The Adams' Mission Adventure - Phở real

 Last p-day, some of our missionaries were sick so we didn't plan an adventure. Instead, Allen and I decided to go on a long walk around our area and see if we could find any fun shops, etc. We DID find something unexpected! Our walk took us down some very narrow streets... And through an industrial area, and then we turned a corner and had a surprise... This was tucked away behind a wall in an unremarkable area of small shops in an old neighborhood. After experiencing the area we had been walking past, I found this to be beautiful! Allen is standing next to a very tall Plumeria tree... And now we've seen a papaya tree! We left and continued our walk and saw more interesting lifestyles of the Vietnamese people... Here's a place to pick your own chicken or duck for dinner... And here we discovered an underground pool for one of our neighboring apartment complexes. It was quite the place! On Tuesday, we had a Mission Devotional with Elder Teixeira of the Seventy and Elder Joh...

Our trip on p-day this week was to a treasure trove that one of the missionaries found! It is called Thanh Chuong's Viet Palace and is described in one place as "Hanoi's epicenter of cultural heritage." A Vietnamese artist named Thanh Chuong built a 2.5-acre open-air complex that was originally intended as a personal sanctuary. But he was frustrated with Vietnam's preservation policies ("they are doing things the wrong way. They completely destroy hundred-year-old relics and then build something else") and so he opened this complex to the public in 2009. As an artist, he created a museum of priceless cultural relics in a natural environment similar to the life and culture of the people thousands of years ago. Each area "feels like an homage to a different ethnic group or cultural tradition." (quotes and descriptions come from the guidebook: Thanh Chuong's Viet Palace) He wrote: "The very essence of our culture is simple, rustic, friend...