Vietnam - Week 2, continued...

Okay, are you ready? We're halfway done! So, after Hanoi, we flew to another city called Hue (pronounced Hway). Luckily after Sapa, where it was FREEZING cold, the weather just got hotter and hotter. Hue was really nice. It used to be the capital, and it's a really fun city with lots to do. Our hotel was like a resort here, with a swimming pool, salon, etc. It was on the Perfume River, where we took a little boat cruise. We also visited the Citadel, which was the home of past emperors and royal families. Some of it is in ruins now, but some of it is well preserved and it was cool to see some historical things that are actually old, as opposed to our "history" here which is never really more than 200 or so years old, usually.






Darn! It's that sideways problem again...can anyone tell me how to fix that? Oh, and that last picture is the result of my friends paying a few thousand Vietnam Dong to put on the "Emperor's Robes" and sit on his throne. Anyway, it was delightfully warm in Hue, which is more than I can say for the weather since I've been back in Utah...here are a few more pictures.


My roommate Hailey and I...yeah, I guess we were too cheap to pay to wear the disgusting robes that thousands of other people have worn...we opted for a ride in the emperor's carriage instead...




We took a little boat cruise down the Perfume River that evening. That was a pretty crazy experience - I can't believe how many people actually live on their boats in the river! I mean, these things are just thrown together with pieces of wood and tarps, and there are, like, 4-year-old kids jumping from boat to boat, and people are building fires on their wooden boats for heat, and their dogs are hanging out on the boats too. It's like a whole neighborhood of boats along the river! I couldn't believe some of the living conditions I saw there.





A fishing boat out on the river (although I can't imagine you'de want to eat ANYTHING out of that river...EVER) and our hotel in the background

We did a clinic the next day just outside of Hue, at Kim Doi compassionate home. This is a place run by some sweet little nuns, and basically the whole village showed up to be checked out by us.




The sweet little nuns, who cooked for us, gave us presents, and treated us like royalty even though we probably got them in big trouble with the government for hosting us.

It was a really long, hot day, but fun too. It was also a bit scary, as some communist government representatives showed up and tried to make us leave halfway through the day. Our director, Binh, (the found of COPI, from Vietnam) spoke to them and told them we would be happy to leave if they would apologize to the 200 people that were still waiting to be seen. Of course they wouldn't so we stayed...but they were not happy. We had even gotten permission from the governor of the province to be there, so he sent undercover police to stand by and watch, and help us in case anything happened. We made it through the day (another 12 hour), but the poor nuns will probably be the ones that get the punishment for us being there. Then, when we got to our hotel that night, in another town an hour away, there were government representatives there waiting for us. It was pretty scary...they escorted our director and her son out to the parking lot, and it was so late at night that none of us heard what happened until the next morning when our trip leaders announced that we were leaving the province immediately. This was very sad, since our accommodations there were at a lovely little beach resort, which I had been waiting for the whole trip! I have some pictures of the few hours I got to spend there though. Anyway, it turned out that the woman who is in charge of Foreign Affairs for the province didn't want Americans coming in and delivering health care to her people - apparently it makes the government look bad when they're not doing their job, and it's being done by foreigners. So we skipped out of there VonTrapp-style to avoid anyone getting arrested, and we had to cancel our next two clinics. Here's the pictures of the beach: