Hanoi Hilton

After breakfast we went to the temple of literature and saw students graduating in their dresses and robes. They don't study there, they just come to take pictures for their graduation. It's the first national university of Vietnam, and there are stone tablets there listing the doctors who graduated.

For lunch we went to KOTO, a good restaurant on the same street that employs street urchins, so it's sort of a charity organization.

From there we walked to the Ha Loa prison (called the Hanoi Hilton in some movies) which has very propagandist explanations in three languages. It was built by the French and most of the plaques were about the French use of it to hold Vietnamese, or about the Communists who escaped from there, and one little room was about the Vietnamese use to hold American pilots and how great they had it there.

We walked through the French quarter to see the outside of the Woman's Museum but decided to go back up along the lake then.

By the lake we stopped to rest and got mobbed by a class of schoolchildren who wanted to practice their English on us. Leia talked to them and Guy worked out at a bench press there, until local muscleheads tried to show off by lifting more weight.

Escaping the heat, we rested in a cafe/restaurant with a view of the lake. There was a model there excitedly showing the man she was with her spread in a magazine she found... and Guy said, with the utmost of finesse and tact, "You're a model?" Nobody looks very good in this heat and humidity.

In the evening we went out for a much-needed haircut. Guy's barber was shorter than Guy sitting down, and couldn't possibly see the top of his head. Guy now looks like a Vietnamese dandy. Leia's hair was cut so short that she made the barber stop before she ruined it any further. The whole ordeal was very distressing for her.

We went out to the night market to buy Leia a couple more articles of clothing for this hot weather. It rained briefly, which made the weather actually much more bearable.