Blog undates! Yes! Finally!

hey everyone,

Here is what I have been up to since I last posted here, back in Saigon. Sorry about that. I have published this in a few installments in an attempt to organize the stories. But I may have just made it confusing to people who aren't me...

I leave Vietnam in less than a week so am busy finishing everything up here. Then I am going to Shanghai, China to visit my cousin Helene and her family.

Today we went to visit Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Creepiest thing I have ever seen. They have him preserved in a glass coffin and on display. So we all walked through the room and saw Uncle Ho, in the flesh. And we visited the museum which told a lot about his life but also a lot about the communist movements, here in Vietnam and abroad. It was really interesting but they also had a lot of things like "This is the stone Ho Chi Minh used to scrub off the terrestrial leeches when he went walking through the forest." It is strange to me how they have kept all of these little things from Ho's life. I was thinking about this and at internship as I was editing a long article about Ho Chi Minh's family. As I was reading it, I was taken aback a few times from how they talk about his family being "patriots" and fighting to change the government. It just seemed backward. But then I had an epiphany: the way the Vietnamese feel about the war in the last half century and about Ho Chi Minh, is comparable to how we, as Americans, feel about our Revolutionary War and the founding fathers.

And now I am finishing up final projects and studying for my Vietnamese exam.

See y'all soon,
love,
Maggie