Making Room For Miracles

One more day in the bedlam that is Hanoi would have driven me to buy a plane ticket back to New York, so I took a twelve hour train ride down south to Hoi An. Little miracles began to occur immediately. The other three people that rode on the sleeper train with me turned out to be really cool and when I arrived it happened to be the fourteenth day of the lunar month. The locals celebrate with a Chinese lantern festival and they also dress up and have music performances by the river. I went with two Danish girls I met while having tea at an art gallery. We realized that we were staying at the same hostel so it worked out perfect. Hoi An is a bit touristy but for a good reason. They are known for inexpensive expert custom tailored clothes. Since I already took a cooking class and a painting class I told myself it was unnecessary, but in the end I could not resist and bought three. They were only ten dollars after all. The cooking class was so-so but the place where I took the painting class was most enlightening. It's a small workshop which sells crafts made by people physically disabled from polio or the war for example. They paint, knit, make jewelry, lanterns and embroidery. These people's stories really touched me. Seeing how passionate they are about their art made me want to support the organization in some way so I took a class and learned a bit of Chinese painting. Don't be surprised if you get a bamboo tree with the Chinese symbol for "peace" on your Christmas card this year. I ended up running into many travelers that I met in Sapa, Hanoi and Ha Long Bay here and meeting lots of new people including quite a few solo female travelers with stories not unlike my own. Do you remember the Blind Melon video "No Rain" where the strange little girl in a bumble bee costume is misunderstood by everyone she encounters but in the end she finds all the other bumble bees and they all dance together? I found the other bumble bees. Two imparticular that I befriended were Lauren from Oklahoma and Ina from Germany. Ina and I are traveling through Vietnam together until I depart to Thailand and she to Indonesia. Lauren will meet us again perhaps later in our journey to Mui Ne. Ina and I rode bikes everyday to the beach, searched for English books, browsed in art galleries, went for drinks with other travelers and had to hold each other back from having too many dresses tailored for us(it was addictive really). Perhaps the most significant of miracles was that my watch stopped the moment the train pulled into the station. My entire life I've worn a watch. I feel naked with the absence of my watch. I must be aware of the time, at all times. This was probably the worst of places to find a cheap watch because they are all selling rip off Rolex's and such. The cheapest I could get my hands on was five dollars which is entirely too much for where I am but I was desperate. The next day it stopped working. I took it back to the woman who sold it to me and she conveniently no longer understood English. I told her I was really disappointed in her lack of customer service. She went back into her house/junkstore and laid on the floor to watch television with her five kids. I think I convinced her to change her ways. I took the watch to a jeweler and had them replace the battery only to stop once again once more about an hour later. I then surrendered to the universe and I now no longer possess a watch. Odd it is, to adjust to Eastern ways. The other day I saw a man selling sliced mangoes at the market, cutting his toenails with the same knife he cuts his fruit, getting a roll of toilet paper handed to me when I ask for a napkin at a restaurant, the perpetual attempts at scamming, incessant horn beeping motorbikes ruling the road, women applying whitening cream to their skin and covering head to toe in hundred degree weather with a conical hat, gloves sunglasses and a surgical mask covering their mouth and nose, hearing the words "buy something from me" with every step you take, women hard at work all day while their lazy men lounge around smoking and eating pho, squat toilets, and instead of telling you they don't know when you ask for directions they will lie and send you in any direction because they don't want to tell you they don't is most annoying. This love/hate conquest is not for the faint hearted, solo travel in Asia will put some hairs on your chest for sure.