Hue...and a bit from Hoi An

Not much blog action happening lately....but I haven't really been doing all that much.

HOI AN
In Hoi An I stayed at a 3 star hotel (oh yeah, I'm living in luxury baby!) but my room was only $10 as it had no balcony...and it smelled like mold. My main goal was to purchase a suit in Hue as I've heard that is THE place to do it...for selection and price. I looked around and was pretty disappointed....although there are a plethora (nice word Dave...thanks Dave!) of tailor shops here, they all SUCK! Poor displays and the only ones that looked ok were WAY too much $moola$. I was just about to abort my mission when I found a shop with decent material, nice display suits, and pretty good price. So the next few days were filled with walking back and forth from my hotel to the tailor shop for fittings....and I was having shoes made at a different place. Haha, that's it for Hoi An, it's a dinky little town...nothing else to do there.

Did you notice the tie that matches the handkerchief that matches the cuffinks??...yeah ya did :)








HUE

Hue is a cool city, I think it used to be the capital of Vietnam (don't quote me on this, just what I heard) before Saigon (HCMC), and Saigon was the capital before Hanoi. I rented a motorbike and drove around the city a bit, some guy saw my Cdn flag on my backpack so we talked while riding side by side in traffic. He showed me where a cool place called Imperial City was, then wanted me to come to his house and meet his wife and family (mom,dad,sisters,etc all live in 3 houses that are kind of connected). So he waited for me to go into Imperial City for hours. Imperial City was cool, lots of ruins and cool architecture, most of the pics on this blog are in there.





These were by far the scariest gold fish I've ever seen. When people would drop food they would fight each other and make a crazy amount of noise...and they were huge. I would be terrified to fall in there...

Buddah giving the rock on sign (at least I think it's buddah...regardless it's rockin out).







It was really beautiful in there.

Self-timer pics never come out perfect....oh the struggles...



Went to the guys house and had a beer with him, he was so excited to hang out with me as he used to live in Toronto for 1yr (his uncle lives there). He wanted me to come over for dinner that night and he was going to make me Vietnamese food. First he said he wanted to show me the city, and that I could follow him around....but I needed to put some food in my stomach. Tao (the guy), his wife, and I ate at a Vietnamese restaurant where the menu had no English...and no prices. I told him all I wanted was rice and chicken...cheap. He assured me not to worry, "everything very cheap". LIAR! The bill came and it was 333,000 dong...about $20. I would've paid the whole bill if it had been around 100,000 dong...but I didn't even have that much on me. So I paid 170,000 dong...he didn't have enough to cover the rest so he had to go to an ATM. I guess he assumed I'd pay for all of us to have an expensive lunch?? Whatever, needless to say I didn't go over there for dinner.



This was pretty gross...but I did eat it...it was some part of a chicken...although I'm sure it wasn't a normal part...gross texture!










The next pics are from a cool river boat tour I took in Hue. We went to different tombs and pagodas. Cool beans.