Hoi An old town

Y., the owner of the homestay, made us breakfast of eggs - she took our requests the night before. We didn't want to risk her bikes so we walked 15 minutes to rent bikes from a real bike rental place.

We cycled past the market and into the old city, all the way to the Japanese covered bridge. We parked there and walked around it because we thought we needed a ticket to cross the bridge (turns out it's only necessary to access the shrine on the bridge.) We slowly went through that part of the city that was nearly deserted then (it livens up a LOT at night) browsing shops, and we sat in an overpriced cafe drinking juice. That area was very picturesque. At the tourist booth we bought the entrance ticket to 5 "attractions" (our choice out of over 20.) In the old town we bumped into E and her friend from Phong Nha, who is going to Malaysia. E is already heading south way ahead of us.

The first attraction we saw was the Phung Hung house, where they tried to sell us embroidery they were making. The house was nice, it belonged to a merchant and had Chinese and Japanese as well as Vietnamese influences in the architecture. We stopped at a memorial park but it was small and not that interesting.

Later we saw the Hoi An history and culture museum, which was small and disappointing but didn't have the ticket check guy to check our tickets. We did get them checked when we wandered over to an adjoining Buddhist temple, so we got two for one there.

We had to bike through the market to find the art craft workshop, because it was confusingly marked on the map. We got there just in time for most of the 3:15PM traditional music and dance performance, which is the only way we found it, by following the sound. That would have been worth the admission ticket but we snuck in and they didn't take one. We tasted some tea there and saw their crafts - all for sale and hawked at us of course. There were people making lanterns as well as painting and embroidery.

At the market we haggled one lady down to a sixth of her asking price for a phin gravity coffee filter, because she started at five times the normal asking price. I didn't want to buy from her at all to teach her a lesson.

Dinner we had at Miss Ly's restaurant, which is rightly successful. Her spring rolls were excellent and everything else good (but not cheap.)

On our way back to the homestay we got chased by a desperate fat massage salesman (possibly a masseuse.) He offered us a 50% discount before I even said a word to him. Walking back after returning the bikes, another masseuse (maybe) offered us an even steeper discount at her spa, saying that she'd had no customers all day because that Cam Nam island we are staying at is pretty out of the main tourist loop. We were shaken up from the other guy and decided we don't really need any massages on this trip.