Going to the Mausoleum

Pictured: NOT the mausoleum, but a view of an Angkorian temple.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum was an interesting rock and hard place in our tour of Vietnam.

It wasn't on our itinerary, in fact had been carefully kept off our itinerary, yet the very stubborn tour guide we were landed with in Hanoi was very insistent that we should go. We tried to be diplomatic and eventually pled exhaustion and the need for a late start that morning. And then after all that discussion, he brought us to the site anyhow and made us stand and take pictures while he told us things about the complicated embalming process that keeps the founding father's body intact (against his own express wishes). I am sure you will all be relieved to hear that the technology is being transferred from Russia to Vietnam so that he will no longer have to fly to Moscow for maintenance each year as in the past, but can instead be cared for at home. Embalming is a rather strange thing.

Going to the mausoleum used to have a different connotation though - apparently it used to be a commonly used expression for going to the loo. But one has to be careful about using it that way now, we were told.

As for us, we've evolved our own. Apparently the little kids growing up with my friend's mother used to use a decrepit governor's mansion for a loo while they were busy playing, and the expression stuck. "Going to the governor's mansion" has rather a nicer ring to it than going to see a man about a horse, at least.