Monday -- Shopping in Hoi An

Our scheduled activities today were exactly one – ride downtown and walk through the shopping district.

This is not a simple “meander about the mall” activity, but is instead carefully choreographed so that we, the tourists hopefully going to spend money, will be so taken by the skill involved and beauty created by the local craftsmen that we will be inclined to part with pictures of dead presidents, either in their corporeal form or in the form of a magnetic swipe strip on a credit card.

It rarely works, although occasionally we are inclined to make a purchase IF we are convinced that the goods manufactured are truly made in the area and are not simply schlepped in from some foreign country. 

After all, we can buy cheap foreign made crap at home.

Silk -- So the first place we stopped was a silk factory.  There, in an incredibly labor intensive practice, they gather up baby silkworms that are 2 days old to give them a diet of mulberry leaves.  They are extremely hard to see, and we had to look closely.  They are more needy than the average human baby, requiring feeding every three hours and twice during the night.  Generally, they eat 3 days then they sleep one.  By the time they area few days old they are big enough to be recognizable as bugs.

At 24 days old, they begin to make a cocoon from the outside in.  Like most teens, they are denning up so the parental units won’t be inclined to come snooping around.  For 4 days they make a cocoon, and then they are a pupating for 7 days, after which they emerge for Prom as a fully developed and beautiful moth, demanding that someone  book a limo to take them all to dinner and the party afterwards, with a stop for parents to take a lot of pics at a local historic site in the meantime.

Just like Prom, the moths come out and there is a screaming orgy, after which a surprising number who had no idea you could get pregnant the first time you “did it” find that they now have to lay eggs.

Oh, and you die. 

They didn’t dwell much on what the males did, although I presume that they had to drop out of college to pay child support and visit their spawn on alternating weekends.

The cocoons are harvested, and although the nice lady giving the speech didn’t say so, the pupa who didn’t have a date for the prom are still trapped in there while they’re dunked in hot water.  They’re unlikely to ever get a date and may as well just die, anyhow.

A single cocoon can make 500 meters of silk thread, although between 15 and 20 strands are wound together to make the actual “thread” that is used.  There are three kinds – “Raw” silk is a bit rougher, with bumps in the fabric, “Finished” silk is what we traditionally think of as “silk” used to make robes and prom dresses, and “Taffeta” is the other fabric, which is a blend of cotton / linen and silk.

Although there is some mechanization of the process – a motor helps drive the shuttle on the loom, for example, it is still very labor intensive and the average silk maker can make between 25 and 30 meters of silk fabric a day.

As with all factories that open up to give tours to the public, there is a showroom at the end of the tour that will give you not only the opportunity to sample the products (if they are edible), but will  also give you the chance to purchase some to take home as your very own.

The first of these we saw were traditional embroidered pictures.  It takes 2 years for each of these ladies to learn the technique, and about a week to make a picture that is say 14 x 24 inches.  Some of the detail is absolutely amazing.

They didn’t have any pictures of dogs playing poker, though, so we lost interest pretty quickly.

But wait, there’s MORE!

The door out of the art gallery led to Showroom “B” which offered the opportunity to get fine men’s suits and shirts, or ladies gowns, made in your choice of fabrics and styles.

We’d talked about this earlier, assuming the opportunity would come our way.  In Thailand we had suits made with mixed results – LJ’s fit perfectly and remains his favorite suit.  EB’s was altered and then shipped home with less success.   After a bit of alteration at the tailor shop up the street from our house, it’s LJ’s 2^nd favorite suit.

We did opt for a couple of custom made shirts each here, though.  Business attire for EB and casual for LJ.

Comments about “Buddha Bellies” from the staff as they took our measurements were understood without translation.  LJ was wearing the infamous “Street Market Puke Shirt” and Madame Tailor was quick to point out that it was actually too big.

Little did she know that we would have paid 4 times the cost of that custom made shirt for a clean, non-smelling shirt on that fateful day.

As in Thailand, no matter what the language, there is something a bit humbling about having your measurements (in Vietnamese and metric, no less) called across a room while you stand being measured with the nice lady saying, “Don’t suck in, you’re not fooling anyone,” (or something along those lines).

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.

Even though we were in overload.  Even though we said that our credit cards were put away and not coming back out.

Next was a traditional lantern-making shop that took the remnants of the silk (probably) and affixed them to bamboo frames to make traditional lamps.  It was a great way to build a complimentary business.

Across from it was a carving shop that had craftsmen hand-carving a variety of traditional plaques and figures.

Nope.  We didn’t buy any of them.  The only other purchase made there were 3 bottles of water from the street vendor out front.

Colonial Hue An -- The streets we were walking down were closed to automobiles for the holidays, although they were open to scooters and bicycles that are about 10 times the hazard of cars, anyhow.

It was a lot like Colonial Williamsburg or Silver Dollar City.  You wander down the street past umpty-jillion shops that offer loads of treasures, mostly made in foreign countries.

Occasionally, you’ll come across a traditional site where a “craftsman” shows how to do a traditional activity.  We went to three of these places, including a house that has been occupied as a home business by the same family since 1790.

Obviously they’ve gotten grandfathered around any zoning issues that might have existed.

The thing is, we were never really sure what the business was.  The lady giving the tour talked about the fact that there were three types of architecture prevalent (as with the others) – Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese.  The pillars that hold it up are wooden, but always sit on a marble pedestal to avoid contact with the ground and humidity, so they don’t rot.

This kind of ignores the fact, though, that these places back up to the river and are prone to regular flooding on the first floor – so much so that there’s a trap door built into the ceiling so that you can haul the furniture and stuff up to the second floor until the flood goes down.

Some of them had markers on the wall showing flood levels throughout the years.

Each of these places had been designated as “historically significant” and as such is protected.

The other thing they had in common was that once they realized we were not buying embroidered table cloths, good luck charms for your home or car or anything else, they quickly lost interest in you.

About as fast as the timeshare salesman does when he realizes that all you’re there for is the free weekend and the $100.00 gas voucher.

That was fine, though.

The Japanese Bridge -- In order to facilitate trade between the parts of town, the Japanese (maybe when they were in charge) built a bridge from one side of the canal to the other.  Being a government job, it took 3 years to build the bridge, starting in the year of the Monkey and ending in the Year of the Dog.  In order to protect the Bridge from evil spirits, there are a pair of statues (male and female, representing the Jin and Jang) of the respective animals, one at each end.

Nosey huh....whatcha lookin at the lady's phone screen..huh?

Another Pagoda -- We visited another Pagoda.  Sorry, but can’t for the life of me figure out what the name was.  This one was a bit unique in that it was dedicated to female goddesses.  There were several larger statues with about a dozen smaller ones in front, each of which had a male child in their arms.  I’m trying not to mix religious beliefs, and I’m relatively certain that it was not the 12 Apostles, although I might be wrong about that.

Big coily incense things hanging there. If I could figure out how to get one home, it’d be hanging on the deck next summer.  These were the biggest ones yet. They’re supposed to last about a month.

By then we’d been wandering around for about 3 ½ hours.  We were tired and hungry and thirsty, so we went to Morning Glory restaurant for lunch.  The food is traditional Vietnamese, but done in such a way that Western tourists appreciate it.  The lady has her business down – she even offers cooking classes (although the timing wasn’t right for us).  Lunch was good, then we found the car and called it an afternoon.