Vietnam!!!!

I went to Vietnam! That makes me cool! Holy moly! Okay, so first we went to Ha Noi. The layout is really neat. As we flew in it looked like a bunch of dark green islands in a sea of rice fields. The dark green islands are small hamlets with green trees and roads. They are each about one to two square miles. When the Vietnam war was going on Ho Chi Mihn decentralized the city because the Americans kept bombing it. Now Ha Noi is more centralized than before, but a lot of the prior city structure remains. The architecture is gorgeous. Super colorful town houses. Everyone eats dinner outside in front of their town houses. They point their chairs toward the sidewalk so they can talk to people who pass by. I love it. We went to a water puppet show, and then went to Ho Chi Mihn's mausoleum. I saw the embalmed body of Ho Chi Mihn encased in glass. After Ha Noi we flew to Ho Chi Mihn City (Saigon). Traffic is crazy!!!! We went to a rubber tree plantation, the Cu chi tunnels and then to the Vietnam war museum. It was a physically and emotionally taxing day. I came away with the convicition that if people go to war they'd better have a DANG good reason for it because it effects millions of innocent people for years and years after the fact. War is disgusting. Yuck, yuck, yuck. All I could think about was the last chapters of the book of Mormon. Luckily there are tons of people who are helping the victims and veterans from that war and the current tragedies now facing the earth. We haven't lost our humanity.