Vietnamese Women's Museum, Hanoi. Exterior front. Photo by Angela Lansbury.
The outside is colourful and inside on the ground floor is small and welcoming with a giant gold statue and museum shops on both sides. Buy your ticket and go upstairs. This museum is on several floors. One level is about marriage and rather like the Ethnology museum. Patrilinial and Matrilinial societies, colourful costumes, cross-stitch embroidery. I liked the opening quotation about a married couple being inseparable, like chopsticks.
Women and Wartime
A grim section deals with women in the army. Also those who lost their lives as spies in the Vietnam war.
Upstairs is one room devoted to the mothers given awards and financial help if they lost a husband, more than two sons, or a husband and son, in the war. A row of sad faces. Some aged eighty, ninety or over 100. One lost nine sons. You can see the sadness etched on their faces.
An enterprising woman artist rode around the country, on a motorbike, sketching them. She spent about an hour per sketch.
On a brighter note, the fashion gallery shows traditional dresses. Some recent versions of the ankle-length elegant traditional designs would look great at a wedding or dinner dance or ball.
Working Women
Woman are shown in various professions and entrepreneurial enterprises. One woman who was orphaned as a child, set up a home for orphaned children. Others founded craft industries, teaching rural and poor women how to create beautiful or useful objects and earn a living. I recall a mother and daughter who were pioneer doctors.
We did not rent the audio guide. For the time we had to spend, the trilingual captions in Vietnamese, French and English were sufficient. The human guides going around were very well spoken and informative. I stopped one to ask a quick question - what is the life expectancy in Vietnam. He told me 69 for men, 72 for women.That is about ten years less than in the UK. You can check tables of life expectancy around the world on line and in Wikipedia.
The shop sells good jewellery, bangles and more.
As you leave, on the right there's an art gallery about domestic violence and the refuges. Very striking images, a bed, a living room with a sofa, a broken mirror.
Restaurant
www.hungryhanoi.com
For hotels
booking.com
Comparison site:
https://www.clicktripz.com/rates/search/index
For airlines
travelok.com
vietJetair.com (Comprehensive list of budget airlines in Wikivoyage.)
For transport
https://www.grab.com/vn/en/
Language
Duolingo.com
(Remember to click on the sound symbol to hear how words are pronounced.)
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Please share links to your favourite posts.
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