AJ's Adventures!: The lovely Hoi An

Vietnam has continued to impress me...At the beginning of this week, I spent 3 days in amazing Hoi An. In contrast to the bustle and excitement of Hanoi and the bigger Ho Chi Minh city, Hoi An is a laid back, charming town with lots of culture, great shopping and beautiful beaches. I had heard that everyone loved it there, so I purposely booked a nice long stay to do some relaxing.

Of course, my travel luck did hit a brief snag on the way there. I thought I was quite clever taking an hour long flight from Hanoi instead of the overnight train (because they're the same price!) but my flight ended up being delayed 9 hours, leaving me in the Hanoi airport all day long. About 2 hours into this debacle, I grudgingly decided to pony up the $15 to get into the Vietnam airlines business class lounge using my lovely Delta status card...this ended up being the best decision of the day. I took more than full advantage of the free food, drinks and wifi to do some trip planning and relax. I also decided that the $15 was my daily budget for food so besides the free breakfast I got in my hostel, I ate all the rest of my food from there for the day, plus a few beers. Not too shabby!

Now, about the town itself and my time here... Culturally Hoi An is full of old Japanese merchant houses and Chinese temples from its past as a port. The first day I was here I decided to go see the "old town" where all of the history was. Here are a few of the beautiful highlights...

A view of the town overlooking the river

The old town streets lined with Vietnamese flags and colored lanterns - it lights up at night!

I loved this dragon / lizard display fountain

Too cute - same display as above

Here are some of the temples...all of them are statues representing Buddhist and Hindu deities. All smelled of the burning joss sticks that people lit to show respect to their gods.

Close up of the one above...If you look closely, you can see the smoke of the joss sticks coming from the middle figure and trailing off to the figure on the left.

In addition to the joss sticks you could light, there were these huge joss ornaments hanging from the ceiling with wishes that people write on the yellow paper hanging off - these joss sticks slowly burn up their spiral until the wish is set free...

Cool fish ornament

Market meats

Beautiful 3 color tree!

Rivaling its culture, Hoi An is also well known for its tailoring and even the backpackers on a budget get loads of things tailored. I decided I would try it out and ended up getting 2 dresses. First I was quite nervous that it wasn't going to look good (I already had the same dress in black, I just wanted another in a different color), but it ended up being so amazing when I came back for my first fitting that I got another one. The whole process was quite fun. These little tiny ladies measure every inch of you and help you decide fabric type, color and a variety of other style things based on your body. Plus, when else was I going to have something custom fit to my body? Pretty much never! I did, however, tell her to make one of the dresses a little tighter because all of the rice and noodles on this trip had started to take its toll...

The first dress I had made - with my tailor!! You can't really tell here but it fits perfectly!!

And I loved it so much that I had to get a second one...

I also ended up staying in an amazing hostel - huge buffet breakfast and you could rent bikes for $1 / day. Hoi An is small enough that when I biked around the town or was at the beach, I would always see at least one friend from my hostel and I even ran into a few friends I met up in Sapa. After I saw the sights, I relaxed as much as possible. My days essentially revolved around tailor appointments, eating, shopping and going to the beach.