#4: That you can haggle over EVERYTHING. "The room is ten dollars per night? Can you give me a discount? What if I stay for three nights, can you give me a better deal? Hm, no that's too expensive, I think I'll look around a little. Oh, you have a better discount to give me?" And that's true everywhere - for buying clothes, buying food in the market, paying for a ride on a motorbike taxi... I think when I come home I'll start trying to bargain for groceries at the supermarket, just to see what happens.
I'm still in Hoi An, and I'm still spending money in Hoi An. It's a very very dangerous place. After outfitting myself with a whole new wardrobe, I decided that for many reasons I needed to stop buying clothes. They're bulky, heavy, they don't travel well in my backpack, and I don't need any more. So I started walking around town. I immediately ran into the 'Hoi An Rock and Gemstone' shop. Gemstones: little, light, travel very well in a backpack, and I certainly don't have enough. So there are a number of sapphires in my bag now, a few strings of pearls, as well as a few other random stones...
After spending my money on gemstones, I booked a tour to get me out of town altogether, and away from the shopping. It was a trip to the ruins of My Son, a Cham holy site - the Cham civilization existed in the south/central vietnam area between about the 4th century AD until about the 13th century AD, when they got run over three times in the span of a few decades: by the khmers from cambodia, another vietnamese kingdom from the south, and the burmese (the burmese seem to come along and wipe everybody out). The Cham were very heavily influenced by India - their religious stuff is all hindu, and their language was a sanskrit dialect. It's interesting to see the differences from the buddhist art, and the similarities with the khmer art (who were also hindu).
The ruins were in pretty good shape, for the most part. One of the pictures I'm posting shows the original Cham brick (14 centuries old) and the vietnamese brick they used when doing some reconstruction work (about 20 years old). The Cham brick is still in remarkably good condition (and you can't even see the mortar they used, which is interesting), while the modern brick is already falling apart, and the mortar is dissolving. Apparently the whole site was even more well preserved before the wars against the french and americans started - unfortunately the northern vietnamese army used the area as a base, and american B-52s pretty much blew the crap out of many of the ruins in the area.
We took a boat trip back down the river to Hoi An, and stopped off at a traditional carpentry village along the way. As part of the UN Heritage designation, they try hard to preserve some of the traditional crafts in the area. We went and saw a wood carving shop, a fine furniture shop, and a wooden boat building yard... there are some wildly talented artists at work. I don't know that my pictures do them justice, but it's some of the best woodworking I've seen. Plus everything is made out of gorgeous tropical hardwood (the first shop we walked in had 4 inch by 12 inch by 12 foot solid mahogany planks stacked against the wall... I nearly had a heart attack). Fortunately for me large wooden carvings do not fit well into a backpack at all, so I managed not to spend any more money (although I did ask about shipping costs for some of the furniture... but it was only asking).
I took a cooking class this morning, where we cooked some of the local specialty food. I feel quite excited that I can now claim to have cooked with pork rinds. Here's a summary of the local menu:
Cao lau - thick rice noodles in a beef broth, thrown in a bowl with bean sprouts, lettuce (sometimes some other greens too), fried pork, and pork rind 'croutons'. Completely delicious.
White rose - minced crab or shrip steamed inside rice flour packets. They look vaguely like flowers when they're cooked. Also very tasty.
Spring rolls - of course everybody probably already knows what spring rolls are. I've decided that the steamed ones may actually be better than the fried ones (I have always sort of assumed that everything's better when it's deep fried. Apparently I may be wrong.)
The fruit in vietnam is also spectacular, and I've been loading up at the market - yesterday I spent two dollars and got a fresh mango, a fresh pineapple (peeled and cored), twenty bananas (it's not as scary as it sounds - they're small, like two bites each, and very good), and a bag of candied ginger. I have no idea why I don't have stomach problems.
I'm off tomorrow evening on yet another night bus, down the coast again. For those of you who wonder why I keep taking the stupid night buses, well, it's because I'm forced to. I bought an 'open bus ticket' from hanoi to saigon, which means that I get to travel the length of the country for twenty bucks (yeah!), and stop a bunch of places along the way. The downside is that I have to travel by their schedule - if the bus leaves at 6 pm and gets in at 6 am, then that's when I go.
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