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June 10, 2005

Home Of The Shiny Green Suit

In which we have an awesome time in Hoi An and break the awful truth about Paris Hilton to some interested locals

Unlike the United States of Freedom, our group had little trouble leaving Saigon. I mean, Ho Chi Minh City. We were there for about 20 hours total. It wasn't a bad 20 hours, but I wouldn't say we were disappointed to skedaddle. It was pretty Big Cityish, and we were in a pretty Backpackery part, and I think we needed a change of pace.

And a change of pace we got! We got to Hoi An yesterday afternoon and have had a complete blast. Great stuff here. The people have been extremely friendly and welcoming, and we really can't say enough good things about this town. Some yarns and bulletpoints....

Just Like Saville Row, Only Really Cheap and You Can't Drink The Water: so the deal in Hoi An is that the town is filled with shops where they'll make you custom-tailored/ from-scratch clothes. You pick the fabric, point to a picture in a magazine, and four hours later, you've got a shirt/ suit/ tuxedo/ etc. Pretty cool. Also, it costs next to nothing.

New Math: in re: things being really cheap, it's stopped making sense to compare prices to their dollar equivalents. It's just useless. I mean, when a three-course meal with drinks runs you $6/ person (and it's good) you realize that dollars just aren't the right benchmark. I spend more than that on a sandwich in New York. As an alternative, I've found myself making more internal Vietnamese comparisons, e.g. "This t-shirt is worth two-and-a-half bottled waters." It's really the only way to make sense of it.

Vietnamese Food: The Big Secret: as noted in the last post, I realize that I prefer Vietnamese food over Chinese food. Knew this before I came here. What I didn't know was the Big Secret about Vietnamese food in Vietnam. In general, my struggle with SE Asian cuisine tends to be that unless I order noodles, I don't get the blast of carbohydrates that my Western diet has trained my body to expect. However, due to French imperialism, there remain vestiges of French cuisine on all of the menus we've encountered. That is, THEY HAVE BREAD. So, I can go nuts with the Vietnamese food and satisfy my craving for empty carbs with, wait for it, garlic bread on the side. This is me rubbing my belly and smiling.

Things That Remind Me That I'm Both An Ugly American and A Bad Person: I keep feeling the overwhelming desire to quote Vietnam movies (with special emphasis on Good Morning Vietnam and Walter Sobchak's lines from Lebowski). I'd like it noted for the record that I've managed to restrain myself, with the possible exception of when we saw the Vietnamese kid surfing at the beach today. (See if you can figure out what I said...yes, there it is.) Honestly, that wasn't my fault. It really couldn't be helped. (I'll blame growing up in our media-saturated culture and leave it at that.)

Errr, The Not-So-Recent Unpleasantness: despite the fact that everyone told me that folks in Vietnam were really friendly, I guess I expected at least some resentment from the locals when they found out we were American. All things considered, our government did do some unkind things here just 30 years ago. I mean, I'm used to taking grief from Western Europeans for being American, and all we ever did for them was to help them not lose WWII. So mad props to the locals (with the exception of the busboy at dinner tonight who told me that "I'd be killed" if I told anyone I was American in Hanoi) for being so chill -- I hope I've been a good citizen whilst I've been in-country. (And it makes you wonder when we'll be able to travel like this to Iraq? Twenty years? Thirty years?)

He Wants To Buy Naked Pictures of Walter Brennan: so one of our tailors today was essentially the guy who runs the bar in Good Morning Vietnam. You know the guy. The one with the shiny green suit. Completely over the top. So this is what the tour book said when it described him as "irrepressible." Mr. "See." Definitely stop by his shop if ever in Hoi An. Worth it if only for the conversation.

Page Six Comes to Vietnam: as we were waiting at said shop for a friend to have his measurements taken, I was flipping through a copy of Cosmo (which they essentially use as a caatalog -- you point, they can make it) with one of the the 16-year-old sales girls in the shop. Very nice girl, very eager to practice her English with me. So she's flipping along, asking me if I know who this or that person is, and we land on a Guess ad featuring Paris Hilton. She asks me if I know who she is. I say yes. She says that she likes Paris very much and did I know that she is very rich? I did know that, I said. She is very famous, the girl said. I agreed. Then (in a moment of extreme couldn't-help-myself-weakness) I asked her if she knew why Paris was famous. Because she's pretty? No, I said. (At this point Mr. See started to perk up. Apparently he was interested as well.) And thus I began to carefully explain, using simple but polite English words, that Paris was famous because, and I quote here, "she -- how do you say -- had sex on videotape and put it on the Internet?" Mr. See glanced at me and said something angry that I didn't understand. The girl cross-examined -- she didn't believe it. I assured her that this was the case -- it was all over the place. Mr. See got even angrier. I don't know what he was saying, but my guess is that those weren't happy words. I mean, I didn't mean to be talking out of school about people, but the girl should at least know what this person that she was so fascinated by was really all about (not to get all South Park about it). You know, before she asks Mr. See to make her a Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset.

Next Up: we head north to Hanoi tomorrow as part of our quest to only visit places whose names are anagrams of each other.

Posted by thatkid at June 10, 2005 10:53 PM under ThatKid

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