Visiting Uncle Ho (by Maggie)

On our 7th day in Vietnam, we went to go see Ho Chi Minh.  Ho Chi Minh was the leader that started Communism in Vietnam in the middle of the 20th century.  Communism is where they think everything should be fair, and there shouldn't be class differences.  He is dead, but they preserved his body instead of cremating him, even though the one wish that he had when he was going to die was that they would cremate his body.  The Vietnamese call him Uncle Ho because they think of him as a fabulous person that was like a family member.

When we went to see him, we were in a long line that took only 10 minutes because it moves very quickly. There were lots of guards making sure you didn't have a hat on, shorts on or have your hands in your pocket. Also you were not allowed to talk. All we could do was walk and look around. It seemed like it was a maze but finally we were inside the mausoleum where they keep Uncle Ho. A mausoleum is a building like an aboveground grave. When we got the room that Uncle Ho's body is in we walked very slowly around and got to see three different angles of him. When we were in Beijing we got to see Mao Tse Tung's body in a similar building. The difference between the two is that Mao did not look as real as Ho Chi Minh and when we saw Mao we had to walk through pretty quickly but when we saw Ho CHi Minh we got to walk slowly instead.

After seeing Ho Chi Minh we looked at the houses that he used to live in. We saw where he slept, where he worked and the cars that he got driven around in. He had two houses that he used to live in  while he was the leader. One was a very small house built on stilts and the other one was a little bigger and more modern. Unlike the houses of some of the other leaders we have seen on our trip, Uncle Ho's houses were very small.

The Stilt House

I hope you liked learning about Uncle Ho!