Our view from our seats on our private beach

Day 13, 14 and 15: Hoi An

Essentially, we spent three days doing one of two things: hanging out by the beach/ocean/pool or buying suits. All told I think that I got 2 suits (a fantastic black and white pin stripe one and a basic blue light pinstripe), 7 shirts (including a pink one to go with my black and white pin stripe suit and a linen one), a smoking jacket (it looks straight out of Hugh Heffner’s wardrobe), a blazer (probably the worst purchase), and a long wool trench coat all for about $500. Pretty good deal. I think I’d easily pay that much just for my smoking jacket. The smoking jacket is so ridiculous that my really cute salesperson/tailor made sure that all my friends agreed I could buy it, she kept calling it a marriage jacket. Joanna got some cool skirts, a couple of cool pairs of pants and a shirt as well. So, we had some pretty good purchases

We also had an incident where we found some really fantastic hand painted pots to buy. We wanted to pay with credit card, but for some reason the store didn’t have their machine. We would have spent about $500 on the set of pots; so we wanted to make sure that we had the insurance of the credit card company in case anything happened shipping them to us. I just don’t feel comfortable paying cash for something that expensive, much less something that I am having shipped to me. The sales person took us to the first “bank,” where they said our credit card didn’t work and the second “bank” where we realized why it wouldn’t work. Their banks are currency exchanges, which is actually not that surprising since many developing nations use currency exchange places as banks. However, they were trying to do a cash advance on our credit card (including our debit). It worked on the debit, but I don’t think that the same rules apply on a cash advance as on a transaction so we opted to cut our losses and abandon the purchase. The girl was disappointed, but I don’t want to risk it. The main issue is that it took up a lot of time and resulted in nothing.

Other than that, we hung out on the beach and by the pool for a couple of days, it was a nice break from the hectic travel.