후에 - 왕의 도시

Hue - today we can spend a whole day wandering through the city and we want to do that on foot as well 🚶🏿🚶🏿

As a royal city, Hue has a lot to offer. For many centuries, the Vietnamese kings resided here. The royal city is gigantic, to be precise, 520 hectares. Too big to explore everything on foot, as we soon realize. Along the way, we meet a rickshaw driver; he tells us that the outer ring of the royal city alone has a circumference of 10 km - okay, we book him😀

He takes us to beautiful places that we wouldn't have discovered otherwise. We visit the garden house of Ho Chi Minh's parents and a garden house of a mandarin that now operates as a souvenir shop. It's really beautiful there - the garden here is filled with bonsais, water, and small cozy sitting areas.

Today, there are still 35,000 people living in the first ring of the royal city. In the past, it was inhabited by mandarins.

We enter the heart of the royal city - the Citadel - through the Noon Gate, then we go to the Hall of Supreme Harmony (where the king received guests and held ceremonies), and finally, we enter the Forbidden Purple City. This part has been partially restored - wars and socialism have also left their mark here - and we get a glimpse of life at the court 😀

Beautiful temples, long corridors (which are very practical when it rains, as we experience ourselves), and pavilions make up the main part of the Forbidden City. Everything is arranged in a very symmetrical manner, which is very calming 😀 We leave through the Gate of Peace and make our way back. There are two more gates in/out of the city - the Gate of Humanity and the Gate of Virtue. Everything here has melodious names and is always closely related to the predominant beliefs - Buddhism and Confucianism.

For us, it all sounds like stories, but with deep philosophical thoughts.

At the end of our sightseeing tour, we realize that we are quite exhausted - full of new impressions and with sore feet, we are drawn only to a delicious restaurant. After that, it's time to pack, because tomorrow we will continue our journey over the Hai Van Pass to Hoi An.

(Kerstin)

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