Relaxing Day in and around Hoi An
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2009
1
7
39
Trip End
May 19, 2009
I realized I never came back and updated this post, so I'll go ahead and at least get started on it now since I have a little time. This was a pretty fun day in Hoi An filled with some unique experiences. I started off the day early, because I was still not quite over the jet lag, so I took a little stroll around the city to kind of get a better feel of it. I found Hoi An to be a very peaceful city, more of a town, filled with very gracious people. Everyone I met in Hoi An smiled and greeted you. The treets were narrow and everything had this old French architecture , which gave it a very unique feel. After wandering around for a while I met the amigos back at the hotel where we headed to the post office to go and meet My ( one of the hotel receptionists, and pronounced Me) for coffee, as she and wanted us to come join her and her sister Ny. So we joined them for iced coffee off the beaten trail and had a pretty good time. After coffee we headed over to the tailors shop to get some fitting done for our order. After we left there we fired up the hogs and headed back to the post office where we met the two sisters again. They wanted to make us lunch, and they garanteed a very traditional Vietnamese lunch, so how could we turn them down. For lunch we had a few different things. we had these ietnamese pancakes that were made with egg and shrimp and wrapped around lettuce and then held together with rice paper; we also had pork grilled and wrapped with lettuce in rice paper; and there was one other spring roll. The food was very good, and I definately prefered the pork. A couple bites into the the pancake with shrimp I knew I wasnt going to be able to handle anymnore of those, and the fishy taste I had in my mouth almost made me lose my cookies, but thankfully nobody noticed and I continued smiling and ate the whole thing. Sean definately got fed the most because he was the biggest of all of us. They kept pushing these spring rolls at him until he had already had 5 or 6 of them and had to decline. They refused to eat until we had eaten our fill, and then after we were finished they ate what was left, and after they had eaten the daughter of their third sister was allowed to eat. It was very heirarchical, but no worries as there was plenty of food for everyone. All in all we had a great time, and Im glad we did it, because it was truly a unique experience. Im not quite sure why we got invited over, but My told us that it would give her and her sister a chance to practice their English a little more as long as we didnt mind. After lunch, we took the hogs down to the beach where we hung out for a while until we decided it was time to come back and go to dinner. we ate dinner at a really great restaraunt whose name is escaping me at the moment, but we ran into Natalie ( an Australian girl we ahd met the day before) and ended up chatting with her while we ate. i had the local specialty Cao Lao , which was pork and noodles, and some veggies, and supposedly its made with a special water from a certain well or something. No sooner had we finished diner than we heard some familiar voices, and upon looking outside we run into the English gentlemen again. They were pleased to see us, so we all headed over to the Salsa clu, where if you bring a group of 10 or more you get a free bottle of Vodka, and we began a fun evening that included a Mexican Wave, a stand a drink ode to the song Roxanne, some table dancing by a bunch of people I didnt know, and ended or so I heard by an owner of a club almost smaching a beer bottle over a taxi drivers head because he wasnt on their payrol. I had already hit the sac at that point, but you know how stories go. All in all it was a good night, and I learned a valuable lesson. Saigon beer is not miller lite.
