Vietnamese Cultural Dances

The Azamara cruise ship invited another local dance group, this time from Vietnam, to entertain us under the stars. The young women, like those in Thailand, were so graceful and beautiful. They are also size 0! Anyway, accompanying them would be musicians who would play authentic old world instruments making the evening quite enchanting. Well, it would have been enchanting had you not been worried about those dive bombing mosquitoes eating your exposed skin! The gals in red are doing some sort of fan dance where they twirl around and snap the fans open and closed. It was really cool.

They also did a hat dance in very simple garb. I think it was meant to be more of a peasant dance with these hats made of baskets for gathering food. Like the Thai dancers their fingers would bend backwards, giving it a very elegant look as they interpreted life in VIetnam.

The last dance of the evening was similar to the hat dance except that inside the hat was a real burning candle of some sort. I'm not sure how they got away with that on the cruise ship, but there were no accidents or near misses, so I guess all was safe.

A real praise goes out to Azamara cruise line for their attention to detail and bringing quality local entertainment on board the ship. Some people who cruise are limited in the shore excursions they can participate in and this was an excellent way to feel like you were really experiencing the culture. With this being such a small cruise ship, there was plenty of room on the poolside deck to see the show up close should you want to. Dan and I are pretty sold on these ships that hold less than 1000 folks total (600 passengers and 400 staff). The ships can go into many ports the larger ships can't, and it isn't a madhouse on board the ship to find seats, get food, workout, etc. We had only about 400 guest on board (did I tell you this already, if so sorry) making it a 1:1 ratio for guest and waitstaff.