One museum, two markets

The stalls are close together in the fabric market and piled high. They pack in so much fabric that the stallholders mostly have to sit on the merchandise. This looks quite comfortable! I love Vietnamese markets, especially the fabric market. I went to investigate prices so that when I do some shopping, I’ll be a little more prepared to bargain. I also went to the general market in the old quarter. I has lots of ready-made clothes, household goods and pretty much anything you could ever need.


Hanoi has opened a women’s museum since I was last here. It was an interesting way to spend the morning. It had information on marriage traditions among some of Vietnam’s different ethnic groups – some patrilineal and some matrilineal. The room on ‘family life’ was essentially a presentation of traditional gender roles in rural Vietnam. There was a floor on women revolutionaries and women’s participation in the fight against French colonialism and then in the ‘American war’. The first woman described in the exhibition was someone I’d heard of because she has a major street in Saigon named after her: Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. I didn’t know her story before though. She was a major leader of the revolutionary party (that later became the communist party) in the 1930s and was executed aged 30 in 1941.