Beautiful deserted beach

Our mission today is to purchase new wardrobes of tailor made clothes. The process is quite tricky – first choosing one of many shops to buy from, avoiding the commission-hungry touts, then choosing fabrics, styles from various catalogues or clothes on display and discussing designs in broken English. At the end of this long negotiation the shop-keepers write the full description (presumably to be passed on to the person who actually makes the clothes in some awful sweatshop nearby) using alarmingly few words in a messy notebook. I have a reasonable idea that the distilled description for my clothes reads something like “Western Trousers, 70s style”. At least that would explain the disappointing mismatch between what I thought I’d asked for and what I eventually get.
After all this to-ing and fro-ing comes the haggling. They are in a stronger position from the start since after all that decision making the last thing you need is to have to back out and go elsewhere. I feel like I have sweated blood for these clothes already and duty-bound to buy them. By pooling our purchases we think we’ll get a reasonable bulk discount but I’m surprised to find a great resistance on the part of the shopkeepers to dropping the prices lower. I expect the initial price to be at least double the “real” one but I have to cautiously accept the possibility that profits might really be slim. The average cost is about $12 per item but this is not as cheap as we’d like – even with all the competition. We have to return for a fitting tomorrow.
In the afternoon we find our way by bike to a deserted and beautiful beach about 3km from Hoi An. The South China Sea holds a certain mystery for me and it looks distant, misty and brooding here. We walk along the sand rather romantically and pause for a few “Robinson Crusoe” pictures.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2004 at 10:39 am and is filed under Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.