Hoi An - Tailors, motorbikes and new friends

Hoi An is a beautiful little town on the coast, which has remained somewhat uneffected by modern development. When walking down the streets during the day and at night you can imagine what this town looked like 200+ years ago. Most buildings are two or three stories with a shop in front and a residence in back/on top. There is a vibrant food market that starts at dawn (I should know - my hotel room over looked one of the stalls and I was awoken every morning at 5:30am), where you can sit and have a morning coffee and all sorts of local foods. Hoi An is known for their tailors and you can't walk a block without seeing one (and by "one" I actually mean "sixteen").

I arrived early on the overnight bus (read previous post) and decided that this marathon speed tour of Vietnam was definitely not the way to go and that Hoi An might be a place worth staying in for a bit. On the first day I commissioned a suit, winter white jacket, button down shirt, linen pants (2) and 2 pairs of sandals for a mind blowing total of $140. Over the course of the next 3 days I went back for a total of 4 fittings for no extra cost (probably not the best idea to allow an over-anal perfectionist like me to run loose).

The next day I ran into Stefan and Glen (the Austrian and Australian I met in Ho Chi Minh) and they picked up another girl travelling alone (Marjolene - from the Netherlands). We were all staying in Hoi An for the 3 nights so we became a four-some ... safety in numbers, right? One day we hired bicycles and rode around town then out to the beach (which was surpisingly clean and vast for Vietnam - water still murky, though). Another day we rented motorbikes (my very first time driving a manual motorbike!) and headed out to My Son (the Angkor Wat of Vietnam). Marjolene taught us how to play a very popular game in the Netherlands, which - after being taught the rules, Stefan, Glen and I concluded that it was actually Uno, but with a deck of cards instead of the special Uno deck. So our nights were spent sipping beers, playing pool and Dutch Uno and sampling the street food.

Side note: most of you know about my intense empathy for older Asian women. Well I found the most adorable old lady with the cuttest little fupa and no teeth. I tried to be culturally sensitive and take a picture of her discretely so it's a little blurry, but you get the idea.