Where was I?

As I was saying, we went to the Museum of Vietnamese natural medicine, which was housed in a beautiful wooden building with nooks and crannies, stairs and balconies, jars of mixtures and composites, mortars and pestles, sharp rolling knives for chopping herbs and flowers, and peculiar statuary as below.  I love this wall of jarred components with ONE red one in the lower right corner.

God only knows who this little fellow is, but I found his face rather beguiling and had to capture him.

Lunch was a group grope where the menu offered pig uterus; unfortunately nobody was willing to do more than photograph the entry on the menu.

This is a little out of order, but these were some of the medicinal drawers - all writing in Chinese characters.

We went then to the Fine Arts Museum, which I love, but if they don't get themselves some AC and protection from UV rays, those paintings are real goners.  They are already showing severe signs of wear and tear.  Here was the liberation soldier with a little bell in his chest, but the bell was missing the thing that makes it dong or ding.

There is a section of the museum with this abstract gold gilt-like wall coverings that I thought was swell; Peggy, my roommate, thought otherwise.  This is a sample of the wall covering that went through a hall and onto one of the porches overlooking the courtyard. 

This is one of the first abstracts that I liked, and then in the really contemporary section, I found the one below, which made me want to flip!

 This chap and his big teeth should have been labelled as the first emoticon because he is such a caricature of those silly things when, in fact, he is a sculpture that may date back to the Cham era!

This is the interior courtyard of the yellow museum.

Inside the court yard hovered this ape-like figure who made me laugh because he looks both apish and human at the same time, and you have to love the suggestive knob that is his penis!  Today we will be in lectures all day, so the posting won't be of much interest, but you never know.

I ran this morning and took Nguyan Hue down to the big river where I ran along the river and then the road. The smog soaked sun was a fuzzy diaphanous orange ball hovering in the thick gray of a polluted sky, but it looked really evocative to me.  The enormous ships docked along the river's edged told of journeys far and wide, and the smaller wooden boots recalled for me the floating market boats in the Delta.  All along my run I saw people exercising, running, swinging, dancing or waiting for buses.  It was the place to be!