Warning: although this is a blog post about visiting Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum there are no actual pictures of the museum because when you go through the official entrance and walk through the, like, half a mile long maze they have you traverse they have set up for the lines of people who want to see a former revolutionary's embalmed corpse, they take away your camera LONG before you get anywhere near the actual building that houses his body. If you, however, simply walk up to the mausoleum, you can take pictures all the livelong day. If you want to see some photos I took of the building that houses the man, the mystery, the legend, check them out here and also here.
Actually waking up early enough to see the double-parked line of tour buses (and ensuing hordes of tourists) along Ngoc Ha street, outside the mausoleum. Dan and I stopped for some breakfast and more importantly, some coffee before lining up. Although I think normally there is an entrance fee somehow we ended up not paying one? I think we accidentally slipped through the cracks.
The line was long but it moves pretty quickly as once you get into the room with the dude, you only have about 1 minute, tops, to walk around the giant glass box his body lies inside before you're shuffled back out. So this is the entrance point where everyone goes through a metal detector and gets their bag searched. You must then check your bag immediately after entering.
Walking down this corridor where all the TVs are showing the exact same propaganda video.
Dan vamping it up as usual.
Some ugly-ass, Soviet-looking fountain/museum stuff along the way.
So. That's that. Across Ba Đình Square is the Presidential Palace and a bunch of other Ho Chi Minh-related historical buildings. It took so little time to go through the mausoleum we figured we might as well check it out. As soon as we got in we noticed this bottleneck of tourists and wandered over to see what they were looking at. As it turns out, people are not currently allowed in the palace.
Just a mass of people selfie-ing it up.
The.... "palace". Vietnam is really good at a lot of things, but from what I have seen.... palaces are not one of them.
"GARAGE OF HO CHI MINH'S USED CARS"
The best part of seeing these cars was noticing this woman elbowing her way to the front of the crowd. I was wondering where the fire was and why she was being so rude when suddenly...
HO CHI MINH'S RUSSIAN CAR SELFIE!!! Obviously.
Across the pond (where the koi fish pictured up above reside) is the dude's former stilt house.
Along the way, a very sad cage housing a very sad peacock. Oh, Vietnam. Why?
The Mango Road, were HCM took walks to thing about...revolutionary stuff...
And homegirl was there, getting her photo shoot on.
The house was really beautiful and very well-maintained.
Upstairs.
Meeting room on the ground floor.
Looking back at the garage.
Another view of the Ho Chi Minh museum, which we passed on as I felt that I had gotten more than enough information about the man for one day.
On the way back home we decided to check out our local temple which was heavily under construction when I first moved in. It's been looking good lately though! Despite the blah weather, it's still a dignified and pretty temple.
Lookin' good, little Ngọc Hà Temple.
Inside...
Some details.
The view from the front of the temple.
All in all, a random and somewhat interesting morning. It was just as interesting to see the mix of Asian and non-Asian tourists and their very varied reactions to Ho Chi Minh's body and the general severity and seriousness with which the entire operation is conducted.
