Tuesday 3/25/2008- Thursday 3/27/2008
We had no accommodation booked for Hoi An, so our taxi driver drove us around until we found a hotel with two rooms available. Luckily the third time was a charm, as we found a nice place with A/C and a pool for $16/night. The only problem was that there was no electricity, but they hotel clerk promised us that it would be back on by night time. It seemed that all of Hoi An was in a brown out. We dropped off our bags in the room and then headed down toward the river to find a place to eat. We find a nice rooftop restaurant where all four of us ordered a variation of fried rice.
After lunch we headed to some tailors to start looking for suits while John and Natalie explored other parts of town. We made our first stop at Thuy Thy which was recommended by our friend Josh. They seemed very professional and had tons of fabrics, but were a bit pricier than we expected. After we got an estimate, we headed to a tailor recommended by Hoa. Their price was less, but we couldn’t find a fabric that we liked. We ended up going back to Thuy Thy and negotiating a better price and choosing them to make suits for our upcoming wedding. We wandered around Hoi An some more, before eventually heading back to the hotel and having dinner. We were too tired from the heat and our busy day to make it out that night, so we went to bed early.
The next morning we decided to explore the Old Town before heading back to the tailor to see how Dermot’s suit looked. (It’s amazing that the turnaround time on a suit is 1 day in Hoi An). We walked over the Japanese bridge, browsed through the market and enjoyed the atmosphere of the Old Town. We stopped in at a restaurant and made reservations for a cooking school the next day.
On the walk to the tailor, Dermot noticed that one of the Barber’s in town advertising shaving. The heat of Southeast Asia was getting to him, so he decided “why not?” and sat down in the barber chair for a shave. The barber seemed very excited to shave someone with a full beard. He stopped shaving the guy in the chair when we walked in and immediately started on Dermot’s beard. Ten minutes and $1.75 later, Dermot’s lower half of his face saw the light of day for the first time in a couple of months. With a new look, Dermot tried on his suit in the tailor and loved it (Long our tailor barely recognized Dermot!). It needed just a few adjustments, but looked fantastic…so we agreed to get the 9 other suits made (for John, Tommy and all the nephews) and then even decided to get flower girl dresses down for nieces. (Dermot actually designed the dress; we have the sketch to prove it!). We were very happy with our experience at Thuy Thy, and we highly recommend to anyone!
For dinner we decided to head to Café Des Amis. It was a cool local restaurant where the owner changes the menu every single night. You just choose vegetarian, meat or seafood and then they serve you 5 courses of dinner. The food was great and we were very happy with our choice. It was a great end to a very productive day.
The next morning we headed to the Cooking School at 10:00 a.m. The school was a bit less posh then our Thailand Cooking School, but it was great nonetheless. We made sweet and sour chicken, grilled fish in a banana leave, vegetable pho and fresh shrimp rolls. It was the perfect amount of food for a big lunch and we learned a bunch of tricks for cooking Vietnamese food, including Katie’s favorite to not cut the onion all the way to the end. If you cut like a fan, then the smells won’t escape and cause you to cry!
With full stomachs we made our last stop to Thuy Thy to pick up our tailored suits. They were not quite complete with them when we got there at noon, so we used their free Internet connection to get some things done while they put on the finishing touches.
When all the suits were done, we inspected them, packed them up and then thanked our seamstress Long for all her help and good work. We headed over to a travel agents shop to set up shipping for the suits and confirmed our flight to Saigon that night. We dropped off all bags at the travel agent and then roamed around Hoi An before it was time to head to Saigon.
We ended up getting dinner and drinks at the “Same Same” Restaurant Café. This is a popular phrase in S.E. Asia, “same same….but different”, which relates to many of the ‘knock offs’ you can buy. We ordered a pizza and a hamburger for our last meal in Hoi An. We played some pool and then headed back to the travel agent for our cab ride to the airport.
The taxi driver, coincidently our travel agent’s “friend”, picked us up in his car (no taxi signs anywhere)…but we felt safe since he had his little girl in the front seat. Our driver had great English, and they gave us a little tour on our 45 minute ride back to Da Nang. We ended up passing a large amount of traffic, as Da Nang was completing with 5 other Asian cities in an international fireworks show. We got to grab a glimpse of the show on the way to the airport, and it was televised all over the airport. Before leaving the ‘taxi,’ Dermot decided to give the little girl his frog pen that he won in Latvia, almost 6 months ago. The little girl was very happy with the present and we said good bye, checked in for our flight and were soon in the air on the way to Saigon.