Vietnam

Our program is officially over! I've said goodbye to just about everyone except for a few who I will see in Bangkok when I get back, and it's definitely strange to think about this all ending. I am going to upload all of my pictures when I get back to Bangkok, and I think I'll just post them within the old entries.

In Vietnam, our group (the UNC group, on an organized tour with our professor) visited Hanoi for 3 days, Halong Bay for a night, Hue for two days, and Hoi An. I loved Hanoi, and the boat trip around Halong Bay was possibly my favorite experience of this semester. We also visited several health facilities and schools in Hanoi and Hue, which was a neat experience. In Hanoi, we visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, which was packed with both tourists and Vietnamese paying their respects - Ho is the leader of the original Communist party here and is credited with the unification of the country even though he passed away just before Saigon fell. After our tour of Halong, we took the overnight train to Hue, which was actually fairly nice. Hue is best known for its Citadel, which was a major battle site during the American War (yes, that's what they call it here), and for the tombs of old emperors that lie just outside the city. We visited a few of those and a couple pagodas before continuing to Hoi An for the final day. Hoi An is a port town, surrounded by fishing villages, and we were able to take a boat ride up the river and explore a little bit yesterday and this afternoon.

I've loved Vietnam so far, except for the unbearable heat, and I definitely plan on coming back at some point. One nice thing has been the lack of Western institutions - fast food, recognizable brands of everything - which I think gives the cities a lot more character. Also, in general, less people speak English than in the other countries I've visited, so we feel a little more out of our comfort zone. Not to mention the guilt of being American here, even though none of the Vietnamese seem to mind (after all, they "won" the war). At one point, a man came up to me and asked me where I was from, and when I said "America" he replied "ooooooh!" and whipped out a picture of George W. Bush to show me. I told him (through gestures, since he spoke little English) that I wasn't such a fan of GW, and he laughed quite heartily.

Continuing with the theme of visiting only cities that begin with "H," a friend and I are leaving in a few hours for Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) for the next four days before flying back to Bangkok. The bus ride is a whopping 21 hours, and I'm trying not to think about the logistics of that too much. I am also bracing myself for the shock that will occur when I get to Australia and see how expensive everything is there. It's already pretty bad trying to make plans and realizing that I will spend more on single activities there than I have on entire weekend trips in Southeast Asia. Still, I'm very excited! And I'm getting more and more excited about seeing everyone when I get back, although I know that after a few weeks I'll be bored of NC and itching to travel again.