"World Heritage and America....." a Hue Travel Page by chala

It was a shock for me!!! I grew up with pictures of the Vietnam war , but to see the effects of the massive american attakcks, not even sparing the cultural heritage in the imperial palace really did give me a gasp!!!. Having been to the forbidden city, the imperial palace in Peking and seeing the model of the former imperial palace in Hue..... Well I do not want to get too political besides of still seeking one single reason for the Vietnam war... but here for foreigners the effects are depressing. It is not like in the war remnants museum in Saigon whre you expect this, but her there is a wall and a gate and beyond there is nothing... literally nothing. I am from Germany, the Brits bombed Dresden for some kind of revenge or to turn the people towards capitulation, but after world war 2 the so called democratic world still did this and tolerated this destruction without loosing too many words about it...

I do have to admit that I do not remeber the name of the grave we visited, as in Angkor Wat , we did the tour with ASIAN TRAILS we did have a very nic e guide and the weather was just horrible, we had the rains from a taifun , even with an umbrella it was wet wet wet....Drops like tennisballs...
We were so impressed by the beauty of the grave, the stone guards, that the whole harem was literally moved here to live here after an emperor's death like being buried alive... but on the other side the grave we visited was one which was inhabitaded by the emperor before his death, he liked the lakes and gardens and plants and flowers and birds etc , etc so much that he came here to create poems. I would like to like my grave as much as he did!!! But not yet!!!!!!!!!

One of the first pictures out of the Vietnam "crisis" I remeber is the one from the monk,who burnt himself on a street croosing in Viertnam. It was in Life magazine and my parents bought every year a book that showed all the importnat pichture of what happend in the world and there I saw it. He was schooled and lived many years in this monastery of this temple with the huge brick tower everybody visits coming to Hue, The monks do have his car, visible in the picture of LIFE, they expose the picture of the burning monk, and we saw a monk dusting the car and cleaning everything up, even the text honoring his life, it is with so much love for this person, overwhelming, you just don t expect solmething like this visiting a temple, but don* t miss it!!!