History, Hotels and Hand-made clothes in Hoi An
Trip Start
Aug 03, 2008
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9
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Trip End
Sep 20, 2008
Hoi An, Vietnam
Monday, August 25, 2008
- The next day was spent shopping around to various tailors to have custom made clothes, bags and shoes fitted for us. There are at least a hundred tailors through out the tight, cute streets that make up the old section of the town. In between shops there are historic temples, and old trading posts. The current along the waters in Hoi An is quite strong, because of this many ships were brought into the town and it became a main trading center. Still, to this day, beautiful and intricately decorated trading posts are available for view. They are all museums now and set-up formally for visitors... different than some of the other places we went to where you can just go in.
- At night we ran into some guys who where doing a summer internship in Saigon and are now traveling before heading back to school. One was from New York and the other one lived in DC for 10 years. They invited us to dinner and we sat down to a delicious meal of traditional Vietnamese food including fish in banana leaves, beef and lemon-grass, dumplings and wantons. Please keep in mind that this is coming from a non "foody" so the description does not actually capture how fresh and yummy the food was.
- Today Alexis went SCUBA diving - here is her take: Amazing! Diving in Hoi An has yet to make on the map with the Great Barrier Reef, and may not, but my experience was fabulous! I went with the Cham Island Dive Center (www.chamislanddiving.com), they were so nice. I was quite nervous because I was just recently certified, but they broke us up into groups appropriate for our level. The diving was quite lovely, there is lots to see including huge blue starfish, purple coral, beautiful bright fish and interesting reef formations. They picked me up at the hotel in the morning and dropped me off in the evening, there was free lunch on Cham Island and then we napped in the sun on a hammock until it was time to go. I had a very adventurous day and met lots of Americans who were on break from grad school, had just taken the bar, or were switching jobs. There were even some people on my boat who knew other people that I knew from home and grad school. Overall the day was wonderful.
- Naomi went on a fabulous pedal bike ride and to the beach - more to come
- The evening was spent sorting out the final fittings for our clothes.
- Tomorrow we fly out of here at 1pm and head to Saigon. We've heard that it is hectic but great.
