Hội An is a city by the ocean that has become Vietnam's tourist shopping destination. The streets are lined with little shops offering everything you can imagine — clothes, shoes, statues of the Buddha, bottles of wine with cobras preserved inside. On the plus side, this means you can find merchants willing to provide you with a tailored suit or a pair of Chinese silk pajamas for a song. On the minus side, this means you're approached every minute — and I mean every minute — by children or young women trying to sell you post cards, buttons, flutes or other things. It can get overwhelming after a while, especially in the heat: it was well over a hundred degrees today, with humidity you could walk on.
Our hotel here is nice — a small, air-conditioned room with shuttered windows and walls that are home to little colonies of geckoes keeping the mosquitoes away. (I tend to get excited about things like that; Ellen is still puzzled by how thrilled I was at seeing Old World bats last night). The streets of Hội An are lined with palm trees and bamboo, and in between the hawkers, the con artists and the men with shiny green suits are some wonderful people: the woman who sold me T-shirts today who happens to be a history teacher, or the waiter who worked his way through tourism school and would like to get married (he's almost 30, an old man by Vietnamese standards) but is having problems meeting the right person.
"In Vietnam, it's no money, no honey," he said.
I told him it's sometimes like that in America, too.
We're off tomorrow to Huế, the historic capital of Vietnam, where I'm told the beaches are quite nice. The group we're traveling with is great — there are two British medical students, a Swiss couple, two brothers from New Zealand who know how to party, a Japanese student living in Brazil, and an American living in Japan. We've gotten into some terrific discussions about politics, history and the state of the world...
I can't think of a better way to spend my vacation.
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