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Published: September 15th 2009
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After staying two days in Nha Trang, we took a sleeper bus eleven hours north to Hoi An, a very cute, historic town, reminiscent of the lovely Luang Prabang, Laos. The central, old part of this town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, meaning all the beautiful old buildings are safe from encroaching development. Walking around, it's as if someone said, "What contrasting colors can I paint all these buildings to make them as quaint and photographic as possible?". The many old buildings throughout town are in various states of decay, and collectively have the most creative paint jobs I've ever seen. The town is built along a little river, laced with small bridges, and filled with small boat commerce. Women call out from little row boats, wanting to take you out for an hour in their boats.
The town also has a thriving tailor-shop industry, with dozens of shops ready to design you a suit, a coat or a dress. The tag-line from street vendors and tailor shops here is, "Miss, buy one, buy something, c'mon buy something." Which is a bit different than the laid-back staff in your average store back home in the US.
From the
window of our hotel room, we looked out on to a little square, where little but tough old women served rice congee and soup to people on their way to work and to school in the morning.
The favorite snack in town is tiny colorful, snail-like shells which women sell from the back of their bikes, attracting customers to their presence by yelling "APPLE!", or so it sounds to me. These snails are uncooked and are eaten by sticking a toothpick inside the shell and pulling out the miniature creature inside. I think it’s an acquired taste. But even if I did like them, I would have been a bit concerned about eating the cuties because they are seafood, they are not cooked, and they sit on the back of a bicycle in a bag all day.
There was a thriving marketplace on docks by the water, filled with strong and confident women selling their wares, tofu, turtles, tomatoes. I watched a group of fish-selling women, their wares sold for the day, sitting atop overturned crates, having a great old time gambling with playing cards. These women were rough; they spit, they were loud, they drank whiskey and
I watched them pee right there, squatting over cracks in the dock, simply pulling a pant leg aside.
One day, we went exploring and ended up in a huge rice paddy filled with high, green rice stalks. A Vietnamese man came out of his home at the edge of the field and spoke to us for about 20 minutes. I think part of his story was about someone getting caught in machine gun fire, then going hungry then being buried underneath heavy stones. He started crying at one point, and then he wrote a bunch of information down on a piece of paper. This entire conversation was in Vietnamese, and somehow he hoped we could understand. It was very sweet and very sad and we really did try to understand. (We later asked the woman working at our guesthouse what he wrote and it turned out to be his address and phone number, in case we want to visit or call him, she thought.)
Walking further into this rice field, we came upon a huge geese farm, with baby geese, teenage geese and adult geese. The people working there didn't mind us walking around or taking photos of
the geese, though I bet they thought we were wierd for doing so. There were multiple geese pens, geese ponds and geese huts for the geese to play in.
Continuing our walk, we came across a young woman tending her cows while they ate grass in between the planted rice. We sat with her for awhile as the sun was going down. We shared our water with her and she shared her sunflower seeds. I couldn't get the shells off of mine, so she kept unwrapping hers and placing the unwrapped seed on my arm or leg, or somewhere accessible to her on my body. It was incredibly sweet. Then I took her photo and when she saw it she laughed this cute, happy, hysterical laugh. We watched a friend of hers chase a naughty water buffalo out of the field nearby. And, we saw a farmer riding a different yet huge water buffalo! Gabe took a stab at tending our new friend’s cows, taking her stick to steer the cows back when they wandered away. Everyone we met in the field was very affable and not at all concerned that we were walking through their field.
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