Tuesday : overcast

Well today I felt pretty tired for most of the day, from as soon as I woke up till around 3pm. Did not feel energetic at all, just wanted to lay down and sleep everywhere.

It was a shame I felt like that today, because we went to the Citadel. The Citadel was the Emperor's town.

Hue itself though probably is the second largest city we have been to outside of Saigon. There doesn't seem to be as many cars, which is a good thing when crossing the roads. Hue has a large river that runs through it, and basically on one side of the river you have the Citadel and on the other side you have the city. There are quite a few parklands here also, and I made good use of they today with how I was feeling.

There are no hotels or hostels on the citadel side of they river either, maybe to keep it looking non touristy. If i have to say a bad thing about Hue there are cyclos everywhere, and your constantly being approached with, hello cyclo, where you from! We haven't ventured into the city part of Hue yet, we will probably go there tomorrow.

The Citadel itself was very interesting, I might get lost trying to explain it, because we were pretty much lost ourselves while in there, it was massive.

The exterior brick walls were very tall and surrounded by a moat, there were a number of large fortified gates with bridges crossing the moat. In the centre of a length of one wall there is a 39m flag pole the tallest one in the country.

When we crossed the bridge and went through the gates it was just like another town only surrounded by giant walls and a moat. Everyday people lived and worked there, shops, cafe, markets, houses, businesses, just no hotels.

We had to go over and through another bridge, moat, and gates, to get into the Imperial Enclosure, and pay an admission fee of corse. Plus side no Cyclos. The Imperial Enclosure was the Emperor's Citadel in a Citadel.

There were Temple areas, areas for the in-laws and Kings family residences. They even had there own areas, temples, libraries, meeting houses, party houses, relaxation areas. There were Kings Mandarins residencies and they had areas like above too. The Mandarines were like the Kings posse. All the different areas had giant walls and gates surrounding them too. Out of the 148 buildings in the Enclosure only 20 have survived Vietnams wars.

Now in the centre of the Imperial Enclosure was another brick walled and gated area called the Forbidden Purple City. It is a Citadel in a Citadel in a Citadel.

This area was for the King's private use. The only people allowed in were his Mandarins and servants that did not pose a threat to the thrown. This enclosure was enormous, a lot of the structures were destroyed in the wars also, but you got the gist of it for the signs around the grounds.

We decided it was getting late in the afternoon and started to head back past the Emperors lake which he used to fish in. In our travels there we got talking to a Viet fella and his wife on a scooter they wanted us to come back to his place for some bia and food. I thought why not by Kim smelt something fishy so we declined. I don't know they seemed harmless but apparently the further north you go the more cunning the scam. Better to be safe than sorry A.

We stopped off at a modern shopping mall and Kim picked up some personal item. While we were there the music inside was cranked, They love there dance music here. They have it playing full ball in the weirdest places. On this occasion they were playing the most inappropriate song. It's too rude to say, let's just say it was very discriminative to the females. The staff at the shop obviously had no clue what the song was saying. Kim and I were like WTF.

We went back to a restaurant close to the hotel and had a massive feed, in a different way though. Same food as usual but we had rice paper to make wraps, we didn't have soup of corse. It was great to eat the meat and salads that way, it was served like tapas but we put everything into wraps.

It really was an interesting day we had, looking forward to tomorrow off to some imperial tombs never been to a tomb before.