Vietnamese Women's Museum, Hanoi, women in war, peace and life expectancy

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.

Travel information
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.

What To See In Vietnam - planning far in advance

I saw a stunning waterfall on Facebook.
I translated this through Google translate and got: ban - you; g i o c - descent; c a o - high bang - state. I must put this place on my list. But where is it? Can I travel there easily, quickly, affordably. Would I only get that view from a helicopter, not from the ground in rainy season?

Story
Friends of mine recently told me that they went on their honeymoon a couple of years ago to Cambodia where I recently had a wonderful trip. I was delighted to learn from them that the sunrise trip to see Ankor Wat, which I had missed, not wanting to ruin my holiday my making myself tired, was,in their opinion, not necessary, in fact a waste of time and effort. They said too many people got in the way of photographs. It was bad weather and the sunrise was not good.

Problems
How do you decide what to see in Vietnam? What is the layout of the land? How do you remember which place is where?

Answer
It's a long thin country, the reverse of Chile (which is a long coast down the west of South America). Vietnam is long north to south down the ease coast, so lots of beaches. Historically, Americans and British movie goers will be familiar with the Vietnam war, the names Hanoi and Saigon, and the Vietcong tunnels.

You have to choose whether to take a trip to one area or all three, south, middle and north, and if so, which season.

Simple way to remember what's where:
In the South is Saigon - now known as Ho Chi Minh city.
Up north is Hanoi.

Answers
1 Read the tourist board sites and pick your favourite places.
2 Check cheap last minute deals to the capital or another city. Check out the hop on hop of buses or cheapest guided tours and list your top ten attractions, or three per day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening.
3 See TripAdvisor for their top ten attractions.
4 Compromise with your fellow travellers, both pick one attraction per day, and one nearby which both of you would like to visit.
5 Whoever is paying and booking the trip decides after buying a guide book such as Lonely Planet.
6 Pick the cheapest hotel within your budget and ask the concierge to book a tour.
7 Ask your friends.
8 Ask people who live in the country. (But their trips home might only involve seeing granny and relatives.)
9 Travel with a local who speaks the language who can bargain for better prices and spot scams and dangers.
10 Pick up maps and leaflets at the airport on entering, local leaflets at hotels and nearby shops, look for and select coupons and discounts.
11 Make one sight your reason for going and treat everything else as a bonus.
12 Pick beauty spots featured on the internet.

Warnings
The featured beauty spot may depend on weather and your tolerance of isolation or crowds. I don't like big crowds but nor do I like to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with a driver who is a complete stranger.

My lists:

Vietnam Sightseeing
North: Capital Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, world Heritage Site. Ha Long bay has those dramatic isolated rocks which look like double height sugar cubes.
Take two buses and a motorbike taxi to
Ban Gioc Waterfall, Cao Bang, Vietnam. See the nearby cave.
Hanoi Museums: Vietnam Women's Museum (first in TripAdvisor); Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology (second); Vietnam Military History Museum; Ho Chi Minh Museum; Hanoi Police Museum.

Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), biggest city.
Cu Chi guerillas' tunnels. French Notre Dame cathedral. Museums include: Southern Women's Museum; Ho Chi Minh Museum, Ho Chi Minh City Museum, 3D art museum.

Activities and Workshops
Kite-making or
Pottery.

Shopping
From Wikipedia:
'The áo dài is a Vietnamese national costume, now most commonly worn by women but can also be worn by men. In its current form, it is a tight-fitting silk tunic worn over pants. The word is pronounced [ʔǎːw zâːj] in the North and [ʔǎːw jâːj] in the South. Áo classifies as shirt.[1] Dài means "long".'

Also look at the simplified Wikipedia. Elsewhere I read that Ao means clothing. The man's version is called Ao gam. You can also buy these from websites.

Tips and Trips on Websites
https://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/Attractions-g293924-Activities-c49-Hanoi.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hạ_Long_Bay
https://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/Tourism-g293921-Vietnam-Vacations.html
https://www.viator.com/tours/Ho-Chi-Minh-City/Cu-Chi-Tunnels-and-Countryside-Tour-by-Luxury-Speedboat/d352-6765SGNCCCSSPEED (Trip promising speeding down the Saigon river to the war memorial park and see the entrance to the labyrinth of tunnels; riverside lunch and stop at cricket farm to try eating a cricket, and on to see rice paper being made.

Reading and re-reading and film/movie list:
Good Morning Vietnam.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer, author, speaker.