Hue!

Hue (pronounced technically who-aye but pronounced by us hugh-AYE) has been our battle cry for days. We arrived in Hue filled with hope and excitement - a new part of Vietnam, a series of post-it note tags in the guidebook, and some beautiful looking beaches.

But Doug and I had learned nothing from arriving in Hanoi, so we were again surprised to arrive in Hue to find in raining. Once we arrived at the hotel, we checked the weather to discover it is raining everywhere in Vietnam. We take a few moments to review the post-its in the guidebook and quickly reduce our itinerary of what we're thinking of doing in Vietnam.

Hue has a lot of history to it, so I put on my raincoat and Doug grabs his umbrella and we walk over to the Citadel. After going a bit stir crazy in Hanoi it feels good to get out and it was actually not raining too hard.

On our way to the Citadel we stop by an exhibit of some army tanks captured from the enemy army during the American War. While Doug found the tanks intriguing, I found it more interesting that this was the first time I had seen in print something that referred to the US as the enemy.

We walked on to the Citadel which, I'm going to be honest, is rather unimpressive. It seems they have great plans to put up a lot of impressive things there but for now they are all plastic replicas so it ends up looking very very cheesy. We had a good time playing around with the plastic structures and then made friends with the snail down by the river. Doug had a great time making out with it and putting it on his face and letting it crawl around while I bravely held it on my hand for about 30 seconds.

We woke up the next morning and it was almost sunny, so we decided to hop on a motorbike and visit the tombs. Of course, about five minutes into our ride it started pouring - but we continued on. There are no really good maps of Hue, so with a few false moves we finally found Khai Dinh's tomb - which turned out to be well worth it. Both Doug and I are a little historically sighted out, but the tomb was amazing. It took 20 years to build and was started before the emporer died. It's a huge structure with many different statues, and the building inside is intricately decorated with mosiacs of dragons. It was breath taking and well worth the trip out.

After Khai Dinh we had to hurry back for our bus to Hoi An.