New Year's Eve - Part II (DJ For A Night)
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2007
1
17
19
Trip End
Mar 14, 2008
Hoi An,
Vietnam
Friday, February 8, 2008
Our plan was to get to Hue at 6am (we got there at 2pm), check in somewhere and then head out on a tour to the DMZ (de-militarized zone) from the American War. Needless to say, it didn't work out like that so we decided to get out of Hue as quickly as possible since we had heard that the DMZ wasn't all that interesting anyways as well as the fact that it was still raining and freezing cold. We booked our bus to Hoi An for the next day at 2pm and so we had about 24 hours to kill. Seeing as we were tired and feeling pretty lazy we got on a cyclo which is pretty much like a rick-shaw (Ken-Bond, haha) except that it's powered by a bicycle. They took us around town for a while in the cold, telling us about their families and about the coming New Year and then of course they wind up asking "You want smoke?" and "You want nice girl?" We politely declined and then seeing as they weren't going to get any of our Dong they dropped us off a good kilometre or two from our hotel. The next morning though we got up early and got a motor-bike tour around the countryside to see a 300 year-old Japanese Bridge that's never had to be rebuilt as well as Tu-Doc's tomb and some nice pagodas. It was really nice seeing all of those things, but the best part was just the ride through the country, zipping by all of the rice paddies and seeing the very different life which they live over here. So Hue redeemed itself a bit and then we made our way down to Hoi An on a nice routine 4 hour bus ride.
Hoi An turned out to be a really cool little town. Lots of nice cafes and restaurants with patios and a river with a nice boardwalk, so it was a good place to just chill-out with a strong Vietnamese coffee and people watch. We were there during Vietnam's most important festival of the year called Tet which is the Vietnamese New Year. The vibe around Tet was really cool and it felt a whole lot more like Christmas does back home than New Year. It's a very family-oriented holiday so we met many Vietnamese families who were in Hoi An for just a few days from Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi to visit the rest of their family. Another cool thing about Tet is that most families decorate their homes with tons of flowers and plants as well as these orange trees which reminded me a lot of Christmas trees. So everywhere you look there would be people on motor-bikes hauling these flowers and orange trees. It's also a very supersticious holiday. For example, you're not supposed to eat shrimp on Tet because shrimp swim backwards which signifies lack of progress. And people don't sweep during Tet because it's sweeping the good luck away. You're also not supposed to give people clocks or watches as gifts because it signifies the ticking away of people's time. At least that's what wikipedia told me... I looked it all up the day before to make sure I didn't accidentally offend anyone by showing up at someone's house to sweep their floor while eating shrimp and then presenting them with a brand new watch!
While we were there we wound up going to a really nice tailor named B'Lan to get some sweet, custom suits and shirts made. She was so nice to us that she even invited us into her home during Tet to eat with her and her family. It was a really cool experience getting to talk to her. She told us all about her family and how she got to be a tailor. It was nice to actually get to interact with local people on a personal level.
The day before, we also rented some motorbikes and rode about an hour out of town to visit some old ruins which were pretty nice, but again the highlight was the ride itself. There were a few points where it was a bit sketchy driving in all the traffic, but it was all part of the fun. I gotta say, I'm loving the rice paddies over here they're absolutely everywhere.
For the big night itself, we spent a while in our hotel room watching some really shitty movies on the "Star Movies" channel which always seems to show the movies that big stars should be ashamed that they made... Then we headed out to watch the fireworks show which was pretty impressive and then to a bar full of travellers since most of the Vietnamese went home to be with their families. I wound up DJ-ing the first few hours of the party pumping such crowd-pleasers as Daft Punk, 50-Cent and Rihana. It was actually pretty fun and it got me a few free drinks as well. All in all another succesful New Year's.
The next day our bus didn't leave until 6:30pm and we had to check out at noon so we wound up sitting on the patio of "Treat's" Restaurant for six straight hours playing shithead (a card game) and eating a few meals. Good times. Now we're in the beach town of Nha Trang which looks a lot like what I imagine Florida to look like. The good news though is that we're finally back into good weather. It's the first sunny day I've seen in about 8 or 9 days and the first time the temperature's been more than 20C. I guess that's not much to complain about, but the last few months we've been pretty spoiled for good weather. Anyways, that's it for now.
Here's what was written as #7 on the list of rules for the last hotel we were in which I thought was pretty hilarious...
"Please do not bring pets, weapons, ammunition, explosives, stinky things, guests (even the prostitutes) into your room. Thank you."
