Vietnamese Shoes Killed My Feet

A few months ago I visited Hoi An, a city in central Vietnam famous for custom-made clothing and shoes. The city is gorgeous--two to four centuries-old wooden Chinese architecture, paper lanterns lit at night, Chinese temples, art galleries and antique stores; a quaint town straight out of a Pearl S. Buck novel.

I had four pairs of shoes made: a cute silver pair with orange and yellow polk-a-dots (trust me--they were fabulous) to wear with jeans, black and brown pumps for work, and a hot pair of black knee-high boots. The silver dotted shoes I threw away in Italy after the second time wearing them.

Yesterday, I walked downhill to the train station in Larne, NI for fifteen minutes in excruciating pain. Even though these shoes had been measured and designed for my feet, they felt like torture devices from the Inquisition or, dare I say it, devices used on POWs during the Vietnam War. Never mind, that was uncalled for.

When I reached the station, I had missed the train by three minutes since my stride slowed down as I awkwardly walked in the least painful way possible. SInce I had an hour to kill, I went to a cheap clothing store called New Look and bought a pair of flat, black eyelet shoes for only 12 pounds. Although they were much more comfortable, my feet had blisters and bubbles like the time I spilled boiling water on my foot. Today, I have to walk on the sides of my feet around the house, since blisters are covering the entire bottom of my soles and the tops of my toes.

Moral of this complaining: The suits in Hoi An are great. Get some. But skip the custom made shoes.