T&A

The city of Hoi An is one of Vietnam’s treasures. The ancient city primarily operated as a Seaport, but is now an architechually stunning tourist town, filled with hundreds of shops that line the small streets. This is the site of the first chinese settlement in Southern Vietnam, which becomes obvious when observing the architecture, local cuisine, and beautiful silk lanterns that light up the village at night.

Due to the number of tourists that come here to exploit the cheap labour and materials, Hoi An has an overwhelming number of tailor shops. You can’t walk 10 feet without walking into a shop displaying silk dresses or wool suits. The number of tailors is astonishing, and the quality of the clothes also varies substantially. After reading reviews on various tailor shops on the internet and getting a crash course in how to select well made suits, we were off to get some clothes made.

We walked around old town with our list of recommended shops (thanks to the internet) and finally selected B’Lan, a shop located in a beautiful historic wooden house. The girls here were welcome and inviting, and were masters of selecting fabrics. First, we were sat down, and presented with old catalogues from North American stores as well as old fashion magazines (since we didn’t know exactly what we wanted). These seamstresses are masters of copying designs. After selecting a picture in the catalogue of the garmet you want to replicate along with the material type and colour, it is sewn in less than 24 hours and ready for a second fitting.

After ordering a variety of items including suits for Adam, and pants for Tara, we spent the rest of the afternoon admiring the architecture of the town. Hoi An was lucky enough to survive the numerous wars in the region, leaving the beautiful architecture of the old wooden houses intact. The antique houses are surrounded by newer yellow cement buildings with a french influence. Silk lanters hang outside almost every building and greatly add to the ambience of Hoi An at night when they light the streets.

During our second day in Hoi An, we walked into another recommended shop, where Tara was fitted for a variety of clothing. Again we were assured that within 24 hours all of the garmets she had selected would be ready and waiting for her. We spent this afternoon walking up and down the small streets looking for souvenirs. We decided to purchase a medium sized lucky wooden Buddha. After buying some other souvenir items, we had our second fitting at B’Lan, and then spent the evening eating dinner at a nice cafe. The last day in Hoi An, we did much of the same thing with more final fittings, and more relaxing.

After our trip to Hoi An, we were back on a bus headed toward the historic city of Hue. Hue is famous for being Southern Vietnam’s capital under the Nguyen dyansty, and the area around Hue is littered with pagodas, temples and tombs of the various emporers. Located in the heart of Hue is the 19th century citadel city of Phu Xuan. Within the citadel city is another enclosed city known as the Imperial Enclosure which housed the emperor’s residence and buildings of the state. Inside the Imperial Enclosure is a further complex called the Forbidden Purple City! The Forbidden Purple City was reserved solely for the emperor’s personal use.

We arrived in Hue, and decided that since we had just recently visited Angkor Wat, the costs associated with visiting the ruined temples and tombs around Hue was not worth the trip there. Our main interest was visiting the citadel, and so the following day we rented state of the art (read:old) bikes and were off on our own tour of the area. It is possible to get to the citadel on foot, since it is only a few kilometers away, but the touts in Hue were the worst we have encountered in Southeast Asia and walking there would only mean an hour of harassment by moto drivers and cyclos.

The imperial enclosure itself is massive and contains beautiful wooden pagodas and government buildings, many of which have been reconstructed. As we walked around the area, we noticed that every gate whithin the citadel was decorated not only with paint, but also with chunks of broken pottery, glass, and seashells. Each gate we came across seemed to be decorated more lavishly than the last. As we were walking through the forbidden city within the citadel, we saw some men a little younger than us climbing some really tall trees, and throwing pods from the tree down at friends. They noticed our interest, and one man on the ground offered us some of the fruit they were picking. He showed us how to eat it, and since it was offered, we couldn’t refuse. The fruit itself looked like large, brown, hard, grainy, pea pods. When we ate them they tasted like really bitter, sour peas. We thanked the men, continued walking, and threw away the rest of the pods without them knowing.

By this time, the weather had turned nasty and it was starting to rain so we took the bikes back to our guesthouse and relaxed for the rest of the evening. After another “relaxing” ride on a sleeping bus we found ourselves in Hanoi.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.