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Other entries in Hoi An

Small World

The wake up call rang at 7 and I decided it was just way too early to get up, so I skipped cooking class, woke up at 9 and had breakfast at the hotel.  I took the free shuttle into town and picked up the clothing I had ordered the day before along with my suit, which had been adjusted and now fit perfectly.  The weather was nice and cool, so I walked around for a long while, trading in my copy of the Devil in the White City (awesome! a great history of the Chicago World's Fair at the turn of the 19th century) for Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which I have not read, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I read in middle school but haven't read again since.  I found a nice cafe and sat and read, sipping coffee and then enjoying a Hoi An specialty called White Rose, which is steamed shrimp dumplings shaped to resemble a flower and flavored with scallions and roasted garlic and soy sauce.  The dumplings are made from fresh rice noodles.  This is one of my new favorite foods.  My other new favorite food was dessert - lemongrass ice cream!  I wish you could get this stuff in the states - it is so light and flavorful but not sickeningly sweet - it tastes almost minty at first, but has a real lemon taste at the finish - really good stuff that I hope to try to reproduce in my ice cream maker, which I haven't used in like 3 years....

While I sat in the cafe, it started to rain, so I went back to the hotel, took a bath, read some more, and watched some of Flags of our Fathers.  When the rain finally stopped, I walked back to town and went into a fair trade shop that employs people with disabilities to make crafts and pays them a living wage to do so - the place is associated with a project of the UN, and you can walk into the back where some of the people are working and say hello.  I met a blind woman who sews silk sleeping bags, and bought one to take camping next week.  I wandered around a bit more, checking out some of the art galleries and admiring the paintings of local Hoi An scenery.

At around 5:30, the sun was starting to set, so I went upstairs to Cafe des Amis, a local Vietnamese-French restaurant and sat for an hour drinking sparkling water and watching the sun set before ordering.  The restaurant has only 3 choices - vegetarian, seafood, or meat.  The chef prepares a four course meal centered on whatever you choose.  I chose seafood, seeing as how Hoi An is a fishing town.  We started with White Rose, which was excellent.  Then, it was a cup of Crab and Pumpkin soup that was delicious and had big chunks of sweet crab inside - the crab and pumpkin played nicely off one another, and it was a combination I had never had (nor imagined) before.  Next was a warm squid salad with veggies and ginger and garlic - good, but I'm not a huge squid fan.  After that was steamed white fish with a chili fish sauce - very good. 

After dinner, I was going to resume my book, but the people at the two tables next to mine started chatting and I joined in.  One couple is from Dallas and we knew a few people in common - their kids went to my rival high school and they recently attended the wedding of a girl I grew up with.  The other table was two single women in their fifties who are traveling (separately) with a tour group and broke off to have dinner for the night.  They are also Americans and both are Jewish women, one from Philly and one from Kansas.  I gave them tips on traveling in Saigon and Bangkok, where they go next, and we discovered that we are staying at the same hotel, so we decided to share a cab ride back, but not before we managed to sit at the Cargo Club and share some pastry, even though we were not at all hungry.  We talked politics and expressed our mutual outrage over the war in Iraq and then shared a cab back to the hotel.

I think now I will finish Flags of our Fathers and then get to bed - tomorrow is my last full day in Hoi An - I'll be sad to leave, but I am starting to run out of things to do here, so Bangkok will be a welcome sight in a few days time.

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