After taking another overnight train back from Sapa, I had two days to explore Hanoi some more.

On the first day, I took a city tour of Hanoi which included the Ho Chi Minh memorial/mausoleum complex, 2 pagodas, lots of historical buildings and a ceramic village. We didn't get to go inside the mausoleum to see Ho Chi Minh's body because it's closed on Fridays, but that was actually fine by me because I'm not really into dead people. It was interesting to hear the guide describe the war - his interpretations of America's intentions & motives were quite different from the way we describe it in America.

Politics aside, the guide also said with perfect sincerity in the ceramic village that women could only paint small ceramic items and the large items had to be done by men because women don't have the "mental strength" to work on such a big project. Right. You can probably guess how much I valued any of his insights after that...

On the second day, I visited the Vietnamese Womens Museum and the Hoa Lo prison, which was a prison during the Vietnam war and was so luxurious that it got the nickname 'Hanoi Hilton'. Most of the museum was dedicated to the time that the prison was used by the French to imprison Vietnamese, but there was a small section focused on its use during the Vietnam war for captured American pilots. (I don't know what the politically correct term is for the War, so let's just not go there.)