mickan in world

The preparations for Vietnams most important holiday; Tet- The Chineese New Year, include cleaning everything in your house (from clothes to floors) notoriously, burning paper money, lighting incense and offering food to the ancestors. All to provide good luck for the year coming.
In comparison my task; which was to find out where to celebrate it and the actual date of the festivites, seemed easy but it proved rather tricky. To begin with everybody was naming different dates, and seemed generally confused of what was the actual celebration. Anyway, I decided to make my way to Hue, the old dynastic capital of Vietnam, a place I found suitable for the celebrations.
Hue has a rather intriguing history, being the heartbeat of Vietnam in the imperial days of the Nguyen dynasty, which ruled (at least in name) til 1945. But it was also from Hue that the emperor provoked the French attack in the 1800s which in it's extent lead to the French colonisation of Vietnam. Furthermore Hue was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnamese (or as they say here: American) War and was held by the VC for 25 days during which 3000 civilians were murdered and buried in shallow mass graves. Sadly this offensive also destroyed most of the Citadel and the old imperial town.
Today it is a bustling town, third in size in Vietnam, situated on both sides of the Perfume River. And, as far as I'm concerned a good place to celebrate Tet.

We ( me and Andrew) arrived from Hoi An at 1 PM and set out to find a place to stay. A task which at first seemed easy, us negotiating a good deal with a man we met at the bus station. The deal proved itself to be a scam though, the salesman had straight up lied to us, and we left the guesthouse in a fairly bad mood. Sadly I have noticed that far too many people has discovered the benefits of lying. This render you suspicious and lessens the experiences of your trip; having you turn down offers you gladly would have accepted otherwise.

Very well, we found a great guesthouse just down the road from the first one, right in the backpacking area. Clean and nicely prized. We went for a surpirsingly cheap and good lunch and felt our mood rise again. The rest of the day we spent exploring Hue and trying to figure out were the action was for New Years Eve and also if the Eve was that night or the following. The answers differed. But as the night fell our doubts did the same. There definitelly was no reason to worry about missing IT; everybody went out on the streets. And they all went around like crazy, honking and running around. We simply spent the night walking around; marvelling at the sheer number of people. Fantastic! Everybody bought balloons to release at the strike of midnight and for some reason everybody also bought cactuses which they carried around. We still haven't gotten an answer to that phenomena.
At midnight there were some fantastic fireworks and then I guess IT was finished for everybody mounted their motorbikes and went home. As did we.

When we got back to the guesthouse we were greated by the personel and some of the guests. The personel gave us a great meal of fruit, candy and sticky rice and loads and loads of rice wine, and we stayed up drinking til the early hours; having a blast.
This morning I uttered some words that I've never said before: "Oh, my head! I think i had to much rice wine yesterday." I was not the only one.