Day 4 -- My Son
The dining room at Vin Hung is set under a deep overhang, but open to the street. Here’re a few of the things I observed while eating a very nice breakfast of baguette, little dumplings, fruit and tea:
a dozen birds in antique cages hung in front of the store across the street
five middle aged ladies in traditional Vietnamese dresses jumping in the air together to have their picture taken
a family of four on one scooter
an older man carefully placing squares of pink and blue construction paper in a white pail and setting them on fire (Tuan says this is a typical gesture of respect to one’s ancestors on a particular day each month, which is all very well, but it really upset the birds :)
Tuan picked us up for the 45 minute drive to My Son, a very ancient archeological site built by the Cham people before they got their asses handed to them by the Kinh (Vietnamese) people in the fifteenth century. One the way we saw many rice paddies, water buffalo, giant piles of rice stalks with jackets and hats on top of them in an apparent effort to make a pile of straw the size of a minivan look like a scarecrow, and big boards with pale white circles or rectangles painted on them that turned out to be rice paper drying by the side of the road.
My Son is up in the hills a bit and spectacularly lush, even in the dry season. The ruins date from as long ago as the 4th century, but are mostly about a thousand years old -- thoroughly creepy in a pleasantly mysterious way and dotted with bullet holes and bomb craters in a way that shouldn’t have been shocking, but was. One temple was literally blown inside out, exposing the original pale terra cotta color of the fired bricks. Most of the temples are moss and vine covered, though less than you might expect due to the cleverness of the masonry technique used to build them.
The temples at My Son are Hindu, and predominantly built to worship Shiva, the Hindu god often referred to as the Destroyer. He’s symbolized by an object called a linga. There’s really no delicate way to say this -- a linga is a big stone penis. Many of the linga at My Son are set into stone blocks with channels running through them so that water could be poured over the linga and then directed into a sort of triangular spout. It’s not subtle. And we are not mature. I leave it there.
Lunch was at the lively establishment of Madam Khanh, the Queen of Banh Mi. Dave and I know banh mi from Hawai’i, but it’s a whole different level in Vietnam. Warm, fresh baguette with pork pate, shredded chicken, cucumber slices and shredded pickled carrot tucked inside accompanied by an icy Saigon Special beer is really hard to beat. And when you can get six sandwiches and six beers for $9.00, it starts getting hard to think of reasons to go home.
The group split up for the afternoon in Hoi An -- Glenn went to the tailor and Mary and Holly did some shopping while Dave and I took a roundabout walk down to the river. We had a look at the sister hotel -- the Vin Hung Riverside -- where we had pool privileges (very nice, but a little too far out of the action). We wandered through a pretty residential neighborhood and then back over one of the many picturesque bridges to take a swing through the outdoor market. Another riot of color, smell and sound that made me long for a big kitchen to cook so I could cook up all the gorgeous ingredients.
We visited an astonishing shop where women were copying photographs by embroidering them. The illusion that you were seeing a photo was absolutely perfect until you got about an inch from the image and could see the stitches. And we stopped at the Reaching Out tea house for a very calm refreshment in the bosky garden -- the young people running the tea house are all deaf mute so everything is transacted in silence.
Later we connected with Jeremy for drinks on the balcony of the bar across the street from our hotel and then wandered back to the waterfront for dinner at Morning Glory. This was the polar opposite of tea at Reaching Out -- chaotically loud, cheerful and fast moving. So much food was delivered to our table that at one point we were holding dishes in the air. More sauteed morning glory (a new favorite food), smoky pork and eggplant casserole, barbecued pork belly, more excellent fish - and yay! More beer!
