actually seeing vietnam

so we hopped on our sleeper bus to go south to hue. and got here the next morning. found a hotel for $10 per night, which i think we could have found cheaper, but i'm really relaxing about money. like i'm willing to spend a bit more for a decent place. we saw the citadel, which housed the emperors and many other people when hue was the capitol of vietnam. it was fine. then yesterday we went on a city tour. the itinerary was like this: visit 3 tombs of dead emperors, the village where incense and cone-shaped hats are made, have vietnamese lunch, visit the citadel, a garden house with mandarins, and then a pagoda and take a sunset boatride back.
what actually happened is that we went to the incense and conical hat making 'village' which was actually just a shop on the road to the first tomb. no village. we watched a lady make incense for about a minute then they just tried to sell everyone a bunch of crap that was probably made in a factory anyway. i'm sure they don't actually make that stuff there. they probably import it from china. haha. then we went to the first tomb for 45 mins (not enough time really) which was really just like a park with lakes and statues. no one knows where the emperor is actually buried. we went to another tomb but foo and i didn't go inside because it's like $3 per person to get into all these and we don't like tourism very much anyway. then we skipped the third tomb because no one wanted to see it.
then we went to our 'vietnamese lunch' which was at a traveler cafe called stop and go cafe. the food was, well, not vietnamese, that's for sure. then we went to the citadel, which foo and i already saw, so we got ice cream instead. then we went to the garden house, i can't say much about it except i'm not sure why we went there. then to the pagoda. seems nice. there's lots of chinese architecture in vietnam. then the boat ride back, where the tour guide passed around an envelope that said 'tip for guide'. classy. yeah tourism!
so today we are headed to hoi an, another city a few hours south of here. the good news is that people are friendlier here in hue than they were in hanoi. i hope this trend continues.