Trip to Vietnam Part 2!

Hello!

I will wrap up the update about Vietnam in this note.

When I last wrote, I shared up until our journey to Hue.

After Hue, we rode a bus 3 hours south through the mountains to Hoi An. Hoi An ended up being one the trip's highlights - it has a huge commercial area with many shops and restaurants.

Hoi An is also has various tailor shops. There must have been at least a hundred such shops there.

In these shops, you can tell them what you want and also chose the fabrics. They will then get your measurements and make the garments for you. Prices are very cheap - you can get a full suit for $100-300, or tailor made dress shirts for $40 or less.

I bought several things and have been happy so far, but we will see over time how the quality holds up.

Also, turnaround time on clothes is extremely fast.

We visited Hoi An first on a Saturday - you could visit a tailor that day, get your measurements done and have the clothes later the next evening. I ended up having a jacket made and they were able to get it done in a few hours.

This did make me wonder how things were being made behind the scenes, but my tour guide told me that everything was being made responsibly and ethically. I am not sure still if I believe him or not. I am sure it must at least partially depend on which store you go to.

The other interesting thing I found to do in Hoi An was to make custom stamps. There was a store that could take any picture or design that you want (even a picture of your face) and turn it into a wooden stamp. I often use stamps in Japan on student papers, so it was nice to have a few custom ones made.

The stamps turned out pretty well. And, like the clothes, they are able to make them super fast - it only takes an hour from submitting the design to it being done.

I do not know how they make thes stamps. I assumed a machine did it but after reading about the process, I found that some stores hand carve the stamps.

My tour group also took a bicycle tour on pedal bikes into the country side. While there, we stopped at a local place that makes rice wine and saw how it is done. We then saw the process for making rice paper and rice noodles.

Workers take husks off the rice and then the rice is made into a milk-like liquid and then it is cooked like a pancake.

Once it is in the thin paper-like form, you can then cut it into noodles. Or leave it in the paper form to wrap food and create spring rolls.

After eating lunch at the noodle making place, we rode the bikes back to the hotel.

We spent two nights in Hoi An. The morning of the third day, we caught an early morning flight down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

Local Vietnamese do not care if you call it Ho Chi Minh or Saigon - even some of the locals say Saigon, it is easier to say that way.

Our guide mentioned two things about Saigon after we landed - that we could expect prices to be a bit higher there and to be careful with our cell phones. He said that there have been issues in which thieves steal phones out of tourists' hands. Luckily nothing bad happened to us while in Saigon.

We stopped first at the War Remnants Museum, which talked about the Vietnam War and its impact on Vietnam. You can see some photos of exhibits in this week's photos.

We also saw some other sights around the city, which included the apartment building rooftop from which a helicopter tried to save some Vietnamese people before the North Vietnamese took over Saigon. A famous picture was taken of that rooftop which you have probably seen before. Most people think it was of the US Embassy roof, but it was a random city apartment rooftop.

Our guide said that as the city was being taken over, many people would follow helicopters around the city and try to jump onto them.

Our last tour day, we went to the Mekong River delta. This is a long river that goes through many, if not all, of the southeast Asian nations. We toured with a local guide who took us on a boat ride and then to several local places that make goods out of coconuts and honey.

After taking a tuk-tuk ride and a canoe trip, we got back into our boat, then our bus back to Saigon.

The next day before I left Saigon, I took a coffee making class at a nearby cafe. I learned more about roasting beans and making pour over coffees. We also made some egg coffee and latte art. For the egg coffee, it involved taking two egg yolks, mixing them with honey and cinnamon for about 10 minutes.

Once the mixture turns creamy after a while, you can pour coffee into the bottom of a cup with the egg mixture on top. Usually you drink a little bit of the cream first, then you mix everything together and drink it.

If I made egg coffee again, I would probably use less yolk - two were a bit too much for me.

After the coffee class, I went to the airport.

I first flew back to Hanoi to stay the night at the airport and then caught an early morning flight back to Osaka the next day. At the Hanoi airport, I stayed in an "sleeping pod" which is really just a small hotel room with enough room for a bed and a desk. There were a group of pods in the domestic terminal which made it easy to get to my flight the next day.

Overall, in Vietnam, I thought it was a fun place and possibly somewhere I would go back to at some point. Contrasted to Japan, it was very easy to find good, vegetarian food in Vietnam. Japan just has not seemed to achieved this yet.

It was also much easier to speak English in Vietnam than in Japan. And stores and cafes seemed to be setup in a way that is much more familiar to me than the ones in Japan.

And the Vietnamese prices were very nice. Most meals you could expect to spend $3-4 for a lot of food. Similarly, prices were low for clothes or souvenirs.

There was a lot of North Face gear for sale throughout Vietnam. Many tourist stores sell brand name bags but I did not want to buy anything as I was afraid that most of it was fake.

The weather was also warm, which was a nice change from Japan's winter. Temperatures in Hanoi were around 20 degrees celsius (high 60s Fahrenheit). Saigon temperatures were even warmer, around 30C/86F.

I will be back here in Japan for the next few weeks, talk to you later.

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Photos from this week!