The tailors of Hoi An

Wednesday 14th March

As intended, we had a nice slow start to the day today.  We made use of the Resort’s boat service to take a ride over to the town.  Although it only saved a short walk, it was good to see the area from the water. 

Life on the river

We saw many of these simple boats

That's one way of moving motorcycles!

Didn't we see him in Kyoto??

We started at the Market, but got pestered so much that we gave up and left.  We found a nice café for breakfast and watched the world go by for a while.  We’ve realised that Hoi An is a nicer place by day, with many interesting old buildings and boats on the river.  We were amused by the Westerners wandering by in their conical hats.  If we thought they looked silly, I’m sure the Vietnamese find it twice as funny!

Nice place for breakfast!

We started our browsing of tailor shops looking for some tops for me.  I found a loose-fitting cotton top and ordered two in different colours, to be picked up at 6.30 tonight.  It would take me a month to do the same thing.

Sneaky shot taken through a shop door

Statues for sale

We strolled and browsed around the town until lunch time.  John tried pho (which, unfortunately is pronounced ‘fur’).  It’s a standard Vietnamese dish which can be found everywhere and it was very good.  I still can’t quite get past the idea of a bowl of fur (can’t help thinking of cats), but I managed to get used to the idea of having a purse full of dongs, so I’ll work on it.  Loving the prices here – our lunches and cups of tea totalled $7.50.

Conical hats are nice in their place -
which is not on the heads of Westerners!

We ambled our way back to the hotel for a rest as John’s cold is giving him a bit of a hard time.  While he had a rest in the hotel room, I took my Kindle over to the pool and had a lazy afternoon reading and dozing.  We’ve tried to cram in plenty of activity, but it was nice to just kick back and relax.  The weather is perfect – not too hot, not too cold but not quite warm enough to get me in the pool.  Many other Resort guests weren’t so pathetic.  Watching them was enough water sport for me.

We’d revived again by dinner time, so we went back over to the town to have dinner in a restaurant.  John said it was the best meal he’s ever had, so I feel that a bit of Vietnamese cooking will be occurring in the Abell household when we get home.  After dinner we went back to the tailor shop to pick up my tops and then did some more window shopping which resulted in me purchasing two more tops.  Impulse buying is not usually my style (that’s why I get to go on holidays!) but the price was right and the tops were nice.  We found another café for dessert and packed in a few more calories.

Do people actually wear these??

Back near the bridge we heard some odd singing going on, so we made our way over there to see what it was all about.  Apparently it is an old gambling game which is played every evening by both locals and tourists.  It involved paying 50 cents to get a wooden paddle with a picture on it.  As the game progresses, accompanied by musicians and singing, larger paddles are hung on a line.  I never did figure out how it worked, but at the end someone won a bag of prizes.  He looked quite happy with his haul, so I guess it must have been worth more than 50 cents.

We went back to the hotel to print off our boarding passes for tomorrow and to squish everything into our ever-expanding backpacks.  We plan to buy another small bag when we get back to Hanoi so we can manage a few souvenirs without splitting the seams of the packs.