Google knows what you did last summer
This was written on a painting on the wall of a bar in Hoi An. I'm jumping forward to Hoi An, Vietnam, because it's where i am now so i remember it better. I'll talk about Hanoi, Halong Bay, Sapa and Hue in my next post.
I arrived without a booking or knowing where the bus-stop i'd arrived at was, so i did my usual thing of imposing myself on other travellers - i followed an australian couple with a phone with gps, checked into one of the hostels we walked past on the way to their hotel, then had dinner with them.
Hoi An is very pretty, as everyone says. There's also a lot of shopping, but prices are more expensive than hue. You walk into tailor-made shoe shops and they have all these racks of old dirty poorly made fake-leather shoes on display. It took a couple of shops for me to work out that these are just models for styles. I bought some boots from shops that had a) good-looking examples of shoes they'd actually made themselves and b) catalogues with styles of shoes that i might actually want. I ordered some very interesting boots which i just tried today. I'm not sure if choosing interesting styles is the right tactic, on one hand you get something that you've never come across before, on the other hand you're giving the shoemaker a task that they've never come across before either, as they try to come up with a pattern on the basis of a blurry photo. That said, my boots did turn out to be fairly similar to what i ordered in the photo in the end, they're certainly unique. The main advantage of getting tall boots is that they measure your calf-width at 5cm increments so you can actually get them to fit. I then impulse bought another pair of black boots tonight, which should arrive at my hotel at 9am tomorrow morning.
Hoi An is on the coast with a river going through it which rises significantly with the tide - you're 20cm underwater in places if you want to walk to a water-front restaurant. I was at a waterfront restaurant tonight and heard inappropriately loud christmas carols that kept getting louder and saw that it was coming from a "cruise" boat restaurant coming up the river with drunk people and santa-waiters on it. It sounded like possibly the worst things to be trapped on a boat with.
I spent several hours last night talking to a local guy at a restaurant, Vuong, who had a few interesting things to say. He showed me the water-line where the river had flooded to last year, which seemed to be just above all the switchboards and power points, and the umbrellas that were still dirty from it. He said that motobike drivers have 4 jobs - driving motorbikes, selling marijuana (which is policed in the cities but not rural areas) finding female prostitutes for western men and finding male vietnamese prostitutes for 35yo foreign women who are usually japanese and maybe 10% western, and sometimes the motobike driver will fill that role rather than find someone else for it. In vietnam if they're caught the westerner gets in a little bit of trouble but the motobike driver gets in a lot of trouble.
I talked about my job and renting and how it's expensive and he asked why i didn't live with my brother to save money, i said that i would expect my brother to charge rent if i stayed with him, and he was shocked that a sibling would charge rent to stay with them. He's an orphan and lives with/looks after his elderly aunt and his nephew, and works 9-9.
He says its really unfair that you can work really hard and never get a good job because you can't join the communist party and so can't work for the government if a relative of yours does/has worked for an american. They check back 3 generations. He says he can't get a government job because his father used to work doing translations. I met up with him for a coffee when his shift ended but we parted ways after he hinted about 20 times that we should go back and drink beer together in my hotel room. The other slightly annoying thing he did was invite this drunk perth guy to sit at the table with me at dinner, who i did talk to for about half an hour out of politeness but wished wasn't there.
When i went back to my hotel after dinner all the lights were off and the front gate closed and locked, so i went out in the city and hoped that when i got back and knocked on the gate there'd be someone sleeping on the other side of it who'd wake up and open the door for me.
I spent christmas eve (which is what they celebrate here, which confused me a lot when everyone said it was christmas tomorrow on the 23rd) in some pubs talking to some aussies, spaniards and then sat down for a coffee next to a british couple for a few hours. I got back to the hotel thankful that indeed there was somebody to open the door for me on the other side, and thankful that my hotel was a couple of blocks down on the same street as the bar i'd been at.
Today i bought a ticket that gets you into 5 sites out of 18 to choose from, although i snuck an extra museum in because there was nobody there to take my ticket. I walked past the same motobike guy on a corner about 6 times as i kept trying to find places, he kept saying "hello again" and laughing with/at me. Actually i can see some more sites tomorrow because jetstar has unhelpfully changed my flight time so that i arrive at night instead of in the afternoon.
A woman in a shoe shop told me i'm pretty but she doesn't like my freckles because she has freckles and she doesn't like hers either, and it's really expensive to try to get them off. She said she wished freckles were attractive in vietnam - she seemed to have the impression that they're attractive to westerners - she says you see pictures of westerners with freckles.
