Tick-Tock

Do I state the obvious when I say that the Internet connection here is so slow that I could well need to have my roots touched up again before I this next set of pictures uploads?

Catching up a bit, after leaving Dan and Hien at the Peace Noodle shop, I walked to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, which is how I learned that every word and name in Vietnamese looks to me like every other. Every time I looked at a street name and tried to find it on my map, there seemed to be one hundred streets with the same name. All Vietnamese words consist of only one syllable, and Roman alphabet letters are, like their French equivalents, actually completely *different* letters. So I was never actually able to figure out where I was. The fact that the map I had was completely silly and gave "not to scale" a whole new meaning, compounded my dilemma. Moreover, the universal hand gestures for "where on this map am I?" aren't, well, universal after all. I asked no fewer than 10 people along the way and elicited the same response each time: rapid-fire Vietnamese with nodding affirmative (affirmative what?), and one English, "Yes. Here. Yes." Where? I kept walking in what seemed a possibly fruitful direction (literally, as fruit vendors lined the street), and eventually, a man made a gesture of prayer with a questioning look on his face, said "pagoda", and pointed me in the right direction.

The pagoda was described in one of my books as "spooky" but, in fact, it resembled every Tibetan Buddhist temple structure I visited in Sikkim, in India. Here, the influence is Chinese, but there are also some features that resemble the Christianity in Mexico, e.g., what I would describe as kitschy, with beads, satin drapes and sequins and even neon halo-esque lights. Many of the carved wood statutes even look like American folk art. The carved panels in one anteroom depict some of the thousand ways evil-doers shall be dealt with. Being boiled head-first like a lobster is my choice for the last way in which I'd like to die, and if it's even an option, I promise to be very, very good.