Today was a good day....

So I think today was my favorite day of the trip so far. Not that the others weren't good, but this one stood out as being quite exceptional.
We went on a day long tour to see the Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Erin and I joined two other American girls that we met at our hostel....Mara (who's actually from Grand Rapids. Crazy, huh?) and Lauren. We had a great time talking to them about their travels and other random things.
Anyway, the first stop of the day was at the Cao Dai Temple which had some crazy, but strangely beautiful architecture. The Cao Dai religion was invented in the early 1900's by some Vietnamese mystic who decided that the world would be a better place if everybody believed in the same god, so he combined all the religions of the world to form the Cao Dai religion. Today, the Cao Dai focuses on just three religions: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confusionism. Not sure when or why they decided to get rid of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism....
The second stop of the day was at the Cu Chi Tunnels, where the Cu Chi guerrillas hid during the war. I have to admit, I learned more about the Vietnam War this afternoon than I ever learned in all my history classes combined. The Cu Chi fought on the side of North Vietnam, which means they were fighting against the Americans, so it was pretty strange to see and hear about all the different methods they used to 'kill the American enemies.' I thought our tour guide it a pretty good job of explaining things fairly without sounding insulting to the US, but some of the videos we saw were not so impartial. It was odd to be accused of both attacking Vietnam and abandoning Vietnam. We also got to go into the tunnels which have been widened to accomodate fat tourists....though they didn't feel wide when we were crawling along them all hunched over with our shoulders and heads scraping. Not sure how people actually managed to live there. I would lose my mind.
Then tonight, we found an awesome cafe for supper. We were drawn to it because it was painted yellow and red and looked like a real American coffee shop. Our supper there was delicious, and as we were reading the menu we found out that it's a Christian cafe that was started in order to help people living on the streets learn how to cook and run a business so that they could make a living. Erin and I got really excited about it and bought cookies and coffee mugs from them in order to support the cause.
So that was today. Tomorrow we leave for DaNang, where we'll be hanging out with Erin's friend who teaches there.