That’s what the first stallkeeper said when we arrived in Hoi An, Vietnam, and it sums up the lifestyle here quite well. Hoi An is a tiny, adorable little town on the coast, with a river running through to match the pace of the slow and steady lifestyle. There’s slow jazz and piano renditions of the Beatles playing on the speakers around the Old Quarter, with plenty of impressive art galleries to check out, if you’re looking to talk to a friendly artist about their different painting styles and inspirations. But for every restaurant, gallery, museum, or bookshop, you will find ten tailors ready to sew new dresses and suits for young travelers. Getting dresses made was never even on our radar, until we met Van.
Van was the 36-year old, sociable, chatty, wild Vietnamese woman we met on our first day as we hunted around for a place to have lunch. We were checking out the menu at her restaurant, when she made us crack up over and over again with her hilarious chat of international friends and relationships. She was so friendly, and so unlike the many other shopkeepers begging us to enter, that we immediately knew that this is where we wanted to eat. And it turned out that her sister had a tailorshop just down the road, how convenient! After lunch, she took us to meet Tee, her less crazy, more professional, and equally hilarious younger sister. She gave us books upon books to flip through to find the style of dresses we wanted. We ended up mixing and matching sleeves, skirts, buttons, and backs to design our perfect style. And then we got to pick the fabric to match. It was a blast! The next day, we went to pick them up, very nervous about what to expect, but our designs ended up being beautiful!
Other than its infinite number of tailors, Hoi An is also known amongst the traveler community for its cooking classes. Well, when in Rome Vietnam! Similar to lunch, we shopped around a bit before deciding on which one to take. We were very quickly learning to never, EVER take the first deal because it would inevitably be the most expensive one, most especially when haggling! The one we decided on was three courses (spring rolls, Vietnamese pancakes and chicken noodle soup) with a market tour and a cookbook to take home. I think the experience of cooking in a Vietnamese restaurant’s kitchen and buying food from a Vietnamese market was worth it in itself. But learning how to properly gut fresh shrimp, fry spring rolls with chopsticks, and boil delicious chicken broth was a definite bonus to add to my ever-increasing list of life skills gained on this trip.
Virtually the only thing left to do in the town was to rent some bikes (for a dollar a day!) and head to the beautiful beach. So this is exactly what we did, every afternoon!
Now we’re on a 16-hour sleeper train heading up the coast to visit the final city of our trip, Hanoi.
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