Goodbye Hoi An!

We lived for a whole month in the lovely town of Hoi An! Mostly our days were spent like this: one or two hours per night "working for the bar", i.e. walking the charming little streets of the lantern lit old town and along the swimming candle sellers of the peaceful river, giving out flyers to other "Westerners". Then free drinks in the bar and talking to lots of nice and interesting people - what stories we have heard! Sometimes we go home early, sometimes we stay till the bar closes and go out eating with the bar crew - until 2 am there's COM TAM (a lovely rice dish with grilled pork and fried egg) and after 3 there's BUN (a fragrant noodle soup with different sorts of meat and a light lemony flavour), between that it's only freshly baked BANH MI (baguette rolls), steaming and crispy from the oven of the bakery, and eaten mostly before we're even at home, while riding our bicycles through the peaceful rice paddies. Then sleeping long - often until 2 pm. Then: coffee at the beach! Visit Mama Ly for Shakes, maybe eat another lovely filled Banh Mi. After one or two hours in the sun (or well, often enough, after one hour of rainy see breeze) back into the city and study some Tien Viet (Vietnamese) with our tailor/friend/teacher Thanh, and at 7 pm there's diner at home with the family. 8 pm: back to the bar and.... start again! "Up to some party tonight?!" :-)

Every night at dusk Nam's parents harvest and care for the "garden", a patch of the big field of the socalled "vegetable village" we live in. The vegetables are said to have a special flavour due to the seeweed people here put onto the fields for fertilizer.

Little Tuan watching her grandmother harvesting some salad for dinner! Every morning at 4 am she gets up and sells her goods at the market.

Coffee and shakes at An Bang Beach!

A typical family diner - you make sort of wraps in your hand with those flat breads (rice crackers soaked in water to get soft), lettuce, beans and noodles, grilled eggplant and those yummy tiny fishes!

Vietnamese people don't name their dogs. But... doesn't she look like a "Steffie" to you? :-) They probably had a good laugh about us... but we called her that: "Steffie"!

Around the 26th of March Vietnamese families celebrate "Ancestor's Day" - 40 people of the family came to visit on Saturday! And Reinhard, another "German expat", who has been coming to visit Hoi An for many years already.

The feast! Including the meat of three beautiful big white ducks, that had been new in the garden (very much alive) just the day before....

Hue and Nam after a couple of afternoon beers!

The "bar boys" Thach ("MJ"), Luong and Tien and Nam's cousin Ba Khia (also gives out flyers and drives customers to the bar).

Goodbye Steffie!

Goodbye Party in the Bar with old friends Zasu and Stefan, new friends Elmar and Ba Ga ("Three Chicken", because he likes roast chicken, also a "flyer guy").