With only a few days left in our all too brief assignment volunteering in scenic Hoi An, we tried to pack in as much as we could in the short time remaining to us.

For Kimberly, this was a bit of a struggle at times, because she’d been suffering from a urinary tract infection that sometimes left her recuperating in bed. But we were able to obtain some antibiotics from a pharmacy, and that helped.

Making the discovery that in Vietnam antibiotics are sold very cheaply over the counter (as well as other medications, including Viagra, that would require a prescription and a thick wallet or healthy insurance policy in the U.S.) we stocked up to be prepared for future illnesses. Only later did we learn that you can also get these medicines cheaply and easily in Cambodia and Thailand.

Another interesting discovery we made about Vietnam is that the oranges are… well, not exactly orange. In fact, they’re as green as emeralds. Even the ones that are ripe — which makes us wonder how you can tell a ripe green orange from a green green orange. Anyway, they are just as orange and taste just the same on the inside, but on the outside they look more like avocados.

Moonlight Bridge

One fascinating discovery we made about Hoi An itself was the Moonlight Bridge. It often gets overshadowed in the listings of tourist attractions by the much older (and much smaller) Japanese Bridge, but it’s very much worth seeing — and walking across. (It’s exclusively for pedestrians.)

This bridge was built to augment the city’s Full Moon Festivals (which we discussed before), although clearly its more practical function is to supply a convenient footpath for tourists to access Hoi An Memories Land, a ritzy complex of resorts and other places handy for dumping excess cash. It’s just on the other side of the bridge, and the first thing you notice when you approach it is the outdoor venue for staging “Hoi An Memories”, a Disneyesque extravaganza that employs nearly 500 performers. We just might have to check it out one of these nights.

At night, the bridge is illuminated, making its cheddar-yellow features even more imposing. But even in the daytime it’s quite the spectacle; and its walkway is partly made of glass, so you can look down at the boats passing beneath your feet. But we’re still a bit perplexed by the bridge’s golden arches, which resemble horns — maybe the designer was trying to pay tribute to the Dragon Bridge in nearby Da Nang (which we’ll get to in a future post).

Vegetarian Dining

Another thing we discovered was Vietnamese cuisine — specifically vegetarian Vietnamese cuisine — when we went out to dinner with the librarian who helped get us to Hoi An in the first place. You may recall that we originally had arranged to volunteer with kids at her library, but that arrangement had to be cancelled, so she instead arranged for us to go to the school. This was our first time to actually meet her.

She came with her gregarious four-year-old daughter, who was costumed as Elsa in Frozen; and she kept “freezing” and “unfreezing” us.

They arrived on a motorbike, which is a standard form of family transportation in Southeast Asia; they’re often parked, especially in Hoi An, so thickly on sidewalks that pedestrians have to walk in the street. In Vietnam, sidewalks are not for walking on but for walking beside.

It was a traditional style Asian restaurant where patrons discard their shoes and sit on cushions around a low table. The dishes were such that we’d never tried before; most notably, there was a type of banana and egg fritter, which we stuffed into rice paper along with cucumbers and greens, and dipped in a sesame sauce. Absolutely exquisite.

Wrapping up Final WorkAway Volunteer Projects

Meanwhile, back at school, we were really buckling down to get the kids ready for their performance of “Little Drummer Boy” in the upcoming Christmas pageant. This entailed even practicing outside the usual class time, which they were quite game to do. And we made excellent progress.

The students also completed compiling a book of tongue twisters — which are something we’ve found that kids everywhere have fun with — as a sort of final project to wrap up our brief stint with them and, we hope, give them something to remember us by.

11/13-16/2022