When we finally reached Hué our driver had a hard time finding our hotel. That’s because it was tucked down a narrow alley barely wide enough to accommodate a car and generally packed with motorbikes and backpackers squeezing past each other and the pedestrians. We learned there are quite a few alleys like this in our Hué neighborhood and we were to discover restaurants and cafés hidden in these tiny lanes. Out on the streets eateries spilled out into the sidewalks And like everywhere else in Vietnam, diners perch on child-sized plastic chairs at low tables. I don’t know why they don’t use adult sized chairs but my knees would definitely not be able to negotiate those chairs.
We had no plan for our time here except to see the Citadel, another UNESCO site. Our friends who’ve been here were of mixed opinions, from “we loved it” to “there’s not much there.” The stifling heat that nearly felled us in Hoi An followed us here and unlike Saigon there are few air conditioned cafés to take refuge in when the midday humidity saps your energy and dulls your brain. We spent the afternoons in the cool sanctuary of our hotel room or a cafe with a fan blowing directly on us. We had to.
The Citadel is surrounded by a moat and walls, with very few walkways through the massive ornate gates. 
If you are told, when asking directions, that the entry gate is around the other side, you’ve just lost half a day. It’s big. There are virtually no signs or directions posted. When finding ourselves in the vicinity we decided to reconnoiter and while we couldn’t find the actual entrance, we did find a nice little lunch spot which was friendly to vegetarians. Getting Veitnamese to make our favorite banh mi without meat seems to offend most of them. I’m a simple man. I go with the pork.
Along the Perfume River we admired the Eiffel-designed bridge which bears an uncanny resemblance and construction techniques to the Smithfield Street bridge in Pittsburgh. 
Walking across we were startled to see that Christo may have been here.
The following day our assault on the Citadel began in earnest with a Grab ride in an effort to save the legs. During the “American war” our country bombed the bejesus out of the Citadel, easy to find along the Perfume River and so big you can’t miss it, and the Vietnamese have been restoring it ever since. The site includes three walled enclosures and the signage is so poor that the Imperial City is probably here in these photos somewhere, it’s just that how would one know?
One dragon looks pretty much like another so you compose and shoot randomly. Turns out these walls contain a massive fort with, in its day, the largest guns in the world. 
In our day, the only way the finish off this town was with giant mojitos at the Secret Garden just down the alley from our hotel.