It’s early afternoon in the peaceful village of Hoi An, Vietnam. Small houses and nondescript storefronts stretch along the balmy beach town’s handful of main roads. To the west is the town center, a maze of tailors and higher-end restaurants, and to the east lie acres of flooded farmland abutting a series of restaurant-bars and hostels.
It is to that eastern wonder that Matt makes his soggy way now, melting in the heat under the weight of his backpack and expectations. He’s heading to find his hostel, booked online last night. The trudge from the bus station has already taken him almost three miles across town. And several restaurants for quick jumps of WiFi to get his bearings.
“How did anyone ever manage to get by before WiFi?” Matt asks the air. He’s toying with the idea of saying his thoughts out loud, so he can write about it in his blog.
“Is this crazy? This talking?” He pauses. “I think… the important part is that I’m asking the question.” He gazes out past the clay-tiled sidewalk into the fields beyond.
The paddies are apportioned into sections; expectant shoots of rice stick out from murky pools while narrow, grass-covered walkways wind between them, criss-crossing into the distance.
The babbling traveler stops to take a picture of this wholly normal-to-Vietnam but weird-to-America sight. Water buffalo graze along the paths, nature’s lawn mowers. Egrets flap around the lumbering animals to peck through the stalks and mud. Far in the distance, a team of farmers are bent over doing… farming, or whatever, to their fields.
With the moment virtually captured forever in panorama format, the bearded young traveler adjusts the set of his pack on his shoulders and continues on his way. He looks over his shoulder to meet the eyes of a particularly close water buffalo. The creature stops chewing and snorts. Maybe he should–
“Oh fuck!” Matt curses, tripping over the uneven tiling, the clay long-since burnt and scuffed into the color of dried blood.
He’s thrown off balance by his pack and is propelled into a half-fall, half-stumble, all-awkward half dozen steps. He comes to a stop, still standing. He takes stock of his sandaled feet. Not a scratch on them.
“That was close,” he informs the animal.
It swings its tail around and blinks.
Matt shakes his head to clear it of thoughts of judgy ruminants. He has to get to his hostel.
* * *
“Just a little bit more,” Matt puffs damply on a rental bike. A little bit more and he’ll be nice and comfortable in his room at The Sunflower Hotel.
It’s already Matt’s third day in Hoi An, so he knows the way back from his tailor fairly well. He certainly knows his way around now, even in this midday drizzle. Motorbikes, cars, and even other bicycles splash pass his shaky steering with their ever-present honks and bells that he’s come to learn mean just “Hey, I’m here,” rather than the “Hey, I’m driving here!” back home.
He ripples to stop when he gets to the hostel and a nearby woman standing under her umbrella rushes up.
“Hello! Where you from?” she asks.
“Xin chào! [Hello!]” He gives a weak smile behind the rivulets that course between scalp and beard. Finally, he’s found a nice local to talk with! “America, New York City.”
“Wow-New-York!” All one word. “You want buy a suit?”
Oh, it’s one of those. One of those relentless women scattered around town.
“No thanks, I’ve got one being made already.”
“Maybe buy one more?” She pinches the sky as though to squeeze just a little more rain from it. She bears a Grand Canyon smile as ludicrous as the creationist explanation for how it came to exist. “My store very good! Very cheap!”
“I don’t doubt it,” Matt sighs and pedals a bit past her, ignoring whatever else she has to say.
He sags out of the seat at the rental stand out front and exchanges a nod with the woman running it. He squishes up the two stories of wide stone steps to his dorm room in under a minute. He had a rough night and had to get up early this morning for Yum, his tailor.
Stripping off his soaking wet clothes, he hangs them from the metal frame and collapses onto his bed with an exaggerated flop.
“So are you getting anything made?” a Californian valley girl’s voice butts in.
Matt rolls over. He opens his eyes.
“In town, like,” she goes on, “did you get anything made?”
Her name is Kim and she’s from San Francisco, traveling with two British girls from Essex. Kim’s Jersey Shore skin is offset by the barest of blonde highlights in her black-brown hair. When she talks, which is often, she does so quickly and with unwavering eye contact, as if daring you to sneak a glance at her ponderous bulk. Her attitude is as large as her frame, which is particularly noticeable in the backpacker girl uniform: tank top and small jean shorts.
Matt locks eyes with the beast with whom he shares the six-bed dorm. “Yeah, I just got back from a suit fitting.”
“Cool, I just got some heels today,” she continues, apparently not having heard more than sounds coming from the would-be napper’s mouth, “but I’m a bit worried. I mean like, heels? From Vietnam?”
“I guess they must make heels around here.” He hasn’t heard of anyone else getting shoes made in town, though. “Let me guess, you’re a ‘heels’ type of girl.”
“I dunno.” She smiles, cocks a hand up by her shoulder, and starts to walk away. “You tell me.”
Matt tells her nothing, preferring instead to lose consciousness. He was up late last night underscoring his lack of skill in pool.
* * *
“Now, before I shoot, I just want you to remember what a great time we’ve been having so far,” Matt warns his would-be pool partner.
“Of course, love!” Frankie smiles back. The British girl has been chatting with him for the better part of half an hour, delighted to discover he’s an American. And from New York, no less!
Everyone from Europe thinks the city is so exciting. It’s fun, but it’s nothing to blush about. Though to be fair, Frankie’s round cheeks are artificially reddened by the generous application of rouge and the all-you-can-drink bar, not to mention the press of people in this concrete back room.
They’re in the Why Not Bar in downtown Hoi An, lured there by the two-hundred thousand dong ($10) open bar until midnight. It’s a popular special, evidenced by the two dozen other vagabonds from around the world lounging against the unadorned walls. As good patrons, they of the throng are all multitasking, their mouths drinking, smoking, and sharing stories.
One pair of men have their lips fixed in a line, parting only for careful sips of beer. They watch the pool table intently. This game has barely started and they’ve already called next.
Or perhaps they’re staring at the players themselves. Besides Matt, there’s David, a dark-haired, sharp-faced young man from Liverpool. With his button-up shirt left open to expose a thin-but-sun-tanned chest, he looks debonair amid t-shirts and shorts. More likely they’re watching the other two. Frankie and Becky are from Essex (there must be something about that place that compels people to leave…) and unlike Kim and her friends, these two are filling out their backpacker uniform quite nicely. Though their jean-shorts have to be the shortest anyone’s ever seen. Are there such things as jean bikini bottoms?
Matt had gladly accepted David’s winked offer to play doubles. Granted, his wing-manning skills might not be up to scratch if pool is involved. He hasn’t even seen a game since Bangkok.
“Alright, I’m just saying,” Matt leans over the table, eyeing the cue ball, “I’m not very good, so we might not win.”
“Sure, sure,” Frankie’s still all cheery. “We’ll be fine.”
Minutes later, the curve of her smile has migrated north to her forehead, the creases there giving the East London girl an oddly menacing look. “Hit the ball here!” She points at at the solid green colored ball on the table. She’s been doing this for several shots already.
“I know where to hit it,” Matt tells her. “And I understand Newton’s laws of motion and that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection; I know where to hit it, it’s just tough making the ball go there.”
Frankie glares at him. She’s probably not a physics fan.
Matt shoots and the shot lands somewhere near where his partner pointed. The ball, however, careens off and misses the pocket completely. There are far more solid-colored balls left on the table than striped ones.
“I mean, I did warn you,” the novice player shrugs to Frankie when they’re watching David and Becky hugging and whooping at their win soon after. Maybe he’s not such a bad wingman after all.
Frankie looks up at him and narrows her eyes. She purses her red-painted lips before pointedly turning around, saying nothing. They’re done here.
Hours later, he’s weaving down the past-midnight streets on his rental bike. Matt stops to look around. All he can see are moonlit fields and the occasional darkened farmhouse.
He remembers the vodka redbulls and rum-and-cokes. He remembers losing at pool and then stopping to get… a bánh mì sandwich? Yeah! That sandwich guy had been a sand-dick! Who charges forty-thousand dong ($2) for a bánh mì? That’s over twice the going rate! He should never have gone to the man posted up right outside the bar. He–
The front wheel dips into small pothole in the dirt road and Matt’s teeth clack together with the impact. He swerves and wrestles with the handlebars while the the chain skips.
He skids to a gravelly stop, a small cloud of dust kicking up behind him. That’s it, he’s done trying to enjoy the cool night air and might as well get his bearings. He hasn’t recognized any of these rural paths for the better part of, what has it been, fifteen minutes already? His watch insists it’s been much longer.
Matt looks up at the stars. They twinkle and dance in almost-familiar arrangements. Once, he would have been able to point out the North Star and a dozen constellations, but it’s been a decade since he’d crammed for the high school Astronomy Science Olympiad event. He peers down the dark road and fishes a compass out of a cargo short pocket, reading it in the moonlight.
From the periphery he catches movement and turns just in time to see a tailed shadow scurry into the ditch.
The disillusioned cyclist stays looking at where the rat disappeared. “So it’s one of those adventures tonight, eh?” He lets a few seconds pass. “Yeap. Awesome.”
He starts pedaling. He’s miles from his bed and he has his second fitting tomorrow morning.
* * *
Matt opens his eyes. For a second he’s in that ephemeral amnesia where he doesn’t know where he is.
Then he remembers. It’s late-afternoon and he’s woken up from a nap after getting back from his fitting this morning.
He gets up and stretches, rubbing the sand from his eyes. He blinks to notice messy orange splotches in the rumpled sheets on the bunk bed above his own. He cranes up to get a better look. Are those flakes of oregano?
“Don’t worry, it’s not period blood,” Kim teases from the front of the room.
Ah, so It’s awake, too. She saunters out of the bathroom.
“I didn’t think it was?”
“Yeah, well, I just fell asleep with half a sandwich last night and I must’ve rolled around in it all night.”
“Okay.” What are you supposed to say to that? “Cool.”
“You’ve been sleeping a long time,” one of Kim’s British traveling companions notes from another bunk bed. A finger holds her place in the magazine she’s reading.
“Yeah, I had a late night at the all-you-can-drink bar.”
“All you can drink?” Her finger slips from the magazine. She leans forward enough that her blonde hair spills over her shoulder.
“For sure, it’s called the Why Not Bar,” Matt explains. “All you can drink from eight to midnight for two-hundred thousand dong.”
“Two-hundred thousand…” Kim stares at the empty bunk as she calculates. “That’s… like… It’s like…” Don’t worry, she’ll get it. “Ten dollars!”
“Oooh! Where is it?” Blonde Friend asks.
“Here,” Matt says, taking out a rumpled quarter card flyer from his back pocket, given to him the night before by the promoters that hang around the hostels. “You go down Cao Đài, that main road we’re on,” he traces the route on the map printed on the paper, “then you make a left here, and a quick right, and you’re there.”
Kim leans over the paper and plants her own finger on it. “Oh, I see, you just go down this main street, where we are, then make a left and another right!”
“Yeah,” Matt raises an eyebrow, “I just said that.”
“Oh,” Kim flips her ponytail over a shoulder, “I don’t listen when men speak.”
Matt raises his remaining eyebrow.
An hour later he’s escaped the gaggle of girls caking on makeup and doing their hair while listening to the ironic “One Less Problem Without Ya”. The young man shudders at the recollection, standing by the hostel’s pool table before focusing on the game, another game of doubles. He’ll never get better without practice.
He sinks the first ball of the game. Stripes.
On his team is Ben, an affable Australian of indeterminate age who’s more interested in chatting up the twenty year-old French girl, Clara. She’s traveling the world after a breakup from a long-term boyfriend and Ben’s only too happy to fill the void. She holds her cigarette between two rigid fingers like a caricature of her country, sitting aloof on her barstool island.
Ben’s team is up against two young bros, toned muscles roping out of their male-version tank tops. The one named Daniel is quiet unless a ball is sunk, in which case, he’ll hoot and shove his partner.
Daniel’s partner, Moses, is someone Matt had already bumped into the week prior in Hanoi.
* * *
It’s less than an hour before Matt and Wallis will meet Billy the Bogan. They unbuckle their packs into their eight-bed room at the Hanoi Backpackers Original and sigh in the groaning air con, striking up a light conversation with the only other bunk mate present.
“My names Moses,” the youth on a lower bunk introduces himself. “Yeah, like the Moses.” His face is smooth, there’s not a hint of any brown-blonde stubble. He’s eighteen and has just finished a stint bartending at a grungy club in Siem Reap. The job has only fueled his energy for more partying. More drinking, more ‘best evers’. When he talks, his voice carries a Coheed-and-Cambria timber and lilt that pitches his boasting to strange heights.
“Hey,” Matt decides he’s gonna go for it, “I’m kind of wondering, are you gay? You have that kind of speech affect going on and that gem stud in your ear…”
Wallis sputters laughing and claps once, twice. “You’re a social hand-grenade! I love it!”
Moses is less amused, “Hey brah, the stud’s in the right earlobe. Left means you’re gay, but I get that a lot. I’m from Cali and live in Amsterdam now, so I get a weird mix of the two accents I guess.” He goes on. “But seriously, I crush so much ass.” He balks at the sudden silence. “Lady ass,” he clarifies.
Moses goes on to describe a girl he stayed with in Amsterdam one summer wherein they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. “But sometimes she had to be gone for work or whatever, and her roommate, brah, she was so into me too, but I didn’t want to cheat on my girl.”
Wallis nods.
“But she begged me! So eventually I let her play with her tits in the shower while I jerked off and watched.”
Wallis isn’t nodding.
Matt picks up the slack. “And that’s… better?”
“What can I say, man?” the California transplant shrugs from his bed. “I have a conscience. It’s my curse.”
Later that night the accursed teen joins the mess of backpackers for alley beer and extraversion.
“No,” an Aussie young woman interjects, “guys don’t actually like cumming on girls’ faces, do they?”
“Oh god,” Moses scratches his head, “I can’t think of a girl’s face I haven’t cum on.”
“My face,” Stefani retorts, “you haven’t cum on my face.”
Moses throws on a grin and leans towards her. “Yet.”
The Austin-based school teacher’s face drips only with disgust.
* * *
Moses takes the cue from Daniel and leans over to take a shot, but before he can set his hands, his stomach churns. He straightens with a small ripple of motion and whips his his cheeks forward.
“Mrrrruuuuuurrrrrruurrrrrpuhhhhhhh!” the young Don Juan belches. “Behhhp.”
The other three players turn in concern. It had even pulled Ben from Clara.
“Are you okay?” Matt asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Gastrodamus assures them. “But one time? I thought I had to burp and I tried to burp, but I puked everywhere. Blehhhhhhhhhh-yeeuuchhhhhhh!” He rips imaginary vomit from his mouth.
“Quite… the turnaround,” Matt admits.
The bearded American would go on to miss all of his shots, which is quite alright since this allows his partner Ben to sink them all. Stripes win.
* * *
The following evening, Matt’s aiming to get to sleep early. Tomorrow might be his final fitting (spoiler: it won’t be) and he’s been racking up a monster sleep debt. He’s more than ready to move on from Hoi An and see the trekking locales of Dalat and lazy beaches of Mui Ne to the south.
He lifts up the blanket to sweep his arm across the sheets. Stroke after stroke clears aside the gritty pieces of dirt and assorted debris that prick and sting a sleeping traveler. He wonders how they get there. He’s been fairly diligent about brushing off his feet before climbing into bed…
“Where are these crumbs coming from?!” a new British voice says (Brits are everywhere!). “I hate these crumbs!”
“Crumbs? Like bread?” Matt asks a second before he gets it. “Oh, that’s just your word for the sandy, dusty stuff in the bed.”
“Yeah,” she confirms. Ashley is the younger of a pair of sisters from northern England, somewhere near Manchester. They’ve been traveling from the south of Vietnam and had just gotten in that afternoon, replacing the far less sufferable previous occupants. The sisters are planning to make an early motorbike run up to Hue, about four hours north through the mountain pass.
“If it rains again though, I don’t think we’ll want to go,” the older sister Jess adds from her bunk above her sister’s.
Responsibility. Finally. He had begun to think he was alone.
* * *
“Playing by yourself?” a shaggy-haired man in a faded red t-shirt asks with a vague English accent.
Matt looks up from the sun-lit felted table. It’s the next morning and he’s itching to get as much practice in as he can. “Yeap. You wanna play?”
It’s boring to lose three games in a row to yourself.
In no time the newcomer, Garrett, is in the lead. “So how long have you been in Vietnam, mate?”
“Like two weeks and I was planning on doing six here, but I’m feeling like that’s too much for me. Maybe I’ll head into Cambodia a bit earlier than planned?”
Garrett says nothing, folded over the edge of the table as he is. After a gentle tap, a swishing across felt, and a wooden thunk of a sunk ball, he stands up. He strokes his chin. The short tangle of his brown-blonde velcro goatee scratches gently as he thinks. “Six weeks does seem a like a bit much… unless you’re on a bike?”
Matt shakes his head.
“Yeah, a bit much. But I didn’t really like Cambodia that much.”
“No?” the American doesn’t hear that sentiment very often. “Why not?”
* * *
Garrett pulls the door behind him as he exits, as much to steady himself as to be polite. He’s drunk enough that he doesn’t remember how much he’s had to drink. The twenty-eight-year-old leaves the just-closed bar to seek his fortune further along Phnom Penh’s river. While he is indeed in the bar district, most establishments are closed for the few hours before sunrise. ‘Most’ is the operative word.
He adjusts his baggy harem pants while making his way through the dim street. If he’s found a drink in more dire circumstances while traveling Australia for almost a year, he can do it here.
“Ah! Fuck you!” a voice moans from across the street. “Fuck you!” the voice calls out again and again. It’s obviously a local’s accent.
Garrett turns to find the source and focuses on the grimy man sitting near an alley entrance. The man points right at him.
Keeping the blurry figure in his softly swaying sights he calls back. “Fuck me? Fuck me?!” Normally he’d ignore the man and walk on. Normally he’s not in a city that does fifty-cent beer specials all night. “Fuck you!”
“Fuck me?!” the Cambodian man calls back, rejoining the complex banter. He struggles to his feet.
In that time, the foreigner stomps across the patchwork of tiles, cement, and asphalt that are the city’s roads. From the distant intersection, neon shadows drift over from trawling night-shift tuk-tuks. They are the only witnesses to the scene.
“Fuck me, huh?” Garrett steps up to the drunken local, unsure of where he’s taking this, but aggression seems like the right idea.
The man steps left and the traveler turns to compensate. In a flash of steel and shouting, the street man has a machete in his right hand. He’s bringing it around to Garrett’s face!
Garrett manages to get his left arm up in time to block (inasmuch as an arm can block steel). He screams. The blade is stuck, buried in his muscles and tendons, notched in his bone. Awash in a cocktail of rage and inebriation and adrenaline, the rapidly-sobering Brit brings his good arm around in a haymaker punch.
It connects with a bonemeal crunch of knuckle on jaw. The punch’s unlucky recipient lurches backwards and collapses onto the pavement. The machete that was pulled free with his last conscious act of the night clatters wetly onto the dry pavement.
Garrett stumbles up to better-lit intersection, clamping his shirt, now a bloody rag, around his arm. A tuk-tuk driver slows down to haggle for a ride, but jumps out of his cart to help when he realizes what’s happened.
* * *
“He took me to the hospital and explained to the doctors what had happened,” Garrett concludes, back in Hoi An. “Cost me an arm and a leg for the ride and doctor’.”
“Sounds like it was just an arm,” Matt jokes. “How long ago was this?”
“A… little more than three months now.” He holds up his arm in much the same way he must have that night in July. Across his forearm is a raised white line. “I still can’t really close the hand completely.” He flexes. “But at least I don’t really need it to play pool.” He hands the cue to Matt.
Matt surveys the tables, which has been played lightly during the story. He’s far behind. “So if you can play with an injured arm, you think you can teach me a bit? Anything, really, if you think it’d point me in the right direction.”
“Well,” Garrett considers, “for starters, spread your legs or crouch or whatever you need to do to get low. You see how you’re hunching over each shot? You can’t expect to line up a shot without being able to sight down the stick.”
“Uh huh,” Matt nods for more.
“And just look with one eye, like you’ve probably seen all the pros doing. You don’t need to see with both.”
“Right, parallax isn’t important if you’re just trying to shoot it straight.” Matt gets it.
“Sure… Why don’t you give it a try?”
* * *
Matt wants to close both eyes. That would be a bad idea, however, as he’s back on his bike, riding north to the ‘out of the way’ beach he’s heard so much about.
After hanging with Garrett for a bit, he left to explore more of the city on the first clear day since his arrival in Hoi An. So he basks in the sun with his eyes open while the wind whisks the sweat and heat from his brow.
He’s far west and north now, past where he usually wanders looking for small hole-in-the-wall restaurants. “I should’ve stopped at that phở place for lunch,” he regrets, watching one after another ramshackle clothes-oriented storefront go past. “Aha!”
By the side of the road sits a phonebooth-looking stall with a shelf of baguettes that can mean only one thing: bánh mì.
“Hello?” Matt calls into the open shop of half-dressed mannequins.
An older lady peeks from the deep hallway to look at him.
“Bánh mì?” is his next question.
She bustles out to her streetside assembly station and they soon negotiate price.
“Fiftee’” the woman says.
“Fifty?” A preposterous amount! Matt turns to retrieve his bike. All these Hoi An women were the same.
“No, no,” the short woman insists and pulls open her cash drawer. She pulls out a ten- and five-thousand dong note. “Fiftee’”
“Oh, fifteen, fifteen. Yeah, my bad. I’m in, yes.”
The woman sits next to her only patron, her purple wool dress taut in her lap where her wrists lay crossed. She composes a sentence while Matt tucks into the sandwich.
“Where,” she pauses. “From?”
“New York, America.” A monstrous chunk of the sandwich disappears with a chomp.
“Mmm.” More concentration.
“[Delicious]” Matt says in Thai, before remembering he hardly knows any Vietnamese.
The woman’s expression confirms this. The sound of a sandwich’s demise is the only noise for another bite or two.
“Hey, I know what you’ll like. Check out these pictures of my origami.” He hands over his phone.
“Mmm.”
“I make this. I fold,” he pantomimes, “I fold.” He points to his phone’s screen, opened to his origami album.
Looking at the device in her hand, her eyes fill with scrutiny. She points to Matt. “Make?”
“Yes, I make, yes.”
She turns to show him the flower. “You?”
A grin. “Yes.”
“Ohhh,” she murmurs. She swipes once, again. “You?” She’s pointing at the camera.
“Yes, yes. All me.” He nods for emphasis.
“Ohhh!” She continues swiping through the album, consistently incredulous.
As she makes her way through the album, Matt picks up the five-thousand dong note he’s left on the table and starts to fold.
* * *
“Maybe Hoi An isn’t so bad?” Matt asks his familiar audience of no one the following morning.
He’s practicing pool as he was shown. He’s long since eaten his free buffet breakfast, which was nothing to write home about†. Was it his imagination, or have the balls been getting closer to where he wants to put them?
Having his fill for now, he makes his way back to his room to get ready for his final fitting this afternoon. The sun is shining again, the heat less oppressive than he remembers. The smooth stone steps are cool under his bare feet. The tiles of the second floor landing are even cooler. Maybe he would book another few days before catching the train to–
Brang-ng-ng! To the right, a stack of spare bunk bed racking vibrates with a metallic wobble. For an elongated second Matt feels only the catch on his foot. Then the initial ebb of feeling that signals a tidal wave of pain is about to crash.
“Fuuuuuuuck!!!” He’s on the floor, clutching his little toe. He continues to rock back and forth, cursing for everyone on the floor to hear.
The hostel’s cleaning staff gathers at the top of the stairs to look down the hall at him. One employee, a janitor, trots over. He gestures to see the foot.
As soon as Matt removes the pressure, a thin red line traces the three open edges of the toenail. It thickens as they watch.
The man swirls his finger in his mouth, pulls it out, and goes in toward the injured foot. “Ah?”
“You wanna put your saliva-finger on my toe?” Matt bats at the proffered ‘antiseptic’. “Get the hell out of here!”
The man laughs and bustles back to his mop at the end of the corridor.
“That’s it, I’m leaving tomorrow,” Matt mutters, trailing crimson splotches over the last steps into his dorm. He hoists his foot into the sink and ponders at the week-long chiasmus that’s spanned over a dozen people.
He had started with such great expectations and now? Now all of them had been flipped and flipped again. In fact, he winces at the sting of the soap and undrinkable tap water, he probably has to skip the hiking and beaches of south Vietnam and go straight to Ho Chi Minh City next.
It’s a shame that the backpackers he’s been meeting coming north as he goes south have been unilaterally warning him not to bother with HCMC; they say that it’s filthy, boring, and full of scams. They must not have met the incredible people Matt would meet in the southern city.
† He of course realizes the irony in writing this in his blog that is primarily read by friends and family back home
A wide angle shot of one of the many expanses of rice paddies all along the roads of Hoi An (and much of Vietnam in general).