Our next destination was to the Tu Duc Royal Tomb.

It starts off with a view of Luu Khiem Lake.

From there, you can take the bridge over to Xung Khiem Pavilion pictured above.

The Stele Pavilion. I just looked it up and it's a little sad.

The NguyenBros with the Mandarins in the forecourt. Yeesh, I don't know why I'm craning out from behind the statue so much.

I like this picture of my folks. This is why you take up photography.

Hoa Khiem Palace.

The nearby Tu Hieu temple.

Moss covering most everything out here.

It's our first day in Hue and my dad wasted no time in visiting all his old schools. There were large gates to enter the school grounds and my dad would ask the gate guards if it was okay for an old man to show his family around the schools he had once attended. Fortunately, it was after school let out, so we were able to walk the school grounds.

This was his high school- one of the biggest of its day. They've since erected a statue of Ho Chi Minh in the square (the statue was inscribed with a different name- my parents explained to me that Ho Chi Minh gave himself several names), and my dad was mad that that man had nothing to do whatsoever with his high school and yet here was his statue.

It still felt really old as we walked about.

My dad attended an all-boy's school. This was the equivalent all-girl's school

We land in Hue, my dad's hometown, early in the morning.

Flooded fields from the airplane.

Hue’s airport is hilarious- upon landing, you see in large letters “Hue International Airport”. Except we were the only plane at the airport. We disembarked from the plane onto the bus and took the bus all of 10 seconds to go the short distance to the terminal. We were all laughing, and once inside, we saw there was only one luggage carousel for (I think) the entire terminal. I’ve been to airports in the middle-of-nowhere America and they’ve had more gates than this.

Hue was a breath of fresh air from the crowded, slightly dirtier Hanoi. Hue is definitely a lot more rural- the most rural out of Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. My cousin Anh Bin- my aunt’s son who had remained in Vietnam the whole time while his two brothers and sister came over to the US- picked us up in a large rented van.

We dropped off our (ridiculous amount of) suitcases in the hotel lobby as it was too early to check in yet.

My cousin took us out for an early morning breakfast.

Bun bo hue, or as Seo amusingly calls it, "BBH". There's no air conditioning in this restaurant, there's a stray dog sitting out front, there are some flies flying around the tables, and it's maybe 10 AM, but this is the best bun bo hue I've ever had. It's spicy, the broth is rich, and there's a nice mix of flavors and textures all swimming about in this delicious bowl. I kind of want to order another bowl. And I kind of want to eat this every morning. But we have to head off to our next destination.

We're off to take care of my grandfather's grave. We pass by a rundown temple near the cemetery and my dad told me about how when he was in the boy scouts as a kid, his troop would camp out here. NEAR A CEMETERY.

My cousin leads us to my grandfather's grave. Frankly, it's ridiculous out here- there are no clear paths, everything is unkempt with vegetation sprouting out everywhere, and it's a winding maze with no markers really to make your way out here. If it weren't for my cousin, I don't know how anyone would know to find it. Around Tet (or Lunar New Year), the place gets packed with people coming to clean up ancestors' graves like we were doing.

The plot is overgrown with weeds and we hack away at the vegetation surrounding the grave with a dull blade and pull weeds from the area to properly pay our respects.

My grandfather. He passed away at 35 years old when my dad was four years old, so he doesn't remember much of him, but my uncle and aunt certainly do.

We cleared out as much as we could, paid our respects, and headed on back.

LilBro jumping over puddles of water on the way back.

We set out in search of the strange for lunch. The BigBro found this place through google, obviously catered towards tourists.

And here we go. This right here is deep fried locusts. I will generally eat basically anything except for bugs, but, well, culinary curiosity trumps sometimes. Deep fried locusts are not what I had expected- I was thinking of the biblical locusts- those huge ones that devour crops and signal the apocalypse. Instead, these locusts were smaller than small crickets, salted and fried to a crisp crunch. I actually had a lot of these as they taste like anything else deep fried and that small- almost like small fried pork skin.

The crickets fried in pig fat were another story. I didn't eat many of these as these were a bit large for my liking. Still smaller than your average cricket, they weren't crispy like the locusts and I tried to mask it more with the chip that was provided. I can't quite recall what they tasted like (which means it wasn't gross), but the mushy texture and consistency of it all was unappetizing.

We continued walking around that afternoon with my mom attempting to do more shopping, but we were all pretty unsuccessful. My dad said this was like the ugliest tiger face ever. He's probably right.

We had a several-course meal our last night in Hanoi, cooked at my dad's uncle's house. They made us Hanoi specialties like nem cua- except this nem cua was huge. But still, an egg roll with crab? Delicious.

I want to say that this is made from the same stuff as grass jelly, but I can't quite remember. In any case, you put some of it on banana and it's surprisingly good. We were stuffed after dinner, but they kept offering us more to eat. My dad said that in Vietnam, if people like you, they will keep trying to feed you, and it's true. Everywhere we went, we would get fed constantly. I know where my parents get the constant need to feed us now.

My dad's cousin.

My dad's uncle. He killed me at Scrabble and it's not like he's making up words and hoping it's an actual word. Legit. This is why I hate playing Words with Friends and Word Feud these days.

It was our last night in Hanoi and everyone was saying their goodbyes. My mom walked hand in hand with her cousin-in-law's wife that she had just only met twice as we headed towards the taxi, which I find endearing and feels like something that never really happens in the US. I'm not sure how much longer it will be until we see them again.

End day four.

After visiting the university, we continued exploring Hanoi.

This is Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. My dad hates Ho Chi Minh for obvious reasons, one of which were his orders for his troops to kill (and bury alive) about 6000 Hue residents during the Tết offensive (1968). There are still mass graves in Hue, my dad's hometown. For many, Saigon will always be Saigon, never Ho Chi Minh City.

With the rainy weather, the worms surfaced. They're disgustingly longer than a foot.

My dad used to joke about people eating fish from the same river that people poop in. Out in West Lake, all these dead fish were kind of more disgusting. We also saw people fishing out here with no bait and actually catching things. I don't even know why a fish would be that desperate.

We stopped by for some bun cha, a northern specialty. We went up some four or five stories of dining using a narrow one-person spiraling staircase.

So it turns out nem cua is not like the nem you normally think of- it's actually just cha gio (egg rolls) with crab in it.

So this bun cha is more like thit nuong (in this case a kind of roast pork ball) in diluted nuoc mam (fish sauce). You can get something similar to this at the banh cuon place on Bellaire across from Hong Kong supermarket.

This was the whole table layout- mostly unfamiliar but all delicious. I was a little hesitant to try the thit nuong in nuoc mam as I thought it would be oily and soggy, but it was neither of those and held up well.

My dad saw this picture and was like, "This is awesome" and pointed at the pseudo-face on the red Honda and laughed to himself.

That afternoon, we went to the various shopping districts in Hanoi- there's like a clothing district, silk district, jade district, etc etc. We mostly waited while my mom went to look for silk goods and art for the house.

This looks legit.

The family waiting for the cab to take us to dinner.

For dessert, we had something like banh it duong- another northern specialty. Basically a chewy exterior (I guess comparable to mochi) with a liquid brown sugar center- not overly sweet and pretty good.

The third night’s dinner was with my mom’s cousin. My mom’s cousin was closer to my mom’s older sisters, as my mom was just four years old when my mom’s cousin moved to Hanoi from Saigon. My mom hadn’t seen her cousin since ’54- over half a century- when she moved to Hanoi. My mom’s cousin also had a younger brother that my mom had never met when the family moved to the north. When they all met at the restaurant, my mom’s cousin produced a laminated picture of my mom and her siblings and her when they were kids that she had kept for over half a century. Her daughter and son-in-law owned a tour agency in Hanoi (tour agencies being a highly lucrative business) while her brother had been an air force captain in the North Vietnamese army during the war. As a child, I had it in my head that the North Vietnamese were “the bad guys”, as the US media portrays it. But here around the dinner table, everyone got along like they had known each other forever. As you get older, you understand that you can hate the government and what it represents, but obviously you can still love the people who live there.

End day three.

The one nice daily thing about Vietnam is that I could get cafe sua da every morning. And I pretty much did in Hanoi. I wish they had this in the loop in Houston- at least where it doesn't cost a ridiculous $4 for just coffee and condensed milk.

An omelet with cheese is kind of weird. They just put a slice of cheese on top and I guess hope it melts?

Like I said, the pho is decent, but the small chunks of beef made me sad.

Even worse, the bacon out here is limp and more like ham.

That morning, we made the trip out to Quoc Tu Giam, the first national university in Vietnam. In the old days, not many people went to college, much less graduate schools- learning at that level was a luxury. At Quoc Tu Giam, students had a minor test each month and four major tests each year. If they did well enough, they were approved by the Ministry of Rites to sit for the National exam. Once they passed the National exam, they could then sit for the Royal exam held at the court. At this exam, the King himself posed the questions, responded to the candidates' answers, and then ranked those who passed the Royal exam into different grades. These PhD students were given one topic on the exam by the King prior to receiving their PhD, and to be Valedictorian meant that you were the best in the nation. That'd be amazing if there were a presidential exam in the States, but I would assume in this day and age, any question posed by any president would be argued against heavily online.

It rained most of the time we were in Vietnam, and there were always people selling rain ponchos and umbrellas in the streets. I opted for the rather unattractive- but more camera friendly- rain poncho in lieu of an umbrella.

The valedictorian's gown.

On the outside of the university was a saying which my dad explained that every student had to learn upon entering school, and it was roughly translated into this: “Learn courtesy and to respect each other first, then can you learn everything else.” In the old days, when you first began school, you learned how to be polite and to respect others before you began learning literature. My parents said they stopped teaching like that after the war, which is sad to me.

The second and final stop on the Ha Long Bay boat tour.

Vietnam is home to some of the world's largest natural caverns, with the largest one in the world being discovered a few years ago. The ones in Ha Long Bay aren't as large, but still impressive. One thing you'll notice immediately is their use of colored lights in the cavern, which kind of detracts from the grandness of it all.

But you get used to it. The formations are still spectacular regardless.

This kind of looks like an alien's head.

An opening to the outside.

There are people in this photo for size reference.

Sometimes I think about how neat it must have been to be the first to discover a natural cavern- just inky darkness and the unknown lit with only your light.

Not David Nguyen: "I don't get it, what am I looking at?"
Me: "See? It's a guy looking up at the girl, and she's looking away from him. UNREQUITED LOVE."
Me: "I like it."
Not David Nguyen: "You WOULD like it."

Darkness set in for the 3 ½ hour ride back to Hanoi. The roads out here are horrible- you max out at maybe 40 miles per hour because the roads are that bumpy. I sat in the rear of the bus, with each bump magnified to where I would occasionally hit my head on the roof of the tour van. The roads are also all dimly lit, if at all, feeding into the superstitions my dad told me about when he was growing up in Vietnam.

Riding through the country at night for the first time is a spectacular site. Vietnam is still very much a developing country, and at night riding through the country, you can see straight in through the lit doorways into the living rooms of most people’s houses. But one thing I noticed in almost all these houses in the evening was the presence of at least a CRT television shining back out into the streets. Even in a shanty under an overpass, somehow there was still electricity hooked up to power a television as we drove by.

End day two.

Here, our boat docked at our first stop.

With the waters calm and the sun out, I convinced the LilBro to go on the kayak with me while the rest of the family got on the boats rowed by strong women.

That's a'paddlin'.

With our friendly tour guide.

The bay is home to residents who spend their lives on the floating houses, with their children attending a likewise floating school.

These rocky formations are impressive in size.

And on to the next stop in Ha Long Bay.

Early in the morning, we ventured out on the bus ride out to Ha Long Bay. The guide worked for my mom’s cousin’s son-in-law’s travel agency and chatted with us on the 3+ hour trip out to the bay.

Every morning, we would eat breakfast in the small hotel dining room. They had pancakes, but they were a bit strange- a little more like a slightly sweet crepe rather than the fluffy America counterpart.

The hotel's pho was not bad, a decent broth though you generally don't get as generous a serving of meat as you do out in the States- in this case it was a few thin slices of chicken.

The power lines right outside our hotel. This is pretty much how the electrical lines are organized all over Vietnam. I would just give up if I were an electrician.

On the way there and on the way back, the buses stopped at tourist traps to let the riders off for a break. These were mainly to let people off to use the restroom, but they usually contained silk or jade goods for sale, as well as fairly unappealing food and snacks.

Oddly, one of my pet peeves is when people make that whole "asians eat dogs" joke. It's really unfunny and the equivalent to, say, you having chickens in your yard and a black person comes over and you're all, "HURR HURR YOU BETTER NOT FRY AND EAT IT." I mean, seriously, if you're going to be non-PC, at LEAST be clever about it. And yet, here we are- a restaurant that sells dog. It's not even that common- you see it more in the countryside and I don't remember seeing it in the city at all. My parents told me there's an old saying in Vietnam that goes something like, "Cho di ra mien bac, heo di ra mien nam" which translates roughly into dogs get sent to the north, pigs get sent to the south.

Like I had mentioned- houses get more floors added on top rather than expanded.

Ron Swanson: “Encapsulate the spirit of melancholy. Easy. Boom, a sad desk. Boom, sad wall. It’s art. Anything is anything.”

Anyway, back to the story. As we boarded the boats to the bay, it poured a freezing rain across the docks. We settled down into our boat.

It's actually kind of neat looking at out the sheer number of boats out here, like an old time armada.

They started out serving a light meal on the boat on the way to Ha Long Bay. I'll spare you the pictures and put them on facebook instead.

The boat's interior.

Fortunately by the time we made it to the bay, the rain had cleared up and the formerly rough waves settled to much calmer waters in the bay.

We landed in Hanoi in the morning, if I recall. My parents had never been to Hanoi, as after 1954 the north had closed off its borders and people from the south couldn’t visit, much like North and South Korea today. At the airport, we cleared through customs with no interruption (relatives we visited would later inform us that customs stopped asking for bribes years ago due to complaints).

The cab from the airport.

Hanoi is a crowded, busy city. Surprisingly, despite being equatorial, Hanoi is far enough up north that it was actually cold. We had landed right in the middle of monsoon season, so the skies were cloudy and it was around the 60’s. It was dreary, cold, and dingy in the wet, crowded streets near the hotel we were staying at. In fact, it rained about 90% of the time we were in Vietnam.

The first thing you notice is that all the buildings are built very narrow, but built very tall. Due to surprisingly high property prices, building up rather than out is all people can do. Our hotel was in a busy part of town, my brothers’ and my room on the second floor. All we could hear outside our window was the constant honking from the street below.

The room where my brothers and I would be staying for the next four days. The BigBro looks up how to "hack" Vietnam's firewall to access facebook and does so in a matter of minutes.

The bathroom. Notice the short shower curtain- basically every time anyone showered, the bathroom floor would be flooded with water. So terrible.

The view from the second floor balcony.

With our luggage in our rooms, we set out exploring the nearby streets and alleys. And that brings us to getting around Vietnam:

The good thing about Vietnam is that there’s no jaywalking. The bad thing about Vietnam is that there’s no jaywalking.

Basically when you’re crossing a street full of Vespas and motorcycles, you do NOT stop for traffic. You follow a slow predictable path crossing the street and everyone will weave around you. If you stop, you’re more than likely to get hit, albeit at an extremely low speed. Out here, people don’t drive more than 15-20 mph because there’s just too much going on in the streets.

For all the joking about “terrible asian drivers”, I’d have to say the spatial perception of asian drivers is incredible, surpassing the US. People out here drive like schools of fish in the ocean- seemingly all over the place, but rarely ever colliding. The constant honking out here is more a practicality- signaling more “Hey, I’m behind you” rather than the road-rage inducing honking out here in the States. The street lines are more of a suggestion; the motorists are fluid, dynamic. If they weave into the oncoming traffic, the oncoming traffic is flexible enough to move out of the way without honking, whereas in the US, people are inflexibly confined within the two parallel lines delineating a lane. In that respect, perhaps the Vietnamese are more practical drivers, with many intersections having no street lights at all, but not that much congestion.

There are a lot of people sitting around seemingly doing nothing at all hours of the day in Vietnam. There are also scooters parked all over the sidewalks in front of stores at all hours of the day in Vietnam. My dad asked one of the guys in front of a store what he was doing and he told him that for 5000 dong (the equivalent of $0.25), people would park their scooters on the sidewalk in front of the store and he would watch their scooters. And in that way, people made their living.

Produce literally sold right out on the sidewalks.

We start off on a walk to visit my dad's uncle, my grandmother’s younger brother and the last surviving sibling. This is the Hanoi Opera House, which is called "Nha Hat Long Ha Noi" which I like to translate literally into "Ha Noi's House of Big Singin'".

My great uncle's house. The area he lives in is pretty much the equivalent of the River Oaks area in Houston. His father-in-law was on good terms with the prime minister in the old days, and the prime minister provided them with a plot of land spanning a few housing units. Those housing units belonged to his wife’s family and my dad’s uncle had been living there ever since with his son and his family.

The interior. It goes up several stories. My dad’s uncle is a spritely energetic old man of 92 years, something that I noticed with most all elderly relatives I met in Vietnam- they were particularly lively, unlike my grandmothers when they came to live in the states. I take it in part to being in a walking city, meaning no one had a sedentary lifestyle like they have over here, as well as not being quite so isolated in a foreign country. We met the family and one of the constant re-occurring conversations throughout the entire trip when meeting any relatives in any city was the following:

Relative: Are any of you married?
Me and my brothers: No, not yet.
Relative: But you're all so tall! How are you not married? If you lived in Vietnam, there's no way the girls here would let you go around unmarried!

Our first dinner was at a nice Vietnamese buffet/restaurant.

Kind of like an american buffet, but not.

The first of my "try every different beer in Vietnam" challenge. I decided to drink beer instead of sodas for meals at first as it was "healthier" without all the sugars. But then after a while, you get tired of drinking beer for lunches and dinners.

Upon arriving in Vietnam, there are two hard and fast rules that everyone tells you- “Don’t drink the ice” and “Don’t eat raw vegetables.” You grow up hearing stories of how they clean plates in restaurants by merely wiping the dishes in the same stagnant water bucket used to clean every other dish. I would have to say, though, that I never saw this happen the entire two weeks I was in Vietnam (and I was reassured that Vietnam has gotten much better than the olden days). Beers are served room temperature over here, with one solid brick of ice in the glass to pour over. So you can either drink tepid beer or watered down cold beer. By the third day, the tropical heat in most areas left me saying “Screw it” and drinking all the ice all over the place. And once you make the decision to drink ice, avoiding raw vegetables pretty much goes out the door too.

The family photo.

End day one.

There’s an old tale about a fully grown elephant chained to a stake in the ground. One day, a man asked the elephant’s owner why an animal that large doesn’t realize that stake could break with its slightest effort and it could be free. The owner explained that when the elephant was chained to it when it was young, the elephant wasn’t strong enough to break free. As it got older (and larger), it held onto the belief that it could not break away from the stake and therefore gave up trying long ago.

Vietnam was my immovable, rigid stake in the ground. Out of all the countries I’ve known, Vietnam seemed the most distant- imaginary almost, in the sense that all the tales my parents told me about growing up in Vietnam seemed to have been wiped out with the war.

For much of my younger life, Vietnam to me was the country one couldn’t visit- it was the place my parents fled from during the fall of Saigon in 1975. It was the place where, growing up, my parents sent my father’s side of the family care packages to sell at the market- but never money- for fear the corrupt Communist government would open up the mail and the money would never make it to them. It was the country that my dad spent well over a decade trying to sponsor first my grandmother, then his brother’s and his sister’s families over. In short, it seemed to be a place people were trying to leave, not visit.

My cousin Tini was the first of my cousins in Houston to “go back” to Vietnam. I was in high school at the time and she was a reporter for the now defunct Houston Post. Her trip was a week-long series on the front page of the newspaper, narrating her experience there. Since then, nearly all my aunts, uncles, and cousins have gone to visit Vietnam. But even then, it was still a corrupt country, where- if you were a Vietnamese person returning- you had to have a bribe slipped under your passport so you wouldn’t get unnecessarily stopped at customs.

And so, for the past few years, my parents have been trying to plan a family trip together to go to Vietnam. Unfortunately, with age, it was difficult for my two brothers and my parents to coordinate all of our work schedules. We had taken a family trip to Japan in 2009, but no one was available for another trip until 2011. So in the fall of 2011, we had tentatively penciled in the date for our next family vacation.

In planning for the trip, it was mainly up to my parents. I knew the trip would be primarily for them- to visit old relatives and friends, visit old childhood haunts- so I left all the planning to my folks. My dad was pretty excited in planning the trip. Both my parents fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975- only my dad had been back in 2000 to take care of the family cemetery. We planned to fly into Hanoi in North Vietnam, fly to Hue in Central Vietnam, and then to Saigon in the South. I remember my dad over dinner telling me how excited he was to show us his hometown. “We’re going to get to see the old palace walls- I used to jump down from there when I was little. We have to go there and jump off those walls!” My mom laughed and said, “You’re an old man now. You can’t go around jumping off city walls!”

We left for Vietnam on Saturday afternoon, October 1st. My parents sat in the row behind while my brothers and I took up a row. The travel time would be 30 hours total.

This will be the first picture I post of the trip. Because it makes me laugh. Also, everyone in Vietnam either thought my brother was like Robinson Crusoe or Bin Laden. Weird.

This trip could also be alternatively titled as "Vietnam: The Quest for Free Wi-fi", as the BigBro demonstrates here. And we're only in the Houston airport terminal at this point.

My view for the next 30 hours.

My folks in the row behind us. Throughout the entire flight, they would constantly pass us food and snacks they didn't eat through the seat gap.

The magnificent NguyenBros. Fisheye is gimmicky, but it gets photos like these in cramped places, too.

Oh, and let me make a quick comment about international airlines. Singapore Airlines blows any US airline carrier out of the water. The female flight attendants are pretty in their dresses while the male flight attendants wear suits and all are incredibly friendly. I used to think Continental was decent when I would fly to Japan, but Singapore Airlines is amazing. The planes are newer too, with a much better travel interface with games, movies, and travel guides than Continental. Honestly, by the time the plane landed in Hanoi, I still wasn't done watching in-flight movies and wouldn't have minded if it went on a little longer. It's a little bit like the humans in Wall-E, penned into tiny spaces- you sleep, entertain yourself, eat, and get fat. If there were little toilets in the seat, we'd be living the future, now.

Ever since we saw Tom Hanks in the Terminal years ago (when we first saw it, I was like, "haha, that's funny. When is he going to stop making that accen- WAIT, HE'S NOT"), we randomly blurt out KRAKOZHIA and, "EES PEELS, FOR GOAT!" in an equally horrible accent. Moscow airport seemed as good a place as any to do that.

Moscow airport is exactly as I had imagined.. Actually, no, it was fairly disappointing. With a one hour layover, you stand in line for customs and then you have maybe half an hour to look at what the small terminal wing has to offer. I tried looking for local Russian foods to try, but I was mainly bombarded by things like Dunkin Donuts or an Outback Steakhouse or some other chain.

Looks like the terminal gate is all NOMNOMNOM on the airplane. In Soviet Russia, terminal gate boards you!

This is the first of many "Wouldjalookatthis" photos.

If you're in college, you might think this is a sign for I <3 Student Government. But nope, just Singapore.

As much as I’ve been fortunate enough to travel for business and for pleasure, I hope I never get tired of being on a plane because, hey, I'm IN THE SKY, GUYS. There’s just something neat still about being on a plane, knowing you’re in a steel box up in the air and you’ll be touching down in some new land the next time you step out. I feel like a lot of people forget that.