Photos from Hue
written in Hue, Vietnam

As I mentioned, we took bikes through the outskirts of Hue today. At the first temple, we struck up a conversation with another tourist, Kem, also on bicycle, and he joined us for a day of idly riding from temple to temple. As we turned up one road towards a local monestary, we stopped to look at a striking white statue. Why, I wondered, is Buddha eating a bat... As it turns out (thank you Google!) the word "bat" and "happiness" are the same in Chinese, so the bat is a symbol of happiness.



Many of the temples and cemeteries feature "pique assiette", in which the artist recycles shards of pottery to make mosaic. Here's a dragon we liked.



Mixing old and new, the dragons guarding this house perch their claws on soccer balls.



Hue has a large incense market, and some of the wares dried in the sun as we biked by.



Here we are! Kem moved to Miami from Peru when he was 11, and then to Utah in his teens to be closer to fellow Mormons. We talked with him the whole day about our lives and travels.