Simon Family Vacation: The Emperor's New Clothes

Today was another one of those stressful ones. We traveled from Hue to Hoi An, and the stress started with new clothes. Hoi An is the place to go in Vietnam to purchase new clothes. However, all of the travel guides warn not to take recommendations from the locals, as they are all getting kick-backs for sending business their way, which drives up the price and makes the recommendation useless. Our driver not only recommended a shop that belonged to his brother, but set it as one of the stops on the tour. We had managed to get this information out of him early on in the trip, and I refused to go until I could check the shop's ratings on Trip Advisor. Our guide was rather forceful that we should purchase our clothing from there because everyone else was going to take advantage of us.

We moved off the subject because it wouldn't do any good arguing about it until we made our stop. This did not reduce the stress of our drive, however. Someone asked the question of how gays were viewed in Vietnam, and we had to spend the next half an hour listening to him tell us that being gay was a disease, and you could catch it if you hung around gays. He was extremely homophobic, and I found his diatribe annoying. We tried several times to change the topic before finally getting him off on a music tangent where he sang to us for the next several miles. It was better than his rant.

We did go to his brother's shop, and found the prices to be awfully high. However, when we got to the hotel and looked it up on Trip Advisor, it had a 100% rating with over 50 reviews. If I could have had this information to begin with, we may have purchased from him. Instead, we took a bus into town and spent about three hours wandering through first tailor's that I had researched, and then ones that looked like they had a good selection of fabrics. We finally settled on one that had decent stitching, an okay selection of fabrics, and good prices. After ordering some new shirts and slacks, we went out for a good local meal.

I am physically and emotionally exhausted from this day, and am looking forward to going to bed right after posting. We have a busy day tomorrow.

There is, however, one last thing that we did. We were scheduled to stop at Marble Mountain to view a marble shop--another one of those things with kickbacks to the guide. The shop had beautiful pieces, and if I were rich, I would have loved to purchase a few. Better than that, though, was a pagoda up on the mountain that we were not scheduled to go to, but we took the time anyway. We had to take an elevator up to it, and it was amazing, nestled against towering vertical cliffs. Behind the pagoda was a cave with a couple shrines, and a 20 foot tall carved Buddha. Also, exiting one of the buildings we were surprised by another enormous Buddha. This was the best pagoda yet.