Reality Bites

Hoi An turned out to be the first tourist town that we encountered - this has its pluses and minuses. Pluses: A sunny beach, amazing old-school Chinese architecture and seafood that hit our plates still kicking. Minuses: Other sunburned tourists like us, scorchingly high prices (one dollar for a beer!?!?!) and an extraordinarily high percentange of Italian restaurants. We were about to go where pizza was about as foreign as a sit down toilet.

In Hoi An, we quickly found our way to the beach and settled into a couple of rented beach chairs. Vietnamese people do not sit directly on the beach. They also don't sit in the sun. So we sat very retired-in-Miami-like in our beach chairs under our umbrellas and ate snails and peanuts and got mobbed by teenagers with names like Pete and Linda who made us promise to only deal with them when the desire to buy puka shell trinkets arose in us. The waves were choppy and frequent, closing out quickly on the shallow break, and I got pummeled attempting to bodysurf them. We also got sunburnt.

Back in town, which is about 4km from the beach, we checked out the frantic little market. I'm not sure if I've explained the markets yet. They tend to be very similar wherever you go: They are divided into several distinct sections: Seafood and meat (usually by type), then fruits and vegetables, then edible wet and dry goods like grains, spices, sauces, etc. are all sequestered near one another. These foods are usually in an outdoor or semi-enclosed area. Individual sellers have roughly a 12 square foot area. There might be fifteen people selling, say, palm hearts. There are hundreds of sellers in an average sized market, so the selection and variety are amazing. These places make Safeway look like a 7-11. The meat sellers have big pieces of meat of all varieties, and will butcher to your liking. They might even throw in a little brain for free if buy tail AND tougue. The variety of seafood in Hoi An was stupifying. If it lives in the sea and is anywhere near Hoi An, it was for sale in that market. Sea cucumber, tuna, shark, eels, squid, needle-looking fish, grumpy-looking fish, fast-looking fish, anenomae, every-fucking-thing. Itsy bitsy snails (you know those tiny shells you see littering the shore?) are available by the litre. Clothing and wearable stuff usually takes up sizable space in an indoor area. Everything else like cookware, medicine, fishing hooks, refrigerators, and stereos is somewhere inside there too. Usually on one side, near the butchers and bananas are the food stalls. Here, each lady (do the men in Vietnam work?) prepares one or two types of dishes from the freshest possible ingredients. They surround their kitchen (a hotplate and a bucket of water) with a tiny counter and several small stools. You sit down wordlessly and one minute later you're slurping rice noodles out of a spicy aromatic broth and humming "yummm" in between infrequent breaths. Mike has a favorite treat here, which is a dried, flattened squid jerky. The whole squid is dried and then rolled or hammered flat. You heat it up over coals and then rip it into pieces. We found out that it's called 'muc'. The 'u' is shortened, so it's more like 'mc'. Anyway, it's good, and we've spent our subsequent time here armed with the ability to raise our eyebrows and questioningly say 'muc' to any lady in any bia hoi whom we suspect to be hoarding the stuff.

Another amazing thing about Hoi An is its tailors. You can buy a custom tailored, built from scratch suit, made from any material you wish, mimicking any GQ advertisement you have, for twenty-five dollars. We saw one young guy parading around town in his brand new, pinstriped two-button like the youngest elected MP of Britain. Of course you have to wait 8 hours for your suit to be made, so it's kind of a hassle. Mike was considering having a leather jacket made, but after seeing so much dog for sale in Hanoi, we were both dubious of the origin of the "leather." If we would've stayed an extra day I would have bought a couple of suits. Mike and I decided that in order to deftly represent the U.S. abroad, we would need to buy matching white tuxedos, always riding into new towns looking spiffy.