Vietnam Part I

We took 3 weeks off from our jobs in Canada and went back to Australia to visit family and friends.  It was nice to catch up with everyone, and a little bit funny to see that absolutely nothing has changed in our absence.  Life goes on, I guess.  After 2 weeks in Australia, we took off for Hanoi in Vietnam, to visit Stephen's Mum who is teaching English there.

This is the best photo I found of the traffic, but it doesn't really do it justice.  Most people have heard about Vietnam traffic - Hanoi isn't as bad as Ho Chi Minh City, but it was still a case of walking confidently forwards and hoping no one hit you.  No one did!

We visited the Museum of Ethnology (study of people) which is dedicated to the traditional lifestyles and history of the people of Vietnam.  Interestingly, there are 54 different groups of people living in Vietnam, and they each have different cultures - different houses, different boats, different clothing, different customs, different lifestyles.  Apparently many people still live their traditional lifestyle too.

The museum had some full-scale examples of the differences between different groups' ways of doing things.   There were a lot of boats, which ranged from one that was totally circular to this one.  That's Stephen standing at the other end of it.

The houses varied greatly as well, from ones that looked like a normal hut, to very long ones, to very tall ones like this one.  Again, that's Stephen standing in front of it.  The roof was a very skinny triangle.

Some of them had... interesting decorations as well.

Stephen was accosted by a camera crew while we were there - apparently it was some sort of special day for visiting museums, and he was on TV.  I think they were mostly unimpressed by the brevity of his answers.

We visited towards the end of May, which is the start of monsoon season.  For our first couple of days, it was around 85% humidity during the day and 37C (that's nearly 100F) - so you were constantly drenched in sweat.  At lunchtime, it tended to go from brightly sunny to this:

... which cleared up after half an hour and dried up within 10 minutes.  It didn't provide much in the way of relief, as it was just as hot afterwards.

We went to see the water puppets while we were there too - the story goes that traditionally they were performed on a stage set up over the flooded rice paddies.  The stage looked much like this (only we visited an indoor one).

 Here were some of the puppets.  We couldn't work out how they worked - we couldn't see any strings.  Apparently there is some sort of mechanism under the water which is controlled from behind that bamboo curtain by the puppeteers.  However, they move around a huge amount, and they disengage and reengage with other puppets (boats, people, fish, flowers), and they cross over other puppets all of the time too.  We are still scratching our heads over exactly how they worked.  It was a pretty cool performance - accompanied by a band of traditional Vietnamese instruments such as the dan bau, which sounded cool but looked incredibly difficult to play.

More coming up in Part II.