Some participants were already in Vietnam: Antoinette MH Brandenburg

My name is Antoinette MH Brandenburg (1959). In 2007 I participated in a group with SRC (Foundation Culture Travel) to Vietnam. The journey began in the North of Vietnam, Hanoi. First we were taught by the tour guide in "crossing the street", sounds strange but a very valuable lesson to visit Hanoi to survive without cracks. Hanoi appears to be a great city, the people live 24 hours a day on the street. Thousands scooters, cyclists and outnumbered cars that made it difficult to cross the streets. To avoid a clash with a car you stand still, to avoid one with scooters walk through, do not turn the other way because then you become flattened (and it goes fast!). It seems that all Hanoi people have a (often very small) shop crammed with colorful stuff. The women sit half in and half outside the shop, with or without children, and the men you see sleeping on the street or in a tricycle. Walking through the colorful streets with bicycles loaded with merchandise, and the fruit and vegetable markets were for me a party! I had my little pocket camera (Canon) with me and did make continuously photo’s (at least 500 per day). Photos of people, shops and chaos with the traffic on the street.

The pictures I took to my studio and I made a number of paintings like as the work with accelerating scooters which you can see below, and portraits of working women on the fruit, the vegetable and the fish market.

Some (not yet sold) work can be seen on my website www.antoinette-art.com

Scooters, Antoinette MH Brandenburg

The Trading Hats foundation is preparing a stories project. A while ago I wrote a first page, I knew the work of Antoinette not and she did not know my part ... but it fits perfectly together:

"She is a little dizzy. Even here, on more than one meter from the curb, you feel the fullness of the moving street. Left to her two wide roads coming together, on her right there’s only one road. From the left are two streams constantly honking and noise making mopeds, motorcycles, scooters and bicycle taxis. They ride shoulder to shoulder. There is almost no space between. Incomprehensible that the traffic coming from the right, in the opposite direction, still can squeeze in between.

The longer Linh stands, the more the street becomes a river. The traffic on the road undulates as fast flowing water. Linh overlook it.
On the other side, as she want to go, the Hoan Kiem Lake. The Green Water that used to be part of the Red River, she had read in a book. She thought that was funny, that red water was green.

They had told her that she shouldn’t mind the traffic, just go on the road and cross. She ran no risk because the Vietnamese motorcycle riders are the best in the world, at least as long as they drive in Vietnam. In another country, you may not just stop on the middle of the road, driving back against the traffic to pick up your mobile that you had just dropped. In Vietnam, everyone drives sometimes the wrong way and nobody makes a fuss about, but Linh find it scary.
"Taxi!"
"Motorbike!" ..
Linh realize again where she’s standing. There’s shouted at her from all sides, which the motorbike taxi drivers do looking for customers.
"Buy T-shirt?".
This comes from behind her. A street vendor looking questioningly is holding some t-shirts, but Linh wants to buy no t-shirt, she wants to go to the lake. She want to cross. She squeezes her hands, swallows and takes a deep breath, she should just walk to the other side, without looking, but she dare not enter the street ..... it seems as if it is a real river. It is becoming increasingly blurred before her eyes. The sound of traffic sounds more and more like running water.

"hi dear! Linh you're not?"
Surprised looks Linh aside, it is a kind old man.
"May I introduce myself my name is Van Xuong, you want to go to the lake, right?"
"Yes, it seems such a nice lake."
"Yea, that's why I live there. Come!"
Linh feels how he gently takes her by the hand and for granted, without any hesitation, she gets along with the old man into the river.
And she does not sink! Surprised she looks down, she is now on a boat? That seems so .. it looks like it's a boat in the shape of a turtle. Funny! Only, is it a real turtle? Yes, or isn’t it?

Roby Bellemans

Hoan Kiem Lake can be found in the center of Ha Noi, and this story is part of it:
A fisherman found a golden sword in the Hoan Kiem lake and gave it to Emperor Le Loi who used to beat the Chinese. Shortly after the war, the Emperor enter the lake and then a turtle came up and asked the sword back. Since then, it has never seen again.
In the middle of the lake there is a temple in which three important men are living: the scholar Van Xuong De Quan, the war hero Tran Hung Dao and the patron saint of physicians La Tour. There living there for many of hundreds year…