The Reunification Palace

 Our tour took us to this place and it is clearly something they are proud of.  It was the palace for the president until it was taken out by a couple of bombs in the mid 70s.  It is a huge building that they used not only as a residence for the pres, but also for official state functions.

  In the cultural melting pot that is Vietnam, it was designed with European elements out the back to let the air in and in the front, they had to add the fountain because it faced up the main road and it was bad Feng Shui for the main entrance to face the road.  The fountain apparently washes all the bad spirits, so that makes it okay to face the road.  If you are Chinese. 

Inside the house is heaps of huge meeting rooms and entertainment places.  In one area there is an enormous room for domestic meetings and in the very next room an enormous room for international meetings.  I am picking that the pres could only attend one and a time, so why two rooms?  It is all decked out in yellow and red and there is a pecking order to colours, with yellow being the presidents colour and red is the next one.  No one else is supposed to use those colours, so that is limiting and a little selfish, I thought.

In the family area there were a whole lot of things given to the family and here are three elephant feet.  I wonder how you go about giving elephant feet to someone, because those elephants are going to miss those.  They were all different sizes as well, so not from only one poor elephant.  I am picking that they must be really old, considering the palace was not lived in again after the bombing.

The most interesting part of the whole place was the bunker, which is underneath the palace and you go down a heap of stairs and into this part of the house.  Its wall are made of concrete and metal, so it was fully protected from the bombs.  The place has been basically left as it was, with the maps and charts on the walls and all of the communication equipment still there. 

During the war they separated each area out, so the people were easier to control and this chart has the populations of each area and the map showing the districts.  

The second picture is the number of how many foreign troops from each country were there at the time.  So on the 29th June 1968 there were 363601 American troops in Vietnam and if you look down you will see that Tan Tay Lan had 523.  That is us!  I am picking that Uc might be Australia?  

To be that detailed during a war is actually pretty impressive, I thought.  All hand written and tidy and still on the wall 2 bombs and 57 years later.