Things are looking up After spending the night in a blissfully clean and comfortable hotel, I had a much better attitude towards our host country today. We rented a motorbike, much fun but an experience I'll let Mark explain, and then took off to discover if the beach was icky as I'd feared. My fears were luckily unfounded. The beach is beautiful, and minus the once a minute hassle of someone offering you snacks, a pedicure, or some kind of souvenir, it's blissful. You can see mountinous islands in the distance across a turquois expanse of sea off a sandy beach. I was in Heaven. We've already booked a room at the beach resort for xmas eve and day, that will be our xmas present as it's $60 a night (outrageously expensive for Vietnam, and that's a deal because we took a room near the construction site, but they're only supposed to work from 8am-5pm on xmas so hopefully not too noisy). We're spending one more night in the Hoi An Hotel, then we're off to another hotel in Hoi An that's only $15 a night, but still has a pool, then we'll be at the Hoi An Beach Resort for the 24-26th. Not sure what's after that, we'll probably head down to Ho Chi Minh for the last few days of our trip.
Swimming in the pool has been one of my great pleasures of the last two days, especially fun is singing "E. coli" to the tune of the "Ricola" commercial, while swimming up to Mark (I've noticed no clorine in the pool).
We had some clothes made for us today. Pretty fun to pick out the fabric and design of an outfit made especially for you. My outfit (skirt and blouse) was $21, which seems expensive here, but is really a steal. We'll go pick up our clothes soon, I'm expecting some modifications needed, but hopefully they'll still be nice. I'm scared they'll be made with white thread and single stitched since we didn't specifically request matching thread and double stitch, we'll see. Hard to complain either way. I think the ladies at the shop felt like we were dream customers because we didn't try to bargain down on the price.