Monday, June 16, 2008

An incredible adventure.....

Yesterday we took the morning to tour the War Remnants Museum. I can not even begin to describe the experience. The museum is in the central area of HCMC and has numerous tanks, aircraft, weapons, etc. on display outside of the museum and inside the museum are many, many photos from the war. It was interesting that I remembered many of them from youth and from the news. We observed a lot of US Veterans touring the museum as well and this was a very powerful experience as at the same time there was an older Vietnamese man outside the fence and he appeared to be in mourning. The song going through my head all morning at the museum was the Michael Franti song, "Bomb the World" where he says that you "can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace". I am having a hard time understanding why we can't all get along and why we hate so much. (If you haven't heard that Franti song - you need to check it out. His words also resonate with what is going on in Iraq).
After the museum we walked over to the Reunification Palace where the President of South Vietnam lived. We hopped on to a tour and saw where all the major decisions were being made about the war and how the President and his family lived. The grounds are beautiful and they too had numerous war items on display around the grounds.
After that we walked over to the Notre Dame Cathedral and the HCMC Post Office which is a huge tourist location because it was built by Gustav Eiffel. A remarkable building!!!!
Our afternoon was spent meeting with individuals from Saigon Technology University. They were a delight to meet with and we shared information about both of our programs and talked about the possibility of working together in the future. They provided a tour of the campus and Bill was given the opportunity to speak with a class of students about UWL.
I haven't written much yet about our journey to Ha Long Bay. I think I will post this and then open a new post and write about that. Thanks for reading!

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