Hello and good evening Singapore. I'm Julian, you're listening to another episode of "Sleepless in Singapore". It's January 21st, 2024, Sunday night, and it is time for us to step away from the hustle of the day and embrace the tranquility of the night. Please make yourself comfortable, as for the next hour or so, I will help you to clear your mind and hopefully put you to sleep just by talking to you. Tonight I will share a little bit about a recent trip to Vietnam and then I will read a story to you. I picked the Count of Monte Cristo and I will first read in English and then I will read the same passage in German. If you're enjoying this or also if you don't, I'm always happy to receive some feedback. Everything you need you will find at sleepless.sg. Alright, time to relax, breathe deeply, let my voice be your guide to a restful night.

My friend Hatim is getting married and he sent us these invitations for a five-day wedding. He's got some kind of Indian background. Indian weddings are always very long and even though he's living in Africa now in Kenya I believe he's still having this more traditional wedding he sent us an invite five-day agenda five days of different events and Hatim being Hatim he also added a dress code for every single one of the five days. So me living in Singapore only having shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops because that is kind of all you need here, needed to go shopping for suits, for Indian formal wear and for Indian casual wear and for Western formal wear and for Western casual wear and for a safari look. and for a safari look. And I didn't know where to do that until one of my friends, actually my gym trainer Brian, he recommended going to Vietnam. And he recommended a little shop in Vietnam where he made the suit for one of his weddings, one of the weddings he attended as a guest. And yeah, that's the reason why a couple of weeks ago, Nat and I decided to book a flight quite spontaneously from Singapore to Da Nang airport. to Da Nang airport. And even though that was just like the weekend after we moved into our new place, and I wasn't super excited in the beginning to just be not present and not being able to take care of things, I still was down. You know, I always love these short trips. I love the spontaneous trips. And, yeah, so we ended up, I think it was Friday after work, we ended up at Changi Airport, and we took a plane to Da Nang, Singapore Airlines. It was a very, quite short and a very very nice flight and in Da Nang we got picked up by some driver, I don't know, I don't remember the details. I think Nat organized that. We got picked up by a driver. It took us like an hour or so maybe to Hoi An. Hoi An is a little city in Vietnam. It's the capital of tailoring. That's kind of how they describe it. It took us an hour to get there and then we went to a little shop that was called Bong Tailor. That was the recommendation of Brian. And Bong Tailors turned out to be a lot of fun. They were like these two Vietnamese ladies and they were excited to see us. Obviously we were going to spend money there but even aside from that fact they were super nice, super excited. And it was a cool experience. I've never had anything tailor-made before. Actually, that's not true. Once, a long time ago, for my good friend Andrea's wedding, which must be 10 years back at least now. I had a suit made in Beijing, in China. But aside from that, I never really had any custom-made clothes. So I enjoyed going to this place, to this tailor, a lot. We arrived and we got greeted with cold drinks. And the first thing they did, obviously, it was like asked what we wanted. And I said, OK, I need two suits and a shirt and Nat was going for some dresses and they showed us the different fabrics they had. what I think quite nice, I call it like safari-like suit. It's like a linen suit in a very light beige color. And then I found another nice fabric like a brown wool fabric and I picked another like a classic classic suit cut and that's probably where we also should have stopped but then I found this I found this on a was this black silky suit for men with a red embroidery of dragons and some golden ornaments. You know, it's relatively cheap and we had a lot of fun so I thought like okay I want a suit like that. So I got this, I got my measurements taken for a bit of a crazy suit. I ended up picking a blue silk, like really shiny blue silk with some golden embroidery on it, like golden, some kind of Chinese dragon style things. And then on another mannequin we saw what looked like a pajama, like really nice silk pajamas. And I had the idea, oh, it would be fun to have matching pajamas. So I convinced Nat to pick a fabric for pajamas. We created these pajamas for the two of us and then I thought it would be fun. Hey, we're going to a wedding and there are going to be some of our friends. We should appear as all matching pajamas. I don't know, I thought it was a fun idea. So one thing led to another, and we kind of ended up buying, I think, eight pajamas, eight silk pajamas.

Yeah, then I, because I also don't have nice shoes, I asked the tailor if they know anyone who can make shoes. So she recommended her sister or something opposite of the road. And she had a shoe shop like a like a leather, a leather shop for leather goods. And I went and I found a pair of shoes. I wasn't very convinced of handmade Vietnamese shoes. I mean, a suit you wear once for a wedding, that's kind of fine. But shoes are something important to me. I like to have nice, comfortable shoes. So I wasn't very convinced in the beginning, but I thought, okay, I mean, what's the damage? It's 100 Singapore dollars, or not even 100 Singapore dollars for a pair of handmade shoes from natural, full grain leather. So I picked a pair of shoes, she took my size and she was like drawing around my feet and taking like imprints off my feet and all that and She said okay, I can make you shoes and I asked her okay, when can I pick them up? And she said oh yeah, maybe tonight or tomorrow. So within like only a couple of hours they can make shoes And then walking out I saw this like what I call Indiana Jones style bag, like a traveling bag, like a weekend bag. And I asked her if she can make the bag out of the same leather I picked for the shoes to match it. And then I also asked if she also can make a belt out of the same material. And she said, yes, no problem, sir. Tomorrow you can come and pick it all up. It's going to be done tomorrow. pick it all up it's gonna be done tomorrow okay I'll try total total was two two hundred something Singapore dollars so not too bad and then we finally stopped shopping for that day and then we went for a really nice lunch, I think. Was it lunch? I think it was lunch. It was like a Vietnamese medley of famous local dishes. There was this very delicious pork. There was a soup, pho, of course. And there was this salad with, I think, pomelo and also some fish sauce and something. That was really nice. There was also in Hoi An, in the old town. Let me check if I can figure out where that was. So if you look at a map, So if you look at a map, Google Maps or Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap, your favorite map provider, and if you look at Hoi An old town, there is this little river and then there are the two islands, like these tiny islands. And then there is a road, Tran Phu, I don't know. That is where the tailor is too, by the way. I know I'm sounding like I'm advertising this tailor. Which I guess I am to a certain degree, but I promise you it's not a podcast sponsored by this tailor. I just really enjoyed my time there. I don't know how the quality of the products will be after wearing the stuff for a while, but the experience alone was kind of like almost worth the money. Anyway, there's out the name of the restaurant. It's too bad, it was a nice restaurant. I can ask Nat later and maybe I will put it to the podcast notes if I can find it.

Anyway, we went on then and we went back to our hotel in the afternoon, which was actually not in Hoi An, which was back in Da Nang. The hotel name I can tell you. The hotel name I can tell you because it's very simple. It's the Haiyan Beach Hotel and Spa in Da Nang. So yeah, in the afternoon we went back there. The hotel is alright. I wouldn't recommend it as the best hotel ever, but it was relatively cheap. It was nice. We had a spa, a massage, a foot massage, some stuff. It was okay. It was all right. And then in the evening, we went out for a burger, which was also alright. Nothing super special. Oh, Annette had poutine, because she's trying to, as a Canadian, she's trying to convince me that Putin is like a thing of the gods. But so far, not really that convinced. In German, we just would call it Pommes mit Sauce. In German we just would call it Pommes mit Sauce. Anyway, that was a beautiful day. A beautiful first day. And then when we... in the next day... Oh, by the way, we had a funny... I thought it was funny at the breakfast at the hotel in Da Nang. Like a typical hotel buffet breakfast was, again, nothing special, nothing exceptional, but it was quite alright. I was sitting there, there were a lot, a lot, a lot of Korean tourists. And it was fun to watch them having their breakfast because they bring their own stuff. They bring their own gochujang and they bring their own chilis and they bring their own kimchi. And they spice up the breakfast with their own things. spice up the breakfast with their own things. It was quite interesting to see.

Anyway, so we went back to Hoi An after breakfast. The plan for the day was to do some sightseeing, but first we needed to go to the tailors to check if the measurements they took were right. And, you know, like a fitting. So we went for the fitting. And that was even more fun than the day before. Because we got to wear our nice new suits and all that. But also because there were like a couple of new mannequins we didn didn't really realize in the beginning a couple of new mannequins and i looked at it and i thought like okay that looks nice and nat looked at another one and she said oh this is a nice dress and the tailor was i believe it's just your size you should try it on and she tried it on and it was not about her size it was like perfectly her size and the same thing happened with another one and we are very very convinced that overnight they just created a couple of extra dresses and shirts in my case that exactly 100 percent according to our measurements 100 percent fit us and it was their sales strategy but it was cool. Cool for them because it worked and cool for us because we got a couple more dresses and stuff. It was a lot of fun. And then we tried on the things and I got to say, my silky blue golden thing doesn't look that convincing. But the suits looked really nice. The shirts needed some alteration, which they do for free. It's like part of the process, you go there for the first fitting and for the second fitting and then for pickup. So yeah, we spent we spent like another hour or one and a half in that shop. And we took some pictures and we made some friends in the streets and I gotta say even now looking at it again the light beige linen suit is amazing the brown suit also really looks good I remember having a suit like that many many years back, 10-15 years back, from Hugo Boss and I'm pretty sure I paid like eight nine hundred dollars for that. And it looked pretty much the same, both color and cut. We took a lot of fun pictures. I'm just going through the pictures here because that always helps me refresh my memories. There's a nice picture where I'm sitting at the sewing table with three other workers pretending to be a worker myself.

Yeah then we went for the sightseeing which was a a pre-book tour i think nat found on on airbnb activities or whatever that is called or or maybe on kluge um does anyone know how to pronounce kluge cloak kluge you know know this like platform where you can book activities. We went to Taiwan a couple of weeks back and they were pronouncing it Klook. Klook. Klook. Klook. I don't know. If anyone knows, let me know. I'm gonna go ahead and pronounce it Kluuk. So Nat, I think, booked something on Kluuk and that was a a two-part activity. One was riding an ox and the other one was going on these little like round boats, you know, from Vietnam. And I wouldn't call it a scam. call it a scam. I wouldn't even say it was bad in any way. It was just fun because the ox riding. We were taking the taxi or the car they provided with the driver along the road and they were like like ox once in a while along the road and that said to me yeah i'm sure they're just gonna drop us off somewhere on the side of the road and and ride that ox for five minutes and that is exactly what happened the car stopped on a small road where there was a random guy, to us, random guy, with a random ox. And she said, okay here's your ox, go sit on it. So we sat on the ox and I mean it was fun pictures. It was silly, but it was still fun. In general, it was a pretty silly but pretty fun weekend. And after five minutes, I walked the orcs like 10 meters down, 10 meters up. They took like 20 photos with my own phone. And then it was Nat's turn, and she was going down 10 meters and going back 10 meters, and they took 20 photos of her, and then they took pictures of the both of us, and we had to do some silly tourist gestures. And yeah, I mean, I guess that's what you get for booking pre-made tours from these local tour companies. But anyway, I think I might sound a little bit torn, because usually I don't like that kind of tourism, where you just book random tours and tag along with the people, but... It's not as bad as we always think. We did the same again in Taipei a couple of weeks back and I'm gonna tell you another time. But... a couple of weeks back, and I'm going to tell you another time. But, yeah, it also turned out to be fun. It turned out to be a little annoying in some points, but it turned out to be not a little very helpful in other ways. So maybe I shouldn't be condemning it as much as I always did.

Anyway, back to these boats. That was a lot of fun too. We went to a restaurant, which was the starting point for this little boat tour. You know these boats, they are circular and they actually can go in circles. They can go very fast fast it's what they do so there was a lot of sun we got to wear some vietnamese rice hats and exactly how you would imagine it like these triangular big hats and we were paddling we were allowed to paddle ourselves and we were going in circles and actually Nat went on one of these circular boats that were there for a show and the guys were trying like to go as fast as they can I didn't do it because I definitely would have gotten sick. And then we took more touristy photos, like in front of the pretty palm tree, waving our hats, very organized, literally the same picture every tourist gets. Every tourist that books this tour gets. And then we went to that restaurant and we had like a rice paper, like Vietnamese spring rolls, you know, not the deep fried ones but the other ones. We had these like spring rolls, summer rolls, I don't know how to call them, and a coconut. And we walked around a bit, we found Christmas gifts for the family in Canada, like a couple of shirts. like a couple of shirts. And... We walked around a bit more and found some homemade ice cream. They were selling ice cream basically out of their living room. But it was very delicious ice cream. And then we went back to the tailors and picked everything up. And I think it worked out quite well. And it looks nice. Our last day, we went to Ba Na Hills. And that I can only recommend you Google so you get to see some pictures. That was a lot of fun. That was again silly but again so much fun. The Vietnamese built a fake European city. It was like a mix of German, French, Italian. They had like three different castles up there. And oh yeah, it is where, I'm pretty sure you've seen pictures of that this bridge like pedestrian bridge that is hold by two hands like giant hands and you can you can google that, Varna Hills. But that was so much fun because the whole time we didn't really know how to take it seriously, but at the same time we were enjoying ourselves, so who cares. this column walkway like in France. And there was this castle that kind of looks a bit like Neuschwanstein Castle. castle. There was a little fake Eiffel Tower I'm seeing here on the pictures. I don't even remember. And this looks like the Gaudi stuff in Spain. And this looks like a little wine village in Tuscany. Oh, and also it is on top of the hill and to get there you cross two or three other hills and you do that with one of the longest cable cars in the world, which was quite an experience. I mean in the end of course it's a cable car, it looks like all cable cars is this like Swiss-Austrian companies. At least that's like almost all I've ever seen. Even the cable car here in Singapore is Swiss made, right? I believe it's Swiss made. But yeah, we took this super long cable car. Took like, I don't know, easily 10-15 minutes. And then you come up and you're like catapulted into this like different world. Very very fun trip. I had two more things I'm just finding here. One there is the Port City Bagel and Deli in Hoi An. That actually was another recommendation by Brian. Those were really good bagels. I can highly recommend you should try. And the second thing is, Nat had coconut coffee, which is like a tiny, but very strong espresso shot, poured over what seems to be coconut cream, coconut ice cream. And even though I don't drink coffee or I don't have any kinds of caffeine, I tried a little bit and it was delicious. So I also can highly recommend. Yeah and then unfortunately it was already the way back. Two, two and a half hours flight something like that from Da Nang to Singapore and we landed safe and sound Sunday night, ready to go to work the next day. Thank you.