With the Year of the Pig we are offered images of harmony between nature and humans, and of prosperity and peace.

Until now many Vietnamese people still do not know when and why the Viet ethnic group celebrated the traditional Lunar New Year festival (Tet). “Viet su dai toan” (The complete history of Dai Viet) book briefly mentions the event. Some analyses also refer to a time when the Viet ethnic group began celebrating the traditional New Year.

On lunar December 29, many Vietnamese families started to make banh chung, the square cake made from sticky rice stuffed with green bean and pork. My family is no exception.

Many activities are taking place in Ho Chi Minh City to welcome the traditional Lunar New Year Festival (Tet), including Spring Flower Fair, flower procession festival, and Uncle Ho apricot garden. On show will be a pair of Tet cakes listed in the Vietnam Guinness Book for its record weight of 3.5 tonnes each.

Everywhere you go, you can feel it: the New Year is almost here. The streets are packed, although in just a few days they’ll be almost eerily quiet.

On February 14, the Vietnamese Embassy held a get-together for the Vietnamese community in Russia, to celebrated the 77th founding anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the traditional Lunar New Year Festival (Tet).

On the occasion of the traditional Lunar New Year, the Hanoi Dancers Association will present ten Thang Long-Hanoi traditional dances on February 24 (the 8th day of the traditional New Year) at Ly Thai To Flower Garden, next to Hoan Kiem Lake.

Five more artists were presented with the Ho Chi Minh Prize, the Government’s highest award for arts and literature, while another 158 were given the State Prize by the State President, announced Deputy Prime Minister of Culture and Information Le Tien Tho on February 13.

A Vietnamese trade and service company will complete the installation of the world longest telpherage over Vinpearl resort in central Khanh Hoa province before the Lunar New Year Festival (Tet).

A Flower Spring Fair will open at 5pm on February 12 in Tao Dan Cultural Park with the participation of around 800 artisans from nearly 50 cities and provinces.

Tran Quang Hai is a talented musical scholar, who lives in France and has given more than 3,000 concerts in 65 countries worldwide. Together with his father, renowned Professor Dr Tran Van Khe, and his wife, famous singer Bach Yen, he has been contributing to the research, promotion and honouring of Vietnamese music for many years.

Flowers, parallel sentences (Cau Doi) and wine - three typical products for the traditional Lunar New Year Festival (Tet) - are being displayed at an exhibition, which opened at the Vietnam Arts and Culture Exhibition Centre in Hanoi on February 9.

Tet is a good occasion for Vietnamese people in France to buy products, entertain guests and enjoy the festive atmosphere, says Ngo Minh Duong, manager of a food and drink shop in a suburb of Paris, France.

A scholar of the Bangkok-based Chulalongkon University on February 8 handed over the Thai version of Vietnamese war surgeon Dang Thuy Tram’s diaries to the Vietnamese Embassy in Thailand.

An exhibition of 800 sets of wine utensils, thousands of years old, will open in the Ancient Citadel in Hanoi on February 12.

A traditional house on stilts of the Tay ethnic minority group in Bich Chu village, northern Vinh Phuc province will be exhibited at Bavaria National Park in Germany during an international festival organized by the UNESCO in July.

Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem has issued a decision on approval of the Vietnam-Israel Culture and Information Cooperation Agreement.

More than 40 education policymakers and senior practitioners from 8 countries in East Asia, including Japan, Singapore and Thailand, and from the UK, gathered in Hanoi on February 6 to discuss “education and employability”.

A painting competition for Hungarian children has been launched as part of activities held by the Vietnam Women Association in Hungary to further promote Vietnam and the Vietnamese community for Hungarian people who have little information about the country’s current development.

Specialists at the School of South-Southeast Asia Countries under the Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok, Russia, love the Vietnamese land and people not only because of research projects and also a genuine feeling from the bottom of their hearts. They are devoted to spreading Vietnamese cultural values.

Over the past eight years, February 3 has been an occasion not only for the entire nation to celebrate the founding anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam but also for VOVNews staff to mark its own anniversary.

The central city of Da Nang and the Committee for Promotion of Korean Traditional Music on February 2 organized an arts and cultural exchange performance in the city to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the two countries' diplomatic ties.

An art performance to raise funds for the poor will be held at the Hanoi Opera House on the evening of February 10 by the association of Vietnamese businesses in Germany and the Central Light Music and Dance Theatre.

Several foreign musicians, artists and experts will come to help Vietnam build art performance programmes in the early months of this year, according to the Ministry of Culture and Information.

The money came from an auction of nearly 80,000 Chinese antique objects retrieved from a sunken ship 300 years ago off the coast of Ca Mau in Vietnam.

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is going to break the ground on a four-story building to display Southeast Asian exhibits.

Vietnamese and Japanese archaeologists have excavated ancient relics and artifacts believed to date back 2,000 years B.C at the Hoa Diem relic site in Cam Thinh commune in the central coastal province of Khanh Hoa.

General Director of TRG International Company, Rick Yvanovich, and his co-workers have set up a website in English with the aim of introducing international friends to traditional Vietnamese stage performances such as Tuong (classical theatre), Cheo (popular theatre) and Cai Luong (renovated theatre).

Well-known artists from Radio the Voice of Vietnam will perform at a music show in Hanoi to mark the Communist Party's anniversary.

The restoration of Dong pagoda, a scenic and historic site associated with the Truc Lam monastery, was inaugurated in the Yen Tu historic cultural relic in the northeastern province of Quang Ninh on January 30.