February 9, 2012
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Vietnam Part 11: VTV.
We went to check back into the hotel, and look what we had to resort to. Eh? EH?!
We ended up staying at the resort hotel at a ridiculously cheap price. My dad said we got the employee discount despite not even having any connections to the hotel- my cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law’s friend worked at the hotel and gave us the discount.
AND they upgraded my brothers’ and my room to have 2 full-sized beds and a queen bed in the connecting room. It was ridiculous.
I don’t know why that bathroom has translucent glass, but luckily there’s also a curtain you can draw there.
Ughhhh whhaaattt??
All the games are the same as the US counterparttttttt
Let me make a quick comment about television in Vietnam. It was actually entertaining enough where my brothers and I would just sit around in our hotel room and watch tv way too much. There’s VTV, the Vietnamese version of MTV, where they would play a ton of kpop mixed in with American top 40. There was the Vietnamese music video channel, which I would always flip through to see if there was any upbeat dancy Vietpop, but was always disappointed to find the slow Vietnamese ballads.
And finally, there were the Chinese and Korean dramas. This was the most ridiculous part- those dramas weren’t subtitled- they were dubbed in Vietnamese. By a woman. Who dubbed over in the same monotone voice for ALL the male and female characters on the show. And you could still kind of hear the original korean/chinese voices underneath. It was completely bizarre, but the same for every city we went to in Vietnam.
We headed off to Chua Thien Mu, or the Thien Mu Pagoda. I think the wikipedia story is a little different, but my parents say the history of the temple was that long ago, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty was traveling through Hue and one night he saw a nun (whether it was in a vision, I wasn’t sure) who told him that this location would be a fortuitous place to establish the capitol. To repay his indebtedness to the nun, he built this Chua Thien Mu, which translates roughly into the Temple of the Holy Lady.
The temple also carries something surprising- a relic from an iconic photograph.
If you look on the dashboard of the car, you’ll realize that this was the car in the background of the iconic burning Vietnamese monk photo.
I had to google images a lot of these photos to figure out the names. This one is the Thien Mu Pagoda bell house
I really like this pic. This would be like a good profile pic or something.
