Chi Chi a la Vietnamienne (Hoi An, Vietnam)

         Everybody loves Hoi An, a beach resort with an Old Town, and a river runs through it--it reminded me very much of the New Orleans French Quarter, though much cleaner, with more open-air sales, and without the music or strip joints. You can walk across this district easily in half an hour, and besides the very diverse array of shops it has numerous attractions of historical interest, as well as some very good restaurants. The city offers a composite ticket to the attractions: five of them for 120,000 VND, or about $5.70. The attractions consist of historical homes, various Chinese community centers based on region of origin, several small museums, and a couple temples. My Rough Guide to Vietnam offered three recommendations, which I took: the Cantonese Community Center, the Museum of Commercial Ceramics, and the My Song House (?). The first of these begins with a fancy Chinese gate with mosaic dragons and a Chinese curved roof. This leads you into a courtyard with large potted banzai trees, and then finally into an elaborately decorated shrine, before which a great deal of fruit and money had been placed. In another Chinese Community Center I visited, a narrow corridor led to a rear courtyard that had a large multi-dragon mosaic sculpture surrounded by water in the center, really a quite astonishing work of art.

                                   

         The historic houses tended to go back to the 18th Century since which seven or eight generations had lived in them. In dark wood with no windows, they were beautifully furnished in mother-of-pearl inlaid ebony pieces, silver tea sets and serving equipment, and a small Buddhist shrine. In the center of the house is a  small open courtyards that faces their laundry rooms. The kitchen is towards the rear, along with additional seating areas. The narrow bedrooms are on the side, too, often quite narrow.

       The Museum of Commercial Ceramics was more historically significant than visually impressive. It had a lot of ceramic fragments from different periods.
         I stopped for lunch at a stylish cafe. The food was excellent, and the prices were quite reasonable. I also crossed one of the bridges to the other side of the river. There wasn't the same commercial intensity on that side, but I bought a bag of fresh fruit from an old woman carrying her wares on a balance pole. It was expecially ripe and delicious. I also stopped for a cold drink from a woman selling them on the sidewalk. She filled a plastic up with some kind of gelatin cubes, added some lotus seeds and ice, then filled the cup with cold tea and gave me a spoon. It was actually quite delicious once the ice began to melt, and there were things to bite down on. 10,000 VND.

        It was a great pleasure seeing the art in the galleries there. Much of it was tourist-cliched, but some was original. There were also three photo galleries, one of which, the Moon Gallery, was outstanding, even if none of the art photos I saw went outside the traditional pictorialist ethos, the kind that win awards from photo clubs.

One of the more original artists.

The Moon Photo Gallery.

         One gallery, however, specialized in stitched pictures, which look very much like photographs in their detail, until you get closer. They wouldn't permit me to photograph the work, but I saw more of it at a huge art store that was our rest stop on the way to Ha Long Bay out of Hanoi. Again, though, the subject matter is rather cliched; it's the technique that makes it interesting, which has little to do with aesthetic power.
         I reached the Japanese bridge on the far side of town. There's an entrance to a temple in the middle of the bride, but since I was all out of tickets, I didn't go in. The commercial district continues for another block on the far side of the bridge.

        I turned around and was back at my hotel in little more than half an hour. On the way, I saw piles of round cakes with some scortching on them, but no sales person. Finally, I slipped a 10,000 VND note between two bowls and took one. It was delicious, probably a bean cake, made with butter, and I probably could have had two for my 10,000.