At the time, I wasn't terribly interested, nor happy, while I was in Hue. But in retrospect there was a good amount of cool architecture and interesting tombs. Sadly, everything worth checking out was outside the city and mainly only accessible through tours and the tours were utter crap. My so-called English speaking guide sounded like he probably had good grammar, but his accent made it so difficult to understand him that half of the time I was wandering off on my own and ignoring the guy. He was describing something, and was calling it a "stoolie," and the 10 or so of us were confusedly attempting to figure out what it was. Eventually we guessed a "stele," and he exasperatedly said "Yes!" After a day of this I was thoroughly fed up with the guide and all the sights that each cost a good 55,000 dong each. But now, looking back at the pictures, the sights were admittedly interesting. If I were to do it again, I would rent a motorbike and driver and do the personal tour thing again. That works out real nice.

When I left to get up to Hanoi in the north, I was quite glad to leave Hue behind and hop on an overnight train. Though when I got to my cabin to try and throw my backpack on my bunk, there were 11 people in there already. Strange, since the cabin only had six beds in it, and one of them was already MINE. That freaked me out for a bit, thinking that I would have to share with so many people, but it turned out that they were all friends or family and their cabin next door was empty. So it turned out that I had the entire room to myself! Woo! I hung out there watching the scenery and reading my book until a young Vietnamese man came into my room and gestured to me to follow him, saying "two! two!" Well, why not? Maybe he was going to give me "two!" million dollars or something. I followed the guy a couple doors down where he proudly pointed "two!" Australian guys out to me. Instant English speaking friends! They invited me to chill with them and we ended up chatting and eating addictive coconut candy for the next four hours or so. The other Vietnamese guys in that car were artists, we made friends with them and they drew pictures of us! One of them was really good too. Ooh, one of the Australian is in the middle of a year long, around the world type trip and mentioned that he'd actually be in Washington state around August visiting family. "Where?" You might ask? Why Port Orchard! How bizarre is that!?