{"id":58,"date":"2009-01-16T00:33:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T07:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/?p=58"},"modified":"2009-01-16T00:33:10","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T07:33:10","slug":"hoi-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"Hoi An"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hoi An was a dubious stop on this trip &#8211; online reviews and tour books alternately described it as the best part of Vietnam, and&#8230;an overly touristy town quickly losing its last fragments of soul.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I guess both views are right. \u00c2\u00a0Hoi An was picturesque, charming, tiny enough to easily wrap your head around. \u00c2\u00a0It was also fairly commercial, and every building was either a tourist-aimed restaurant, store, or booking agency. \u00c2\u00a0The buildings and streets are a nice balance of navigable and old-world-looking (stones instead of concrete curb, neatly packed dirt). \u00c2\u00a0 Faisal thinks they hired a tourism consultant, who advised them not to get in peoples&#8217; faces. \u00c2\u00a0(One tour book mentioned a ban on aggressive motorcycle\/taxi hustlers. \u00c2\u00a0In contrast to Nha Trang and Saigon, it was nice not having someone periodically question my ability to walk ten feet.)<\/p>\n<p>At night, the river water comes in with the tide, and makes the daytime waterfront street and market area a little splooshy. \u00c2\u00a0Kinda cute, but kinda bad for the restaurants that do business there. \u00c2\u00a0Almost a dead zone. The morning sees some busy markets, though, and those are always fun to walk through.<\/p>\n<p>Good:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Moped rental without an international driver&#8217;s license, ghetto helmets and friendly grandma included.\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Thoroughly enjoyable, well organized cooking class<\/li>\n<li>Friendly small food providers (mostly)\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Watching two skinny Santas ride by on a moped, holding a sack. \u00c2\u00a0Totally looked like a bank robbery.<\/li>\n<li>Good tailors<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Bad:\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Totally got gypped on the &#8220;fresh crab&#8221; at a restaurant. \u00c2\u00a0They 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. \u00c2\u00a0But what are you gonna say, right? \u00c2\u00a0The thing I don&#8217;t understand is&#8230;the cost of freezing a crab in Vietnam, where they have lots of fresh ones&#8230;seems like it&#8217;d be more than just getting fresh crabs. \u00c2\u00a0Sad.\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Overpriced, mediocre food at sit-down restaurants<\/li>\n<li>Lazy, short-cutting tailors<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>Oh yeah &#8211; the tour books all go on about the local specialties &#8211; cau lau (noodles made with water from a certain well), white rose (shrimp dumplings), and some fried seafood spring roll. \u00c2\u00a0 The fried roll is really good, noodles are decent, and hm&#8230;if you&#8217;ve had good shrimp ha gow at dim sum, don&#8217;t bother with the &#8220;white rose.&#8221; Chewy, clammy, unimpressive.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hoi An was a dubious stop on this trip &#8211; online reviews and tour books alternately described it as the best part of Vietnam, and&#8230;an overly touristy town quickly losing its last fragments of soul.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess both views are right. \u00c2\u00a0Hoi An was picturesque, charming, tiny enough to easily wrap your head around. \u00c2\u00a0It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WqcV-W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.audreyy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}