Vietnam the third: day 14, Hoi An

Still in Hoi An, today was even slower paced than previous.

We did pretty much all of our final fittings, and picked up orders today. I now have a new pair of shoes, and many new shirts. Our extra batch of custom gifts, ordered at 25% lower than the lowest price, came through, strangely enough (or not really strangely at all, in the way things work around here).

We dropped off and later picked up a load of laundry: the laundry woman had previously also hit us up to try to get us to shop at a specific place, which we didn’t, so there was a brief moment when we worried that she was going to hold our laundry ransom, she kept us talking, asking us about where we had shopped, and was in no hurry to hand over the clothes. Eventually getting bored with torturing us, she let us go with a bit of extra price gouging.

The hotel offered us a free dinner voucher on check-in, so we decided to use it tonight. This meant that there was us, and another couple with a very cute if a little cheeky baby, in the dining room. The dinner kicked off with the ubiquitous deep fried mesh spring rolls, filled with pork and prawn and very tasty — have I mentioned how delicious nuoc cham is, and how it’s almost a universal condiment as it goes with everything — and prawns with sesame seeds on a bed of wilted local greens, full of flavour. Then there were pork skewers, and an interesting pork and possibly potato soup — the large chunks looked like melon, but tasted like potato. We finished off with some fresh fruit. For a hotel dinner from a quiet kitchen, it was pretty decent food.

Tomorrow, for our last full day in Hoi An, we’ve booked into a cooking class in the morning, where we’ll get to make such wonderful things as banana flower salad. I expect the afternoon will be running around spending the last of our VND, getting tacky souvenirs etc.