We've spent the last 48 hours in Hoi An... a town which Matt described tonight as being "like the 4th of July, every night." Will explain that a little later.
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| Coast of Vietnam as seen from the train heading to Danang |
This is my favorite city in Vietnam, I believe. I'll try to do it justice in words and pictures.
Hoi An is a small-ish (~100K residents) city, located in central Vietnam on the coast. (About 45 min south of DaNang.) The central downtown is an area about 20 square blocks big, with cobblestone streets and covered in French-inspired architecture ranging from 100+ years old to more modern buildings. Many of the restaurants, stores and cafes have colorful stucco exteriors and large wooden shutters and wrap-around porches, reminding me a bit of New Orleans. There are colorful lanterns hanging everywhere, which makes it especially beautiful at night when most of the town is just lit by the lanterns and old, ornate lamp posts. The unique industry here is custom-made clothing, in particular silks. Many of the stores are all clothing shops in which you pick out a style, fabric, and color, then get fitted for a custom-made suit/shirt/gown/coat/sandals/etc (they will make anything) and pick it up the next day. (I had 2 coats made today... I'm anxiously awaiting my fitting tomorrow to see how they look!)
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| No little dogs in these bike baskets...sorry Larry |
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| French architectural influence |
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| The twinkling lights of Hoi An at night |
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| One of many local lantern craft shops |
The other wonderful thing about this town is the food! There are seemingly hundreds of options, but a few restaurants in particular have stood out to us. One restaurant group here in town owns 5 of the top restaurants, and they are all wildly popular and for good reason. The owner, Ms. Vy, is an impressive lady with an interesting tale, and shares both her personal history, the history of Hoi An, and much information about Vietnamese cooking during a half-day cooking class she puts on every morning at one of her restaurants. Matt and I took this class today, and I think it was one of my favorite activities so far! The food was amazing, but the information was just as fascinating (to me.)
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| Shopping for ingredients in the local spice market |
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| Best cabbage soup ever! |
We made 4 dishes - a cabbage and shrimp soup, bahn xio (hard to describe but here is what Wikipedia has to say about it), barbeque chicken in local spices and mango salad. During this time Ms. Vy explained how she grew up in Hoi An in the 80s, when her family (and the entire town) was very very poor. Meals were sad as there was a lot of starvation, and much of the flour they got was from Russia and moldy.
(The town at that time was only ~2000 residents... which is pretty incredible considering today it is closer to 120,000.) Her father decided to open a restaurant and declared that it would only work if they could "cook something that no one else could replicate, and it was good enough that people would be willing to come for it." They apparently settled on making amazing bahn xio.
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| Vietnamese burrito...aka Bahn Xio |
She explained that Vietnam suffered from severe food rationing from 1945 all the way until 1990. (45 years!!) During that time, the government handed out packets of MSG to all the citizens, teaching people to use that with water to create broth, since real ingredients were not available. (Ew.) As a result, Vietnamese cuisine lost several decades in terms of progressing in quality as well as making a mark on the global scene... she lamented that because of the poor quality and rationing all those years, the food of neighboring countries (e.g. Thailand) can now be found globally and is loved by everyone, while Vietnamese food is
just starting to become more widely available, outside of Vietnam.
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| Our ritual post-dinner coffee...and our occasional cheesecake splurge! |
In the 1990s, she went to Melbourne and learned about how "westerners love coffee and pastries!". After that, she came back to Hoi An with the intention of opening up another restaurant (Cargo) focused on pastries. She bought the equipment and space in the late 1990s, but had to wait several years before she could open because Vietnam did not have dairy products accessible until 2003. (!?!?) Today, Cargo sells amazing cheesecakes and ice creams and pizzas and all things dairy... but it seems that A LOT has changed in this town in the last decade.
Fast forward to present day, and she has a good business going here with 5 thriving restaurants. She explained that the secret to good Vietnamese food is all about the ingredients, and the highest paid person on her staff is the woman who goes to the market each day and picks out all of their ingredients. "Never promise you will cook someone something until you have been to the market" she advised... let the ingredients dictate everything else. We learned that still today, most of the women here go to the market twice per day! They buy exactly what they need for that next meal, and only ~10% of the town even uses a refrigerator. (They only keep ice in it.)
I'm rambling now (which is so easy for me to do when it comes to food), so here are some pictures. Oh, and back to the fireworks comment - that is simply because every evening it seems that the whole town sits outside, by the river, and Matt said it "feels like they are all waiting for the fireworks to start".
