Cyclo tour of Hoi An, Viet Nam
The day started with a cyclo ride through the streets of Hoi An, Viet Nam and ended with this Empress hiring a tailor to custom-make some new clothes.
Hoi An is a clothes-shopper’s haven. The streets are lined with tailor and shoemaker shops where you can buy off the rack or commission a custom garment in silk, linen, cotton or cashmere wool. Custom leather shoes are also available in every style and colour.
Each store showcases mannequins clad in traditional, embroidered Vietnamese costumes or contemporary dresses, blouses, skirts, suits, shirts and overcoats. The samples give you a chance to inspect a tailor’s workmanship and ideas for your own design. Bolts of print and solid fabrics are packed tightly into shelves that line the shop walls, offering a shopper maximum selection in this highly competitive market. Hoi An even boasts a fabric market where you can actually see the tailors hunched over ancient machines.
This old tailor in Hoi An's fabric market wanted $1US to take his picture.
At 5’11” it’s impossible for me to buy ready-made Vietnamese fashions, so I opted for two simple silk blouses in white and blue with traditional mandarin collars and frog buttons. Made to measure and delivered in two days after two fittings, the total bill was $40US. All items required a couple of fittings to ensure comfort and appearance. A pair of black, cotton slacks with side pockets looked like jodhpurs after their first fitting, which the tailor altered on the spot. They were $25US.
Viet Nam and much of Asia is renowned for its embroidered silks. A fellow traveller ordered a striking black silk jacket with yellow embroidery for $70US. The embroidery was done by machine, hence the tailor’s ability to turn around an embroidered garment in two to three days. In Cambodia I bought black silk fabric with a multi-coloured hand-embroidered border to make into a skirt sometime down the road. It cost me almost as much as the jacket, the hand-embroidery accounting for the difference in price.
Take a guess who I am?
Dinner and dance
An evening cyclo ride in Hue, Viet Nam took us over the moat and inside the walls of the Citadel to the Imperial City of Emperor Gai Long. We pulled up to the steps of the Duyet Thi Duon Royal Theatre where we dressed in lavish costumes of the royal court and were paraded inside with great pomp and circumstance. To our great surprise, our group of 17 travellers from the Royal Ontario Museum were treated to a private dinner and performances of nba nbac or court music featuring bamboo lutes, zithers, fiddles and drums, accompanied by traditional dances.
To say we had a grand time is an understatement.
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