On the stone path to our room we pass several little shops, apparently rented to local craftspeople who sell their wares to the hotel guests. One store sold silk flipflops and other handmade shoes and bags. I assumed them to be more expensive than town since everything else at this resort is. But this morning when we passes by there as actually someone in the stall for the first time. so we inquired as to the price of these elegant straw topped rubber soled sandals and were amazed to learn that they were only $2. Of course my feet, being over 40cm, were priced higher at $3. But she had none my size. We learned, however, that they could be made up - overnight - for the same price and we could custom design the flipflops using whatever silk fabric we selected. The young woman dragged out a bag of silk remnants and we scattered the colorful fabric all over the floor in our quest for just the right colors. Kelly ordered two or three pairs, I ordered two for me and we ordered some for gifts. We also bought some little cosmetic-type zippered bags and I could see we could easily get carried away here if we didn't rein ourselves in. Seven pairs of shoes and ten cosmetic bags later, we dragged each other away . . . so we could prepare to go into town later to spend some more!


We spent more time lolling around the pool, followed by manicures & pedicures back at the spa, before deciding we had to go back into town since it was our last night in Hoi An. The visit was basically a repeat of the day before, except this time we avoided the tailor building and the public market. We were both of a mind that we didn't need any more coats and why have beautiful clothes made for bodies that needed slenderizing, and there was no more peachfuzz to be threaded or other body parts left to be pampered. We headed straight for the Japanese covered bridge at the far end of town. Hoi An's commercial connections can be traced to its days as a trading port as early as the 1500s first by the Chinese and Japanese and later by Europeans including the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch among others. It was a major international trading port with warehouses holding all types of goods - spices and tea, high grade silks, porcelains, paper, sugar, molasses, so many things for which the Orient became known. It sits on a major river which made Hoi An the center for all trading in this part of Vietnam, until the river silted up in the 1700s and nearby Danang took over this role. But Hoi An, like Hue, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site with more than 800 protected historic buildings. The city has numerous Chinese "assembly halls" built by various Chinese groups to serve as the center for their social world away from home. Many of these are open to the public but the ticketing proved to be too complicated so we opted to shop and take photos from the outside rather than hassle with trying to get in. The Japanese covered bridge, likewise, is a pay to enter kind of thing. This every ornamented bridge was building by the Japanese in 1590 although it's undergone some changes and restorations throughout its life. It's similar to the bridge we'd seen at the rural village market in Hue, with a temple half way across inside. The buildings are incredibly beautiful, many of those we admired dating to the early part of the 20th century. I would have liked to have taken the self-guided walking tour as outlined in our trusted Lonely Planet guidebook but the oppressive heat left us little energy for much more than shopping and another burger, this time at Treat's Cafe, another Western style location that attracts backpackers and upscale travellers alike. This burger was less successful than the last since they provided us with bottles of both chili sauce and tomato sauce (no western style ketchup here) and Kelly mistook the chili sauce bottle for ketchup and poured it all over her meat. She was not a very happy traveler but I won't bore you with the litany of cursing emanating from her hot, tired, sweaty soul that Friday afternoon.


Along the way we stumbled onto two very lucky finds: I stopped into a little art gallery (really a woman's home, with a gallery in one corner, her hard wooden bed and Christian alter (set up very similarly to all the Buddhist ones we'd seen except sporting the Virgin Mary instead) in another. She had original calligraphy drawings of flowers and poems, one for each of the four seasons, individually painted horizontally on rice paper. And while I recognize that these were probably more Chinese and Vietnamese, I fell in love with them just the same. At US$5 each, I had to buy one of all four. Kelly purchased just the winter one, represented by bamboo. The woman shared her sad story with us how she'd lived unmarried with her parents their entire lives until their passing a few years ago. Her siblings were either in America or other cities and she was totally alone save for her dog. She was now very lonely at 68 and spent her days just selling these painting for the artist as she could to survive. We stayed with her for quite awhile, marveling at her simple lifestyle, her lack of material possessions (including her very hard wooden plank of a bed). She explained that she'd slept in the shadow of her parents her entire life, their empty bed still across the room, and now missed them with a terrible ache. This was the first sad Vietnamese person we'd encountered, all others so seemingly happy and smiling and reluctantly bade her goodbye - my purchased paintings so painstakingly wrapped and rolled in a plastic tube with an English interpretation of the Chinese characters - a bit of an empty feeling in my gut.

Kelly's unexpected encounter made her a very happy traveller. We passed an eyeglass store and decided to go in for a look. She'd been complaining intermittently about the need to get her eyes checked and wished she'd done that before we left so she might purchase new glasses while in Vietnam as we'd heard you could get them very cheap. Imagine both our surprise when we learned that not only could they check her eyes for free on the spot, but that their equipment was newer and fancier than even that I'd experienced in my recent opthamology visit back home. After some lengthy selection process, kelly ordered a pair of elegant wire rims with rhinestones on the sides, and large oversized tortoise-rimmed sunglasses - both with blended bifocal lenses - for a whopping $!50 complete. Best yet, they'd be ready by 10:30 in the morning and would even deliver to our hotel in plenty of time to leave at noon for our flight. She literally danced all the way back to the shuttle stop.


So while our cultural education of Hoi An was a bit lacking these last two days, we managed to make up the difference in a lot of successful shopping and back alley experiences instead. All the more reason to return!

To be continued...

Source: http://www.traveljournals.net