Hoi An - tailor-made hell!

We arrived fresh from the night train to a nearby town - Danang - and hopped straight into a taxi for a half-hour ride to Hoi An, a beautiful historic town near the coast which is famous for it's tailor shops.

We found a nice enough hotel and headed out to get some clothes made. We had already tried to get some stuff made in India - Kieran got a suit and a few other bits and bobs, but for El it was a total disaster and she came away empty-handed. You are faced, in Hoi An, with a choice of Tailor shops: cheap and cheerful, but probably not excellent quality, or vastly overpriced but with a much higher level of service and quality.

In the end we hedged our bets and placed orders with 4 different shops with varying quality levels. It took all day to decide the designs we wanted, what type of fabric, how much it should cost, and getting measured up but at the end of what turned out to be a fairly stressful day we had high hopes for our new wardrobes.

El gets measured up - does my bust look big in this?
The second day was a nightmare. We had to retrace our steps from the day before for our first fittings - with not a single item actually fitting correctly. In some cases it was clearly evident what was wrong, or perhaps the tailor had purposefully not finished the item so as to tailor it to our specifications. However, on more than one occasion you end up having to figure out exactly why the suit/shirt/dress/top/etc. looks wrong and convince the tailor what needs to be corrected. This is incredibly tiring and stressful and half the time the people in the shops then have to translate all the new measurements or alterations to a 3rd party anyway so your high hopes crash down pretty quickly and leave you feeling totally anxious.

Kieran just can't take it any more
You'd think that having a wardrobe tailor-made would be really good fun but, as with most things in Asia, it is not the pleasant and simple experience you expect it to be. We ended up with a bottle or red wine on that night drowning our sorrows and vowing never to get more clothes made. Of course in the course of the day we had seen more things that we wanted so ended up ordering more!!!

A small aside to mention about Hoi An. It is a beautiful French-style city (well, the old part anyway) and I think it is also a world heritage site. The streets are filled with pretty yellow houses with plenty of trees for shade and is a wonderful place to soak up the atmosphere. Of course the abundant traffic does get in the way somewhat, but nevertheless it has a charm unmatched by many cities we've visited in Asia. It's a bit like a more hectic version of Luang Prabang!

So on the third day we retraced our steps again and, bit by bit, acquired some clothes, had more fittings, more alterations and more stress. By midday we'd practically had it but managed to round up everything we needed and dropped it off at one of the shops who kindly packaged the lot up and sent it home for us. In the end we got 45 pieces of clothes (a suit being 2 pieces) between us and spent a grand total of 650 quid, including postage, so we think that all in all we got a good deal, even if it put 10 years on us.

Finally a note on the amazing food in Hoi An. Their local specialities were numerous but included "white rose" a sort of rice pancake filled with shrimp and steamed, and a noodle/veggie combination that outshone everything we've eaten here!

Definitely a great place but a shame to discover that I'm not cut out for this tailoring business!