I arrived in the evening in Hoi An. The old city town is a mixture of chinese style buildings and western buildings. The lampions in the street add an extra vibe to the city. That is probably the reason why people extend their stay here.
[pic missing for camera]
But when you think about it, the scenes are created only for tourists. Even though the vibe is chilled, the setup doesn’t feel like an authentic life of the locals.
The next morning, I got into conversation with my roomies. It turned out that we are all roughly about the same age and we joked that this is indeed the oldie’s room since there are quite some party “youngsters” here.
There is Jenna from Wales. She was betrayed by her best friend and business partner. While Jenna was on holiday, her friend did crazy things with her car doing drugs and caused accidents. The car was even under her mom’s name and her best friend even tried to lie to her about what happened. Now she sold everything and came out for travels.
There is Alex from Copenhagen. He is doing social work back in Denmark and he is compensating his overtime with 3 months of travel (jeez he worked a lot). He went to South America before coming to South East Asia. According to him, you have older backpackers there compared to SEA (I guess I might head there after SG). He has been going out for a few times and seems just to be the laid back guy who embraces what he is doing now.
The hostel itself organizes a lot of group activities such as street food tour, spring roll cooking class or pub crawls which help you to get know other people.
In that short night of cooking class + pub crawl, I got to know some people. There is Pope whom I got to know after the Spring Roll cooking class. We were playing some card games and making some jokes. We talked more when we were walking back from the bar to the hostel, ofc, same stuff. But she seemed a good companion to talk to, easy going and making some good points. There was also Michi, the second Swiss guy I met during Vietnam. He is on his holidays between his master semesters.
The next night, I met a Dutch girl and another Swiss guy from Bern (Now in Hindsight, I don’t even 100% remember what we talked about, just some chit chat). The Dutch girl is working in the HR area. And she mentioned that a good question that you can ask someone to get to see who they are is: What would you do if you have a lot of fortune that you don’t need to worry about anything. Although she seemed straightforward with her dreams (which is have own company to provide them the best job they are suited for based on their qualifications and character) and likes to laugh, she seemed a bit disconnected. I can’t really say why, but you don’t feel like the real her is coming through even though you are not talking about shallow topics.
I didn’t do much here in Hoi An except walking around in the old town, going to the beach, went to My Son (Mini Angkor Wat) with the bike and spent a last lazy day with massage and reading before boarding the night bus to Nha Trang.
Me, after an early day in the Angkor Wat for the sunrise and seeing the outer circles of Angkor.
