Noon Report:

• Location: N 04° 39.70′, E 107° 22.50′
• Speed: 18 knots
• Course: 358º
• Weather: Overcast
• Temperature: 25º C, 77º F
• Wind: NE 20 knots, 23 mph
• Seas: 2.5 meters, 8 feet

This is a bit of SOS/DD: Same Old Stuff, Different Day.

They continue to feed us information about the history of Vietnam – complicated because you can’t talk about it without talking about what the Vietnamese refer to as “The American War.”

Topics covered today include:
– Origins of US Involvement in Vietnam 1945-1965
– Vietnam: Ideology to Pragmatism – Escape from the War Years
– South Vietnam Before the Vietnamese
We also caught up on one we missed yesterday:
– Stories the Vietnamese People Tell About Themselves

Other than that we ate, read a lot, napped a bit, Cheryl had a massage, we turned in surveys (They occasionally have us fill out the standard Viking satisfaction survey – I complained about the internet and praised the staff), and made an heroic effort at BBB (25/38 – we were a LOT smarter before he read the answers).

So that’s the day.
Tomorrow we arrive at Ho Chi Minh City at ~12:30.

Till then, R

Cheryl’s Factoids:

• The story of the “Rabbit in the Moon” spread from India throughout SE Asia and up into China and Japan. Whenever these cultures look at the moon they do not see a “Man in the Moon”, they see a rabbit: One day Shiva put on the seeming of an old man and went begging. Four animals found him and volunteered to bring him food, the monkey brought fruit, the otter brought fish, the jackal brought a lizard and a pot of milk curd, but the rabbit said, “I can only gather grass”, and knowing that this would not be food for the old man, threw himself on the fire offering his body to feed the old man. But his body was not burnt or killed – the old man was moved by the selflessness of the rabbit and drew a picture of the rabbit on the moon for everyone to see. P.S. of the 12 Chinese zodiac signs, the year of the rabbit is the luckiest and symbolizes mercy, elegance and beauty. People born in a rabbit year are said to be calm, peaceful, and artistic. This is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. However, it is the Vietnamese year of the Cat.
• Ho Chi Minh was a leader of the popular movement to rid Vietnam of foreign control (the Vietnamese have been fighting against various takeovers for over 2,350 years) – and also a cultural movement against the feudalistic society where 80% of the people were peasants who were almost starving to death as the rich Vietnamese landowners (and also the French) squeezed all the profit they could out of the peasants crops. “Uncle Ho” is so revered as a freedom fighter and ethical person that there are many statues of him and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after him. An atheist himself and, in a communist country where only a small portion of the people have any religion, Ho Chi Minh is considered almost a spirit/god (ancestor worshipped).