Confessions of a Shopaholic

Monday, August 30, 2010 Katie and Taylor
Ok, so sightseeing wasn’t really on our agenda in Hoi An there were just too many distractions so the sightseeing was left till the last night… oops.  I mean its not often you find yourself a millionaire in a country so some shopping had to be done!

Hoi An is well known for its tailors which was obvious when we arrived as every second shop (at least) was a tailors offering to make us anything for the following day. We eventually picked one, a girl who didn’t chase us down the street who offered us a good deal. As well as the displays she had an extensive range of Next catalogues and fabrics and said she could copy any design and make it for us. I chose a couple of dresses from the displays whilst Taylor bravely chose a shirt and shorts from a catalogue.. all for under £25! We paid our deposit and hoped for the best!

Success, well almost, Taylor’s clothes were great and one of my dresses turned out wonderful so we were really chuffed. Dress number 2 was a slight disaster due to my inability to chose the right kind of fabric but turned out nice enough – I’m just not sure I’ll ever wear it. You might spot it on E-bay in a few weeks – bids start at $1!

So that wasted a good few hours and we only had 2 full days to explore so we chose one of those days to sit by the pool, talk Simon and Ben into getting some clothes made and generally do nothing – it was great! Our first pool that wasn’t closed, empty or inside the whole trip so we had no choice but to try it out and see how long it would take us to turn to prunes (3 hours!)

That night we went for a meal and managed to taste all the local Hoi An dishes for £2. We started off with white rose – a shrimp dumpling, then had fried wontons – almost like nachos with veg on top, then Taylor had fried shrimp on sugarcane and I had spring rolls and we finished off with cao lao – a pork and noodle dish. That’s a whole lot of tasty food for £2!

Continuing with the cooking theme, we signed up for a cooking class on the last day with Neill, Kylie and Kay: The Thuan Tinh Island Cooking Tour. This started with a walk through the market where we picked up some herbs and then took a short boat ride to the cooking school across the river. We had our welcome drinks and then headed off to the magic table (nothing to do with the cooking part of the class).

An old man assembled the table and told us that the table could hear our thoughts and do what we asked of it – I know what you’re thinking; what a load of ***P but as we put our hands on the table and thought left or right it moved the correct way, when we asked it to stop and go the other way it did so too.. still sceptical?? We turned our hands over and placed them in the middle and it still moved, very weird! We all tried it individually, while Kylie, Kay and Taylor could move it Neill and I could not (not very spiritual I suppose) and even when Taylor held Neill’s hand (aww) it moved but as soon as he lifted his hands it stopped. After all that fun it was time to visit a local village to buy some veggies.

The village was a small island only accessible by boat and had 10 houses on it and families who had been there for generations. They prepared some rice cakes and iced tea for us before we headed off to pick one of our favourite ingredients morning glory, it’s kind of like spinach but better! This would form part of one of the dishes we would later prepare.

Back at the cooking school we were shown how they de-case the rice and grind it up to make batter (another ingredient for later) and even had a go ourselves, the girls were definitely better but it was hard work!



We then got started with our 4 course meal. Everything was chopped up and ready to use, each of us had our own cooking stations with little dishes with the correct amount of ingredients – kinda like they do in Blue Peter! No chopping and no dishes, definitely my kind of cooking! Our first dish was a rice paper fresh spring roll (pictured left) which we had to roll in the correct way and served it with a hoi sin peanut sauce. The next was a pancake (made with our batter) which was stuffed with shrimp and pork then rolled up and served with home made sweet chilli – My favourite thing to eat and I can now make it all by myself, yey! Our pancake tossing abilities were not bad, Kay managed to loose some of the ingredients but ended up with a great result. The final dish was lemongrass chicken with chillies and morning glory – yum! We got to eat our dishes as we finished them, the fresh passionfruit juice kept flowing all day and we finished the afternoon with some fresh fruit, it was all excellent and well worth a visit in the future!

We headed back totally stuffed for an afternoon of souvenir shopping. The markets here are great and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity of buying a few things for our non existent house as well as a few Christmas pressies (sorry mum but I couldn’t resist). We finished off what was a great day with some fancy cakes and a coffee and managed to take a few pictures of the riverside and the Japanese bridge - told you we did some sightseeing! Grand total for day of cooking/shopping/eating…….a couple of million Dong.

Just arrived in Jungle Beach for 2 days relaxation. Need I say more?
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