Hangin' in Hoi An

Alrighty then kids. We've flown from HCMC to Danang, where our tour guide, Hugh (well that's how it's pronounced, but the spelling is probably entirely wrong) and a driver picked us up and drove us to a beautiful little town called Hoi An. You know how everyone reckons when you travel in Asia you should get clothes made? Here's pretty much where it all happens. Heaps of silk factories, endless streets of tailors, and obviously, a bunch of tourists. That said, Hoi An is tiny. We're talking like less than 100,000 people, so it's extremely quiet compared to the hustle and bustle of HCMC.

Once we checked into our hotel, we started a walking tour of this fine city at a local silk manufacturer. These littles guys make oodles of silk and as I found out at the market today, don't taste as bad as you'd think.
Anyway, there's a process for extracting silk from the cacoons, but the point is they end up with a bunch of silk that they then dye, and weave into sheets which they then do whatever the hell you want them to with.
Pretty interesting stuff, followed by the hard sell to buy clothes, embroidery and all sorts of silk products from them. Boring. They were kind of expensive anyway.

So we walked. Around the cool little streets, seeing all Hoi An has to offer.
Hugh took us to see this pretty ace Japanese bridge. As previously mentioned, it was ace.
More of Hoi An's streetscape.
This lady had crabs for sale. Lots of them. All sorts of sizes. No mum, I didn't buy any, but I thought you might like the photos.
We wandered around an assembly hall, which is basically a place for prayer. Hugh, and the lovely girls I've been travelling with.
Then it was time for beer.
That was yesterday. Today it has been raining, quite heavily, all day. Like, didn't let up once. Rain, rain, rain. But, no matter, because today was cooking school day, which was (obviously) indoors.
Cooking school was awesome. Our teacher, Miss Lu, has been cooking for like 17 years or something and really knows here Vietnamese cuisine.
We got to make 5 different dishes, including super rad spring rolls (both the fresh styled 'summer roll' and deliciously deep-friend versions).
Emmie-lou got angry with some chopsticks.
And we got to turn all of this:
Into this:
You don't get to see what I'd turn it into though. That's just gross, guys.

Tomorrow we're off on a coastal drive to the town of Hue. Fingers crossed it'll be as rad as this place. It must be beer o'clock...

t+e