The extreme heat of Da Nang continues, I buy some tourist shirts to compensate

I love living in Vietnam but the summers here are just unbearable. Basically, you cannot leave your house between 9am and 6pm without expecting to sweat a lot. The Vietnamese have a strange solution to this and they cover up even more to keep the sun off their skin. I think this is more of a desire to not be tan than it is to keep cool because I would die in some of the getups that I see them wearing on their bikes.

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Finding western-size clothes is very difficult here and even when I order XXL or even 5XL shirts or shorts they are always tight on me. I am not small but I am also not fat, the people here are just much smaller than western men.

I did find this one shop that sells these gaudy Hawaiian style shirts and even though it makes me look like an ultra tourist, it is better than sweating buckets everywhere I go. These are the only shirts I have found commercially available in this city so I don't really have any other choice. I will admit I feel a bit silly wearing them especially when I encounter a bunch of tourists that have the exact same shirt on as I do. I try to have a sense of humor about it and complement the other tourists on their fashion whenever I see them.

There is only one shop selling these as far as I can tell and they only have about 5 varieties of them.. It apparently is a very popular shop so the opportunity for you to find someone that is wearing the exact same thing as you is pretty good.

This is one frustrating aspect about being an expat here though. Finding clothes for western-sized men, and I can only presume women, is very difficult. You can see there that this shirt is considered XXXL and in my home country a shirt with that label would be the size of a tent and exclusively available at Wal-Mart.

I'm about 5 foot 11 and weigh 180 lbs. This is slightly above average size for a man in USA and while I have a bit of a beer belly I am far from obese. So it can be a bit maddening when you go to a clothing store and everything appears to be meant for toddlers. The labeling is also inconsistent.

the other day I bought a 5XL shirt that I saw in a supermarket but didn't try it on. When I got home I was really annoyed when it was really tight on me, much tighter than the 3XL ones are. So you can't trust the labels here. Thankfully this mistake shirt that I likely wont even be able to ever wear was only $5, so I'll just give it to some Vietnamese person and hopefully they like it.

I'm really looking forward to November when the temperature drops dramatically and I will be able to wear regular t-shirts again. For now, attempting to do so results in me breaking a sweat just walking to the elevator in my building.