Today was spent touring the city of Hue. We started this morning by going to one of the Pagodas. There were two guardians at each entry way. One guardian is for the good and one is for the bad. It is all about balancing the yin and yang. Maeve is standing with the good guard.
The Pagoda was followed by the tomb complex of Tu Duc, the last king in Hue. The whole complex was incredibly large. There was a tomb for the king, the queen and one of the king's adopted sons. One of the great points of contention in the king's life was that he was not able to have a child, so he adopted a few sons from one of his brothers. While he was alive, the king would often spend time at his tomb complex. No one knows exactly where in the complex he is buried. They kept it a secret so that no one could steal him or damage his grave. To this information, one of us replied, "I bet there's an app for that."
We stopped by a place where some women were making incense. I'd never seen this process before. The lady rolled this doughy, glue-like substance onto one of the sticks and then rolled that in some cinnamon. They smell was wonderful!
Lunch was wonderful and then we went to walk around the citadel. Large areas of it sustained major damage during the Tet Offensive, but there were still a great number of buildings still standing and plans to rebuild it in the future.
This walkway was truly exquisite. It turn out that red and yellow are the royal colors, which explains why I've seen so much of them around Vietnam.
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