This month on emuse

My blog posts this month have all been related to Vietnam, where I went on holiday in November.

My holiday:
Hanoi
Halong Bay
Hi Chi Minh City
Phan Thiet
Vietnam souvenirs
Sunday self-portraits: Vietnam


Creative projects inspired by Vietnam:
Vietnam display
Folded banknotes
Bookmarks
Travel journal covers


Things that I love from Vietnam and other countries in Asia:
My fan collection
I love... propaganda art design

Travel journal covers

I like to decorate the covers of the Moleskines I use as my travel journals, so that I can easily tell them apart. I had a bit of a backlog, with my Kyoto and Italy journals still not decorated years later, so when I added my Vietnam one to the pile I decided it was time to buy a new tub of Mod Podge and get decorating!

I like to use patterned paper as the main part of the decoration. Origami paper works best in terms of not wrinkling, and I used it on the Kyoto and Vietnam ones. For the Italy one I used some marbled paper that I had bought in Florence. I cut some of the lettering using a die cutter, but I also used some lettering stickers on the Vietnam one. I love how that turned out, because it reminded me of the mish-mash of retro fonts I’d seen on shop signs in Vietnam.

Sunday self-portraits: Vietnam

My parents commented that my Vietnam posts didn't have any photos of me! Well, that's because I've been saving them all for this post! They may not be the best photos ever of me (I wasn't exactly spending a lot of time on hair or make-up!), but they bring back great memories and that's what counts! And, yes, I did pretty much live in that red dress for half the holiday!

Vietnam: souvenirs

I bought lots of souvenirs in Vietnam! My favourite shop was a tiny ceramics shop in the old town of Hanoi, called Cerender. I bought a small cup, a spoon, and two little dishes, and if I ever go back to Vietnam it's top of my list of places to go back to!

I got a t-shirt at the airport when I was leaving Vietnam and wanting to use up some of my cash. I love the colours and have worn it a lot. It goes well with the necklace I bought in Phan Thiet.

The museum shops were good places to shop. I bought this enamelled silver lotus flower necklace at the War Remnants Museum, and it was the most expensive purchase of my trip. It came in the lovely box below. 

I loved the shop at the Women's Museum. It was the first place I really had a chance to shop, and it had some lovely products including the bunnies above and below.

I got some pretty zipped pouches, the ones above at an airport and the lingerie one below at a service station that had a huge shop!

Of course I got postcards, and the fan was a very necessary purchase on a day when the temperature was about 32 degrees.

We stopped at a pearl centre, where the pearl jewellery was expensive but I got these two necklaces which were not quite as expensive!

I'd taken my yellow Kanken backpack to use on holiday, but I was finding it a bit big, so I got this fake Kanken mini for about £7! The gourd keyring was from one of the museum shops, and it has my chinese zodiac animal, the pig, on it.

Vietnam: Phan Thiet

The final few days of my Vietnam trip were spent at the beach in Phan Thiet. This was one of the things that attracted me to the holiday - I've been on escorted tours before where I've been rushed about so much that I've felt like I needed a holiday to recover! It was also a bit of an experiment in seeing whether I'd like a beach holiday.

The resort was lovely, with beautiful gardens, a pool, good eateries, and a wonderful spa. We each got a welcome drink with a flower in it, and a dragon fruit was provided in each room. And there were a few cats wandering around the place too!

The spa treatments were really reasonably priced, so I got an hour-long Vietnamese massage, a reflexology foot massage, and a pedicure, all on the first morning, and a manicure on the final morning. I also relaxed by wandering on the beach, doing some beachcombing and taking photos of the sunset and sunrise.

The shops in Phan Thiet were not quite what we'd been told, they all had similar combinations of tourist tat. So it was just as well we'd done our souvenir shopping elsewhere! And we had our worst meal of the trip at a nearby restaurant - I won't bore you with the details, but just about everything that could be wrong with it was wrong! But that was more than made up for by the final night's meal, in a different restaurant, which was one of the best I've ever had, and even delighted the avid foodie next to me!

It was lovely to relax by the pool, swim in the pool, go in the sea, have some treatments at the spa, and wander the beach. After a day of that, however, some of us did start to get a little bored so we booked a jeep trip to the fairy stream, a fishing village, and sand dunes! It was great fun walking for an hour barefoot in the stream to the waterfall and back, seeing the masses of boats at the fishing village, and climbing to the top of a huge sand dune! It was the perfect end to a wonderful holiday!