Hoo-way Hue!

Sorry - can't find an acute accent on this keyboard for the 'e' in Hue, so this crummy title will have to suffice by of a pronunciation guide for this City on the central coast, roughly half-way down the elongated S-shape which is Vietnam.
It's considerably calmer than Hanoi (but then, where wouldn't be...?), and, by comparison, a little 'ordinary', dare we say. Mind you, our trips on the only full day in Hue were far from ordinary. We had a local guide, Thanh - another happy, smiley, joke-telling guide. He took us in the morning to the Imperial Citadel, built alongside the Perfume River in the early 1800swhen Emporer Gia Long, first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, moved the capital from Hanoi to Hue in a bid to unite the country This dynasty made Hue a famous centre of the arts, scholarship and Buddhist learning, but their ambitious building projects and luxurious lifstyle resulted in crippling taxes. In 1885, the French seized power, making the emporors nominal rulers only. French rule was , by all accounts, harsh and punitive and, from then on the city was embroiled in social and political unrest, led by the anti-colonialists, in which the teenge student, Ho Chi Minh took an active part. Hue ceased to be the capital in 1945 when the puppet emporer Bao Dai finally abdicasted to ' Uncle Ho'. Today, the Imperial Citadel, which was heavily bombed and almost destroyed in both WW2 and the Vietnam war, is being renovated thanks to yet another UNESCO worls heritage listing.
Apart from some history and politics, we soon also learnt that every time our guide Thanh asked us a question about what we thought something was, what it meant, what it stood for, he was really setting us up as the 'straight man' for one of his many fairly crummy jokes - in fact, we think he's taken lessons from Paul Newman (for the uninitiated, he's the landlord of our local, the Six Bells in Chiddingly). Also, each time he finished one of his jokes, Thanh immediately pointed out to us that it was funny - just in case we hadn't got it. One example was when he showed us a couple of very ancient, very large frangipani trees whose branches were being suppported by a number of large stakes in the ground. On responding to his question about what the stakes were for, he quickly corrected us - "No, no for holding up chee ('tr' seems as difficult to pronounce for the Vietnamese as 'th' is). Just tha these chees sometimes go for walk in nigh, and, because they so ol, they need walking stic to hep them". He also explained that the purple Forbidden City inside the Citadel was only for the Emporer, his eunuchs and concubines, and VIPs. But that, in this case, 'VIP mean Very Impotent Person - as Emporer Ly ha no chill'n, even though he ha over 1,000 concubine. We say he ha plenty artirrery, no shell"! Yeah, I think you get the picture!
After this admittedly hilarious tour, Thanh took us to one of Hue's three 'national pagodas',which was interesting in its own right, but also because here is housed the 1950s Austin Westminster which, in 1963, one of the monks drove down to Saigon (then capital of South Vietnam when the country was still divided after the Vietnam war), got out in front of the Presidential Palace, and immolated himself in protest at discrimination against Buddhists by the US-supported Roman Catholic President, Ngo Dinh Diem. The photograph of this very public immolation protest, complete with the Austin car in the foreground, hit the headlines all around the world at the time, and it was certainly one which I remember seeing in the UK's newspapers whilst I was in my last-but-one year of secondary school.
After lunch, Thanh arranged for our group to go on a motor-bike trip. 9 of us rode pillion to 9 Intrepid Travel blue-shirted professional drivers (oh, incidentally, we also learned that here in Vietnam, ordinary citizens are virtually never allowed to drive cars - that is the province of 'professional' drivers only - god help 'em!) Anyway, once we were all helmeted and seated, the leader of these 9 motor-cyclists shouted out the Vietnamese equivalent of "three, two, one: we have lift-off", and we all sped away from a standing start in a shower of dust and small pebbles. Pretty exhilarating! After only a few yards, our convoy shot off the road and into a forest, travelling up a dusty/muddy, in places deeply-rutted, track to the top of a hill overlooking a big bend in the river. Here there were three big concrete bunkers, rather like our martello towers - one French, from colonial times, one American from the Vietnam war days, and one South Vietnamese from when the Americans handed the south over. Amongst the trees were several young 'courting' couples, who seemed most put out at our slightly noisy arrival, and there was much rapid re-arranging of clothing going on! Thanh explained that the hill is now known as 'good view hill', because this is the excuse all the youngsters give their parents about why they spend so much time up there.
Having stopped for a photo-call, we got back onto our bikes, and scrambled our way back down the hill, shooting straight out into the oncoming traffic, Hanoi-style, with much beeping of horns. The 2-hour ride took us through the countryside full of padi-fields and occasional jungle, down really tiny winding lanes in small ramshackle villages - the kind of scene where you might expect to see us all emerge covered in people's washing from their back-yard washing lines. Though all these villages seemed pretty dilapated, they all had at least one, sometimes two, elaborately decorated temples of various kinds. We stopped for refreshments at a large museum of peasant/agricultural life. Whilst I cack-handedly tried to learn how to separate rice from its husks using a rattan sieve, Andy had his palm read by a 200-year-old Vietnamese equivalent of Eleanor Rigby - "wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door". This strangely rouged and painted, wizened, toothless old woman spoke some heavily-accented form of English, and we learned from Thanh that she had been the bride of a GI who had abandoned her at the end of the war. Then, it was back to our hotel, still in convoy and Hanoi-style driving, to shower, change, and do our best to stop our legs wobblng!
In the evening, we went to an Imperial Banquet at a local restaurant, where we all had to dress up as King and Queen (Andy and I),or courtiers or eunuchs (the rest of the group). We sat down to this banquet, which compromised several courses of lovely food, each morsel of which was moved by chopsticks from the serving platters to our individual bowls by some silk-clad serving wenches. We didn't, though, have a banquet of 50 dishes, cooked by 50 different chefs and served by 50 different serving girls, which was apparently the penchant of one of the many Emporors we'd learned about earlier this day. Our banquet was accompanied by some traditional music and song, played and sung for us by some very accomplished male musicians and female singers who, in local tradition, did the 'hard-sell' bit with their CDs at the end of their performance. A really good night out, though, after a fun-packed, exhilarating day. So much for us starting this posting with the word 'ordinary'!



King and Queen!





Court Musicians!



3-2-1 We Have Lift-Off!

'Eleanor Rigby'

After a Good Dinner.



Imperial Citadel at Hue.

Rice Sieving.