One of the things I did in Hoi An was take a cooking class. If you've never taken a cooking class, let me give you this tip -- you get to eat all the food at the end (or sometimes, throughout). And they use good ingredients, so you really can't mess anything up too badly.
Among the dishes we learned to make was, of course, pho (yes, it's pronounced fuh; it doesn't rhyme with no). We took a bit of a shortcut by not boiling the stock for 8 hours, but we did do the rice noodles from scratch. Essentially, you mix rice flour and water until it looks like papier mache liquid, and then you scoop it onto that setup on the right, so that it forms a little steamed pancake. Then you gently pick it up, fold it into layers, and slice. It's actually pretty simple, provided you have the right setup, but a bit time-consuming. It turns out that pho vendors in Vietnam leave the noodle-making to others, and just buy the noodles to dunk in the soup. I'm thinking if it's not worth it to them to make their own, the chances of my making them anytime soon are very low indeed.
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