Galleries

The city of Hue is located approximately in the middle of Vietnam and was the seat of royal power from the 19th and into the 20th centuries.  There were thirteen kings who reigned from Hue.  Many of the ancient structures were destroyed during the Vietnam-American War, which have since been restored.  The photos show scenes from the Imperial Palace as well as the three hundred-year-old Buddhist pagoda.

Writing this blog on the return flight from Spain to the US, my challenge in writing is to choose which aspects of the trip to highlight. There are more stories than I have the time or space to relate at length. Thus, my brief listing . . .

I write this blog with the Ukraine war present as a disturbing cloud on the mood of our pleasant cruise.  As I mentioned in my previous blog, the cruise schedule is very busy in the upcoming weeks in the Mediterranean.  In fact, we will be in port on seven consecutive days, including two days (and one night) in Venice.  So my upcoming blogs will combine several ports, with as many photos as the ship’s internet will enable.

We began our China tour in the capital city of Beijing.  Though Beijing is a city of 21 million people, it is very clean and efficient...much above my expectations which were colored by my experience of the crowded cities in India.  We toured the famous Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square on our first day, and on the second day we toured a section of the Great Wall of China.

Flying from Beijing to Shanghai, Susan and I boarded the Viking cruise ship Yi-Dun.  We had the pleasure of a Shanghai city tour in which we viewed an ancient garden containing ornate buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. 

The skyline of Shanghai is impressive, containing the world's third tallest building, the Shanghai Tower with 128 floors, at 2073 feet high.  (The world's tallest building is Dubai's Burj Khalifa at 2722 feet high.  The second highest is the Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 2227 feet.)--source Wikipedia