Encountering Cambodia and Vietnam - Ha Noi, Monday 2016 March 7
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Wedding clothes
Lovely gowns for women and menOur hotel had a limited menu for breakfast, not including Pho! Eggs they are happy to do. Elizabeth came early and opines that they do the Chinese breakfast foods for the early-rising Chinese businessmen.
Our first visit was to the excellent
Women’s Museum, where chairs were set up in the courtyard for a conference and celebration for International Women’s Day tomorrow. Oddly for me, I visited the gift shop in the lobby before going to the galleries. Lots of silk scarves continued to entice, but I managed to curtail my instincts to buy. Instead I found a cheerful decorative lacquer plate depicting a boy and a buffalo.
The Museum was well organized and provided excellent signs in Vietnamese, English and French. On the second floor were many garments and accoutrements related to traditional weddings from several ethnicities. (Modern weddings often feature western bridal gowns and suits for men. We have seen lots of bridal shops in our travels.) The silks and embroidery on the traditional gowns are a marvel to our machine-sewn age. The next floor displayed women’s daily life, which actually means family daily life. Tools for rice harvesting, winnowing and cooking dated from historical times - not hard
Women's dress
Colourful patterns and styles to think that many people still use the same items in the countryside. Birthing and caring for babies was tenderly treated with large photographs and some artefacts.
On the top floor were displays about women in history. Many panels showed the photo and briefly related the story of individual women soldiers and resistance fighters and supporters. Some fighters had been executed by the French or harshly imprisoned by the South Vietnamese government; some lived to an old age, recognized as leaders of the revolution. Where possible, a few artefacts associated with each woman were displayed, such as a garment that hid messages, a small cloth embroidered in prison, a mug used in the field, a sabre, or false identification cards.
In another room, a grand display of the
Mother Goddess, a part of
Taoist faith, showed colourful clothes associated with princesses and princes in the story. Tucked away in a hallway was a pole with two baskets weighted with typical goods for visitors to try to carry. I found it fairly heavy, and the pole cut into my shoulder. Next to it was a large grinding stone turned by a long wooden mechanism – or at least if you
Front door of Maison Centrale
The dreaded entry into a dreadful prison knew the trick you could turn it. Thuy showed us how to do it, and then I managed. It took a lot of power to keep it moving!
In stark contrast, we next visited the
Maison Centrale, which the American prisoners called the Hanoi Hilton. The prison was built by the French for Vietnamese political prisoners. The interior was depressing and brutal, even though it was probably worse when people were incarcerated. A modern bas relief sculpture made the misery explicit.
Next we all climbed into
cyclos for a tour of the
Old Quarter. The exhaust fumes at exhaust pipe level made me wish for a Vietnamese mask! We bounced along the streets originally designated for certain products, such as shoes or foods or household supplies or medicines. Now there was some mixing, but the themes were still recognizable. The excitement of many cars and lots more motorcycles passing at close quarters kept my heart pumping, especially when the driver crossed major roads unconcerned by two lanes of oncoming cars. Everyone did stop at traffic lights, sort of. Late in the ride, we were caught up in a genuine traffic jam – the cars were not moving, the motorcycles were
West Lake
Modern young people manoeuvring at very slow speeds, and the cyclists sometimes had to put a foot down. Nobody seemed anxious – they just gradually weaved around each other until free. Amongst all these vehicles, bicycles held huge loads of products for immediate sale on the street, such as green vegetables, sweet potatoes, china teapots and cups, pineapples, and bananas. Many women with balancing poles plied their goods at the edges of the streets, and wherever space remained on the sidewalks, vendors cooked or served tea or welded frames or flogged a local version of doughnuts. Commerce everywhere we looked!
">Watch again the video of "small wheels".
We got on the bus to go to
West Lake, the largest of three lakes in Ha Noi. Undoubtedly it is beautiful at some times, but today low clouds and smog obscured the view. We turned out attention instead to the Taoist Temple where many people were making obeisance and fervent prayers at three main altars. In an adjoining building there was a shrine to the Mother Goddess who now seemed familiar after seeing the displays at the Women’s Museum.
At lunch we had a special crab and asparagus soup, thickened with tapioca. This soup and a similar corn soup seemed
French Quarter
Now an office building glutinous, but the flavour was good. Beef cut into bite-sized pieces was deeply flavoured and tender. Pork spare ribs were tender and juicy in a peppery sauce.
Unusually, after lunch we had a half-day of free time. Thuy offered to walk through the French Quarter, if anyone wanted. Five of us did. We saw magnificent buildings of yellow with white trim. Once part of the French colonial government, they now functioned as offices of the Vietnamese government or as embassies. One huge building with a frothing, large fountain was the headquarters of the Communist Party – no photos allowed, and we were waved on when we stopped to look at it. The walk brought us once again to the National Assembly (new, of concrete) and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It was closed, only two white uniformed guards standing in front of the doors.
Thuy walked us to the
Museum of Fine Arts again, as Elizabeth, Ray and I wanted to see it more thoroughly. Before leaving, Thuy negotiated our free entry on the basis that we had visited yesterday! The three of us agreed to meet after forty-five minutes. I looked at the first floor, historical artifacts, which I had
Selling balloons
Buy one on the way home from work mostly left out yesterday due to time constraints. Most of them were from the seventeenth century. I again enjoyed the personality carved into the statues of some of the eighteen mythical guards of Buddha. Each one had an emotional facial expression and a particular individual body position. The time flew by, almost before I had time to visit the second floor again – my favourite - the earlier part of the twentieth century. Just as time was running out I came across a gallery with very recent paintings and sculpture. One large painting was called “Happiness”, with three people sleeping in the grass: a male soldier at peace, his wife resting on his body and their son resting on her body. It spoke both of the past and of the future.
We decided to entertain ourselves by walking back to the hotel through the streets, otherwise only experienced in vehicles. Coffee and cake seemed a good goal for along the way. Elizabeth had studied the map, so she was our navigator. Ray braved the initiation of street crossing until we were all good at judging the trajectories of the motorcycles and cars. This morning it had seemed that cafes
Hoan Kiem Lake
Restful moment in a long day were two per block, but we didn’t see a suitable one until late in the afternoon when we arrived across the (wide) street from
Hoan Kien Lake, another of the three in Ha Noi. We all ordered Vietnamese coffee, which is very strong, and Elizabeth and Ray ordered ice cream (four small scoops in each dish!). We enjoyed watching four or five balloon sellers, each holding the strings of probably two dozen brightly coloured helium balloons. At one point they all ran quickly away, perhaps because police objected to their obstructing the traffic on such a major artery. In any case, they soon came back.
Jazzed up on caffeine, we crossed the wide road to the lake shore path and walked to a bright red oriental bridge over to a temple. The temple required tickets, so like many others, we just walked over the bridge and back. Then we continued our trek along the smaller streets until Elizabeth delivered us without error to our hotel.
Dinner was a short walk from the hotel. The service was both impeccable and friendly. Particularly juicy and delicious were the roast chicken, the fish in passionfruit sauce, and the prawns cooked in “special sauce”.
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Isabel Gibson
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I laughed at the downtown scaffolding store (and it made me wonder where I'd go to buy - rent? - scaffolding here - I have no idea). I found the shrine photo almost overwhelming (my level of attention to detail not quite being up to the challenge). And I found the Uncle Ho painting a good reminder that even the history I've lived through looks different depending on where you were living.