city, she just had the starts of a headache and wanted to stay in for a bit. I went to the lobby at the appointed time and asked Diep to come back in two hours to pick us up, but he needed me to go to their office to sign papers paying for the tours. So while Chrissy rested just a bit longer, I left and took care of some business.

While alone with Diep, I tried to rearrange our day to hit the things that we most wanted to see. I could tell he didn’t completely understand my requests, but I felt sure enough that we would get to the highlights of Hanoi.

Once we were all together, our first stop was The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. Unfortunately, we were too late to go in and see Uncle Ho. His body is stored 40 meters below ground and is only hauled up for viewing in the morning hours. We had just fallen outside of the viewing hours. We did get to see the Vietnamese Presidents house from the street.

Lunch that day was at a restaurant next of the Temple of Wisdom. The restaurant is actually a school dedicated to training Hanoi street kids a trade. It offers them a hand up. They have some items for sale to support the kids training. They also accept donations. It looks like a worthy cause.

The Temple of Wisdom was actually a university dedicated to the development of educating the ‘mandarins,’ (civil and military leaders) who would rule the Empire of Viet Nam. What I found most interesting was their system of tests to evaluate the candidates. The students would study the Chinese classics and test at local and regional temples before they were eligible to test at the temple in Hanoi. The tests in Hanoi would last for several weeks. During the testing time the scholars would live on the temple grounds in small tents. Once they passed their final examinations the Emperor would have the new Mandarin’s names inscribed on stone tablet. The stone tablets were then placed behind stone tortoises. It is now customary for students to rub the heads of these tortoises to grant them luck in their exams.

Our tour also took us to the “One Pillar Pagoda.” The original was built a thousand years ago, but when the French were leaving Viet Nam in 1954 they mined it and blew it to pieces as a going away present to the culture and people of Viet Nam. A temple nearby was beginning a ceremony and we took a moment to watch as many ‘older’ ladies began to gather on pillows. A monk prepared for the ceremony by placing various offerings of fruit on the alters in front of Buddha and lighting the incense. We waited for the ceremony to begin, but we had a schedule to complete.

From the temple I could see a large building lined with flags of Viet Nam and the hammer and cycle Soviet-styled communism. It turned out to be the next stop on our itinerary, the Ho Chi Minh Museum. This museum is three floors dedicated to the life and of the founder of Vietnamese communism. He never was married or had children and so he is fondly referred to as ‘Uncle Ho’ by the Vietnamese. I had always thought that the term ‘Uncle Ho’ was a way of mocking him invented by the Americans. We could have skipped the Museum, but the location of the museum next to a working Buddhist temple says a lot about the place religion holds in Viet Nam.