Vietnam

HCMC: The Good, the Bad, and the Gross

I have been in Ho Chi Minh City for over two months now. I’m currently finishing up my TESOL course and have recently landed a job back in Seoul. If all goes as planned, I’ll be back in Korea a week from today. In all honesty, I’m ready to move on. It hasn’t been an …

Vietnam Hearts Korea

Having been away from Seoul for a few months now, I tend to find myself “homesick” for Korea these days. In addition to missing friends and loved ones, I often have kimchi cravings and strange desires to jam out to K-Pop. I yearn to hear the fluid sounds of the Korean language and go shopping …

The Colors of Cao Daiism

It always upsets me a bit to realize how little I know about the world. This realization springs up from time to time during my travels, whenever I stumble upon a certain festival or custom or religion that I had never before even had the slightest inkling that it existed. I recently took an organized …

Lions, Lights, and Luck

The streets of Saigon have been eerily quiet the past couple days. Most of the city’s residents have gone to their hometowns and the ones that have stayed are busy eating and drinking with their families in their houses. I headed out to District 1 on New Year’s Eve to see downtown after dark. Although …

Coconut Candy with Penis

“Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle,” hissed a cooking egg as its creator, a moody street food vendor, simultaneously moved around a frying pan, plated food, and took orders from foreign customers. “Drip, drip, drip,” replied my traditional Vietnamese coffee as it trickled from filter to glass over sweet condensed milk. “Vroom, vroom, vroom,” roared the seemingly endless …

Battered Past, Bright Future

[Note: The blogs about my trip to Vietnam are not in the usual blog-type style. My entries are merely to document the events of my travels there, rather than focus on one specific aspect of the country or its people. These writings are more for me than anyone, so I apologize in advance for the …