by audrey -

Hoi An

Hoi An was a dubious stop on this trip – online reviews and tour books alternately described it as the best part of Vietnam, and…an overly touristy town quickly losing its last fragments of soul. 

I guess both views are right.  Hoi An was picturesque, charming, tiny enough to easily wrap your head around.  It was also fairly commercial, and every building was either a tourist-aimed restaurant, store, or booking agency.  The buildings and streets are a nice balance of navigable and old-world-looking (stones instead of concrete curb, neatly packed dirt).   Faisal thinks they hired a tourism consultant, who advised them not to get in peoples’ faces.  (One tour book mentioned a ban on aggressive motorcycle/taxi hustlers.  In contrast to Nha Trang and Saigon, it was nice not having someone periodically question my ability to walk ten feet.)

At night, the river water comes in with the tide, and makes the daytime waterfront street and market area a little splooshy.  Kinda cute, but kinda bad for the restaurants that do business there.  Almost a dead zone. The morning sees some busy markets, though, and those are always fun to walk through.

Good:

  • Moped rental without an international driver’s license, ghetto helmets and friendly grandma included. 
  • Thoroughly enjoyable, well organized cooking class
  • Friendly small food providers (mostly) 
  • Watching two skinny Santas ride by on a moped, holding a sack.  Totally looked like a bank robbery.
  • Good tailors

 

Bad: 

  • Totally got gypped on the “fresh crab” at a restaurant.  They made a big show of letting you pick the crab from a bucket, and then fed us some frozen, untasty bug-like thing. Not so cool.  But what are you gonna say, right?  The thing I don’t understand is…the cost of freezing a crab in Vietnam, where they have lots of fresh ones…seems like it’d be more than just getting fresh crabs.  Sad. 
  • Overpriced, mediocre food at sit-down restaurants
  • Lazy, short-cutting tailors
Oh yeah – the tour books all go on about the local specialties – cau lau (noodles made with water from a certain well), white rose (shrimp dumplings), and some fried seafood spring roll.   The fried roll is really good, noodles are decent, and hm…if you’ve had good shrimp ha gow at dim sum, don’t bother with the “white rose.” Chewy, clammy, unimpressive. 
by audrey -

Post-fall colors

Okay, so it’s a little late for a “fall leaves” post.  But they’re still out in Japan, AND I caught some on … memory card these past two weekends.  Thanks to some zoom and crop, you’d never know I wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of dead sticks otherwise.  Actually, there really was plenty of scenery to drink in; it’s just hard to capture a bunch of colorful trees in a meaningful way in a photo.  For me, at least. 

I’d have to somehow grab the crispness of the air (which adds a certain snap to the colors), the wet smell of leaves that haven’t quite started decaying yet, and a pinch of ifi’mthiscoldnowwhataboutnextmonth? fear.  Camera wasn’t up to it.  Photographer either. 

A bunch of these were taken in Tokyo, at the Ebisu nature preserve (who knew?) which my friend described as a big carbon dioxide sink for the freeway that surrounds half of it. 

The other bunch came from a one day trip to Kyoto (bounded by two yakou bus rides – a post of their own).  Kyoto is really THE place to see fall foliage, but I hadn’t been able to make it down to visit my surrogate family until last weekend. Â