Hoi An custom made!

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This morning we woke at a reasonable hour and went down to the lobby for breakfast. The whole set up here is a bit weird. We were handed roughly torn order sheets with a pen and the breakfast options. We both picked fresh fruit and muesli.. It came sort of mushed together with yoghurt and a tonne of dragon fruit. Luckily a side of very sweet little pineapple was also included so I was happy.
Today was the big day in Hoi an.. Today, we picked a tailor (there are hundreds) and went to get some clothes made. We were measured and and asked lots of questions. We picked things from books and drew our ideas in a book. We payed our deposit and were told to go back a mere 8hours later for a first fitting. This afternoon was spent at the beach. We took a taxi as it was a fair old way from the hotel and it was sunny and warm. The beach here is fine. There is a wide sandy beach and the water is clean and warm. There was just a lot of commercialism down there. We were expecting a tropical beach and whilst it was nice it was also pretty busy. We were approached a lot by ladies trying to sell us all sorts! They would walk over say "look at my thing" and we would say no thank you then they would just stand there. And stand there. So we would say no thank you again and again they would stand there. The way things work over here is very different from even places like Thailand. At 7pm on the dot we headed back to our tailor expecting some rough mock ups of our final clothes. They were pretty much finished. It was amazing how fast and how good they were. We tried everything on (a woollen winter coat was not fun to be stood in for 10 minutes in the heat!) and they made chalk marks for our alterations. We go back at 11am for our next fitting. I hope I have room in my bag! I got a little carried away! The clothes are awesome though! And the majority of them are silk or silk/cotton blend. As the street sellers say "loverly joverly" We had a wander around some streets we hadn't been down before and discovered some old markets. They were a mix of very local fruit / veg / household goods and silver tipped chop sticks / Vietnam flag T-shirts / silk scarves. We are going back tomorrow with my camera as I'd like to take a few photos. For now though its a bit of an early night as we are both kind of tired and Eireann has sore eyes.

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