No, the sleeves are still too small

  Hoi An, Vietnam
Sunday, February 25, 2007

Hoi An always gets rave reviews from tourists visiting Vietnam. The town is small and laid back compared to most of the other cities on the tourist trail. It can easily be walked in half a day and there are lots of old buildings to see there. They were very lucky that, although they are right near Danang, they avoided any combat or shelling in the war. The old buildings give the town a lot of charm.

Tourists discovered Hoi An early and it is most definitely a placed geared to cater to them. Its most famous industry is tailoring. With good fabric and cheap prices it became essential for tourists to have clothes made while they are here. Because of this, however, these tailor shops have sprung up everywhere and their is easily over 100 in the city center. It becomes difficult to choose! We ended up going to one near the hotel, which turned out to be very convenient for all the refittings. They also seemed to put out good quality products, which a number of the ones in town did not.

The clothing shop is filled with catalogs and after leafing through them and picking out the designs you like you get measured and are told to come back the next night for a refitting. The main issue we had is that nothing fit at the refitting. It was all too small. This got us thinking back to the only other place we had clothes custom made - in Tanzania. Tanzania takes a different view on measuring customers: they put the tape measure around you and then ask "How loose do you want it?" and you stretch the tape measure out to the desired looseness. They then write down that measurement. This is repeated for the sleeves, hips, everything. It is brilliant, really, because when you go back to try on the garment it always fits exactly how you want. While they are not as fast (one of the big selling points in Hoi An) they are accurate.

So, the week was broken up with lots of returns to the shop for refittings. In the end the clothes were quite satisfactory for the price. While certainly not Nordstroms quality (you are paying $70 for a suit) they look nice and will certainly be worn a lot back home.
Hoi An also had its fair share of other tourist delights. Paper lanterns, handbags, shoes, fabulous art work and knockoff luggage (to carry all your new clothes in) were on every street. It seemed that a large portion of the women in the city were pregnant. 

Sweet Baby!

We would use bargaining tactics like "You will have a boy if you give me this scarf for that price" or "Giving us a good price means you will have an easy delivery" (playing the maternity nurse card). They thought we were very funny and we did get some good deals.

The food in Hoi An was great. We ate everywhere from the top rated eateries (nothing was expensive here) to the little old ladies selling noodles on the streets. The further we head south, the fresher the ingredients become. This means we have to decide if we put those raw leafy greens and herbs on the soup like we do at the Vietnamese restaurants in Seattle. We did. It tasted so good that way! We think the food and coffee just got better and better the closer we got to Saigon. One restaurant that we ate at two nights in a row served fried rice that Julius declared "the best I have ever had". Like his Father-in-Law, Julius is an expert in fried rice (especially after this trip).

Coffee in Vietnam is hands down the best we have had since Italy. They have these strainers full of ground beans that are set on top of the cup and they drip the coffee into the glass below. 

Vietnamese Coffee Mmmmmm

They use sweetened condensed milk instead of sugar and cream and it is soooo delicious. The strength of the coffee kept you going all day. Better yet, you could pour the whole thing over ice which is a lifesaver on such hot days.

We found that we began to run into old acquaintances from other tours and stops. We met the Canadian who recommended the Hue tour to us, a woman from San Francisco who we met in Sapa and a couple of teachers from the States who we ended up rooming with on two trains, plus running into them again on their 30 minute bus break in Hoi An. It was a lot of fun to get to know people better. You feel like old friends!

On Ash Wednesday we missed mass but attended on Thursday. The mass had to be the most "foreign" we had attended. There are hardly any sounds in common between Vietnamese and English, must less words. It made it difficult to follow along. The priest did notice us and put a few English words in for our benefit. Our favorite part had to be the sharing of the peace. When the priest said to share peace with each other we were ready to stick out our hands to start shaking. Instead the congregation brought their hands together under their chin and bowed to each other. Of course! The priest came back to greet us after the mass and invited us to the rectory for a visit. It turned out that he had traveled to Washington to visit his uncle there, even visiting the fish ladder near our place in Ballard. The one thing that amazed him was the number of nail salons run by Vietnamese women in the state. When I told him how much women fork out for a pedicure in America he realized why it was such a lucrative business.

One tourist site we visited outside the city was the My Son temples, built by the Champa Dynasty between the 5th century and the 13th century AD. The Champa were Hindu, apparently taught the religion by Indian traders. Maya, the woman from San Francisco who we met in Sapa was also on this tour. She is of Indian descent so she made a good tour guide, explaining the different Hindu statues and pieces at the site. The Champa dynasty was the most powerful in the region for a long time, fighting quite a bit with the Angkor dynasty in the region that is now Cambodia. Unfortunately the Americans suspected that Viet Cong were hiding in this area during the war so they managed to destroy a number of temples before a Cham scholar went to Nixon to beg him to stop the bombings before he destroyed them all. That is why only a few remain intact.

Being the week after Tet we were unable to get a train or plane to our next stop, Cam Ranh Bay further south. All the locals would be traveling back home to get back to work. We were forced to take a night bus - a prospect we did not look forward to. It was supposed to be a tourist bus, but the company could not resist selling tickets to all the desperate Vietnamese needing to get home. Needless to say, the bus was packed. A few poor souls we picked up along the way even agreed to sit in the aisle. The bus did turn its lights off for a few hours but it had the loudest horn we had ever heard. It was a full on air raid siren. Being Vietnam he used it constantly.

The only excitement of the trip was when a very unhappy (and probably drunk) teenage girl stood in the street to block traffic while she screamed at her mom. Our bus driver was totally irate at the roadblock and moved the bus up until the girl was touching the grill. He then proceeded to lay on the horn for a solid 45 seconds which had to have burst the girls eardrums wide open. Her mom eventually ran out and drug her out of our way. Other than that, we spent the night watching hundreds of packed buses zipping past us, ferrying the locals home.