Finally a chance to sit down and blog...ah! :)
Life is wonderful in Hue, albeit a little busy and a little hot. The city, home to Hue University, is known for it's 'high culture.' Many scholars, physicians, and musicians come out of Hue. In addition, Hue is also known for it's diverse cuisine- lucky for me! There's all kinds of food here, and we have gone out to lots of different restaurants!

The sidenote I will mention is that Hue seems to be overloaded with tourists! Many of the restaurants have opened to accommodate tourists, which has created the problem of too-many-restaurants, not-enough-customers.

Class begins at 7:30 and goes until 11:30 - 4 hours. Hue university has given us a very nice room! Additionally, we get to break in the director's welcoming/receiving room -- which contains immaculate furniture. The first day that we arrived, the staff had put out plates of lychees out for us to eat! Lychees are a small fruit, creepy looking on the outside, and yummy on the inside.

 Later in our stay we visited the palace of the Nguyen Dynasty in Viet Nam. The palace has been greatly damaged and destroyed during the American war. However, today, while much of the palace lies in ruin, a lot of the 200-year old structures survive.

There's a really cool moat filled with lilly pads and lotus flowers surrounding the palace!

Lots of sculptures adorn the palace and the palace grounds - if you keep a sharp eye out, you can spot them everywhere! It's like royal where's waldo?

This used to be the national library, home to ancient canonical texts from China!

The natural structures that survived the war are breathtaking!!

 This is where the empress of Viet Nam, wife of Bao Dai, lived after he died. She also had a large building and pond devoted strictly to receiving guests!

At night the group goes out to dinner - so far Indian food has been the winner. Although Indian food makes the entire group sick, everyone keeps going back there for food! Linh, my roommate, and I, have recently started boycotting the Indian dinners. Last night we went to "Cafe Cathi" and had two Hue specialties - fried rice steamed INSIDE a coconut!!! And beef with lemongrass, which was phenomenal!!! It also did not make us sick - quite a plus.
The woman who owns the restaurant is 22, and runs it with 3 of her closest friends, also around 22 years old. She's very sassy! Linh and I love her!

Yesterday we went to some elaborate tombs of the deceased emperors - I'll write about that later. Today, we leave in 10 minutes for Hoi Anh, a 1500 year old trading port and village that somehow survived decades of war. It is promised to be one of the highlights of the trip! I'm most looking forward to the lantern shops....aaah!