Conical hat and incense making

Later in the day on the same tour, we stopped by some small shops where we could see a schoolgirl making different kinds of incense by hand. It's the summer, so the girl is on vacation from the regular school year. Supposedly, she makes 1200 of these incense sticks in one day, which seemed pretty believable since it took her about fifteen seconds to make one stick.

I also saw a woman making the conical straw hat that is a traditional symbol of Vietnam and one that I am fascinated with. Some of these hats have poems written on the inside that you can only see when the sun is shining on the hat. How this effect is achieved is by making a small layer of straw on the inside of the shell of the hat made from wood. After that, the words in the poem are cut out of a newspaper, and then the piece of newspaper is pasted on top of the small layer of straw. Then another larger layer of straw (which will be the full surface area of the hat) is woven to cover the first layer of straw and the newspaper to make the whole finished hat.

These traditional hats aren't popular among young people because these hats are not as easy to carry as ones that you can fold. For the same reason, I can't really buy one to carry along in backpack for the rest of the trip, though I want to.