no pics of Hanoi yet. But the city is very grey and there aren't a lot of "pretty" things in the city. We are taking a night bus to go to the Sa Pa valley, which we heard was amazing. Unfortunately, it's getting cold here ... damn i wish we were back in the south hemisphere.
Please pay your due respects to the greatest lawyer, thinker and revolutionary of the last 200 years.
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ReplyDeleteDear course20:
ReplyDelete1) I am aware of everything you say.
2) I am not from a rich country.
3) I do not mean in any way to trivialize what people in the erstwhile USSR had/have to go through. I already indicated I was not totally rational when I posted that, and I apologize again if I offended you...Robert and I have spoken about these things for a long time, and I guess I should have made part of my comments "private" for him...by posting them on this blog I have not done that and take responsibility for it.
However Course 20, I dont think you should get too aggressive about this. Believe it or not, 90% of the worlds people have or had lived in regimes either just as bad or worse than the USSR's. Standing in line for an hour to get bread? Where I grew up, most people couldn't get water, let alone bread. And you dont have to be "respectful" when you say I am "full of shit". That was just offensive and crude, believe it or not. And which forms of government have not used propaganda on its citizens? Note that I never defended the Communist Regime that you so - and rightly - hate.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I will remove the comments I just made....if you want you can remove yours too, so we dont have to have this on Bob's blog!
And going back to a my more trivial comments...
ReplyDeleteCheck this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM0ptMqNhso
Introvert and Course 20,
ReplyDeleteA debate about the impact of communism is far too difficult to discuss here. Don't take each others emails personally.
On a related topic, Vietnam may be communist (no facebook) but since it's open to trade with the US, there are tons of Nike, KFC, Oreos etc around. People are not very friendly with Caucasians at first, but they don't speak English and we don't speak Vietnamese. It's very difficult to really see communism on the streets.
We can see it only because the face of Ho Chi Minh is everywhere. Also, there is no mention of the war of Vietnam, only of the horror that the French caused during colonization and that US soldiers were well treated in prison during the war. I quote, "US soldiers were lucky fight Vietnamese".