Hoi An

Shelly and I have just arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, where we are staying at the famous Rex Hotel. More on that later.

After my excellent Sunday in Hanoi, I spent the rest of my non-working time sound asleep, trying to shake the nasty stomach bacteria I picked up somewhere along the way. (It have been the ice in the lime juice. It could have been the ice in my drink at dinner. It could have been the salad at breakfast. None of those seem particularly likely as they were all at fairly upscale places, but I don't know where else it would have come from. I'm not particularly careful about what I eat when I travel to places like Vietnam, and that's sometimes to my detriment.) It was intense but short-lived, and after sleeping, avoiding the heat and eating bananas, white rice and 7-Up for two days, I arrived in Hoi An for a long weekend with Shelly in pretty good shape.

Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its historic buildings and old houses, and is also well-known for its dozens of tailors and its proximity to China Beach. You might remember the TV show of the same name.


Hoi An is in central Vietnam, not far from Da Nang, which is actually where we flew to to get to Hoi An. The city has only 75,000 people in it, so it's definitely a different pace than Hanoi or HCMC. Shelly shot some great pictures on a bike ride around town and the surrounding countryside.






One of the highlights of our trip to Hoi An was an afternoon at the Red Bridge Cooking School, which is a relaxing 25-minute boat ride outside of town. The chef taught us how to make rice paper, spring rolls, warm squid salad and some great chili eggplant.


At Shelly's urging, I sat in the front row, with her belief that students who sit in the front row get better grades than those who sit in the back. (There might be some truth to that. She got much better grades than I did in college and grad school. Guess where each of us sat?) The chef taught us how to make food decorations, too -- Vietnamese fans out of cucumbers and roses out of tomato peels. It didn't do me much good to sit in the front row.


Shelly, on the other hand, did a great job:


We spent a fair amount of time at the beach, where we hung out at the creatively-named "Restaurant No. 3."