Hoi An, Vietnam

Hey, well we spent a few days in Hoi An, a funny town of about 60,000 people, with over 200 tailor shops. I was recommended a tailor by Melbournian I’d met in Hue, so we went to check it out. It was a fairly big tailors, and not as pushy as the majority of the smaller places. We spent a while flicking through some catalogues and magazines, a fairly simple process of point at a picture, point at a fabric get measured up and it head back the next day for a fitting. I got a shirt, casual jacket and a pair of pants made up, it came to about $100. There are some photos here. The next night on the walk home form a few beers we heard some guitar and singing coming from round a street corner. Welsh Loy, and I cruised over and invited our selves to join the group of about 7 or so guys. We sat under a street light singing a fairly strange collection of English and Vietnamese songs. The only English song they all could sing was Happy Birthday, so we get a few rounds of that to start with. It’s quite a challenge to sing along to Vietnamese songs. We mainly just got stuck into the rice wine and a few weird little nibbly things. Sitting around singing and even a bit of dancing, it was a really fun night.
Now we’re in Nha Trang, another over night bus got us down here, once again fairly painless. I was even given a sleeping mat and blanket and slept in the aisle. Some bad news regarding the bus trips is that we are finally out of tamazapans. Unfortunately from what I can tell the Vietnamese aren’t too big on the over the counter sedatives either.
Nha Trang’s been good so far, a big Halloween party at the Sailing Club was out introduction to the night life. At one stage of the night after a fair few drinks from the witches cauldron (bad ((but free)) sangria style red wine punch) some of the staff used a combination of toilet paper and packing tape me dress me up as a zombie, it worked quite well for about 10 minutes until the extra layers just started me make we sweat. Unfortunately for the staff I had no plans of wandering the streets of Vietnam, Pissed, dressed up like a zombie and suffering from heat exhaustion, so I pretty quickly escaped from my bog roll outfit.
This morning I taught English at a local community centre, some of the postcard selling kids had told me about it yesterday. It was a really small class, and about 7 volunteers turned up. We spent most of the lesson doing previous, current and future verbs. I think the kids did a better job than us teachers. After class we met up at the beach and had a fairly rigorous game of soccer in the afternoon. They were all really quite smart and well spoken, the community centre is set up by Crazy Kim, who runs a bar and a “Hands off the Kids” anti Pedo group. I think we’ll head down south a bit further on a night bus tomorrow.