Museum exhibits

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Today we visited the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology here in Hanoi, after being invited to take a tour with a Vietnamese girl that Joelle had met a couple of weeks previous. She's a first year university student and was looking both for a chance to practice her English as well as an opportunity to hang out with some really fun foreigners (us).

We met her and her cousin near our apartment this morning and so it was that I (Steven) proceeded to take my first motorbike ride in Hanoi. (Joelle's first ride was a couple of weeks ago, as she's much braver than I). I rode on the back of the cousin's bike, with a helmet that felt as if it was both crushing my head and choking the life out of me at the same time. It really was rather fun, since Saturday morning traffic is nothing compared to weekday traffic. And we've been getting 'acclimatized' to Vietnamese traffic over the past month, so that close encounters with honking buses no longer faze us as they used to.

The museum was quite fun; it consisted of both some typical indoor exhibits with artifacts from various ethnic groups in Vietnam as well as an outdoor section with pretty authentic-looking houses built by members of the different groups (there are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam, according to our friend/tour guide who showed us around.)

During the tour we couldn't help feeling as if we ourselves were part of a museum exhibit, due to the large number of Vietnamese who openly stared at us and followed us from place to place, forming something of a paparazzi entourage. At one point, a college-aged girl walked up to Joelle--possibly mistaking her for Angelina Jolie--and asked to have her picture taken with her. This emboldened her male friend, who also had his picture taken with Joelle, which in turn drove a group of three more girls to jump in on the photo op. Steven--whom no one mistook for Brad Pitt, mysteriously enough--stood back and took pictures of the people taking pictures of Joelle.

A few minutes later we were approached by a smiling Vietnamese woman who explained that she was an English teacher for a class of university students who were at the museum on a field trip and wouldn't we please join them for a small party in fifteen minutes. We tried to explain that we really weren't famous, and were in fact quite normal people but she would have none of it, so we hung out and talked with her class for a few minutes. The small party never really materialized, but we did get to chat, walk on stilts and have our picture taken with them.


We wrapped up our adventure with a nice lunch at the cousin's house. As we were getting ready to climb on the back of the Honda motorbikes for our trip home, the cousin said to me in his somewhat broken English, "In Vietnam, Honda has slogan: I love Vietnam. I hope soon you can say 'I love Vietnam' too."