Thursday 25 February 2010

Thursday 25th February

























Bit of an admin and sightseeing day - we booked tickets to fly to Hoi An tomorrow (only $20 more than the train and $460 less than a motorbike - also considerably quicker). Also posted some stuff back home; paperwork in triplicate / quadruplicate is alive and well here. To get our presents out of the country we had 28 different stamps and nearly as many forms...

Went to see a gallery of beautiful black & white photographs by Long Thanh (see http://www.longthanhart.com/). We've copied a couple of samples for you...

Also visited one of the local pagodas with a 24m high buddha and the usual plastic paraphanalia, and the Pasteur Museum of Alexandre Yersin who discovered the microbe that causes bubonic plague (and developed an antidote and a vaccination) and pioneered quinine production in Vietnam. He was also an avid collector of scientific toys in the early 20th century - all for serious scientific research of course... Possibly the only Frenchman the Vietnamese admire, he has also become plastic paraphanalia and has a pagoda in his own right as a protecting divinity.

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