Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Considering making Hanoi your home for a while? Awesome! It's a great place to live, but it can take some getting used to, and knowledge is power. This guide should answer all the questions you could have about moving to Hanoi, but if you're still feeling uncertain, don't hesitate to reach out and ask me yourself!
Just passing through? Looking to explore and have some fun? This guide will give you a peek at some Hanoian favorites from the perspective some more permanent residents. Trust me, hanging out with the locals and the expats is a totally different world than Hanoi’s rowdy backpacker scene.
Ba Vì Mountain is just a couple hours drive West of Hanoi. It’s supposed to be beautiful, so my roommate and I decided to make a motorbike trip of it. I’m going to tell you now – our first attempt was a miserable failure. It was not until our second attempt that we summited that S.O.B.
You wake up. It's a normal morning and you need to make breakfast before you head off to work. After you freshen up, you trudge downstairs to make yourself an omelet. You put the pan on the stove. You get the carton of eggs out of the fridge, and when you crack open the egg, instead of yolk coming out, a fully-formed bird fetus falls out.
Actually take a moment to imagine that plopping down onto your frying pan.
This is the first in a 3 part series. This first installment is about my first 72 hours in Vietnam. And I don't write this for the sake of trash talk, (the company in question is earning a bad enough reputation without my help) rather, I write this to let you know some of what can go wrong out here. Working abroad in the developing world carries a different set of challenges that growing up in the West does not prepare you for. Hopefully, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you will have learned a little something about how to sort it out from reading this.
Welcome to the 2nd installment of the ESL Teaching “Story Basket.”
Make some popcorn / get nice and cozy / go to the bathroom now because this one is a bit longer than the last one.
We'll start with the story of me giving a terrified student the "get-out-of-jail-free card."
In buying my first motorbike I chose the path of least resistance and bought an automatic transmission bike called a Nouvo. However, in addition to being a gas guzzler, this bike was considered to be 'unmanly'. Eventually I gave into societal pressures and graduated to a semi-automatic transmission bike called a Wave, which I rode for a short time. Semi-automatic bikes are undoubtedly the most practical bikes for city driving, but I really wanted to learn to drive a manual transmission bike. Go big or go home, right?
When my hosts suggested that I visit the elephants in Ayutthaya, I had some serious reservations about it. I expressed my concerns to them and they reassured me that while elephants might be treated poorly elsewhere in Thailand, the elephants in Ayutthaya are treated well. Being locals, it was safe to assume they knew what they were talking about. After all, there is a spectrum. It's not ALL terrible. But either way, wouldn't feel very entitled to an opinion on it if I didn't go see for myself. So I resolved to approach the experience with skepticism.
Pretty much the only city in Thailand that anybody outside of the region has ever heard of is Bangkok, both famous as a tourist destination and infamous for the debauchery it plays host to. Chiang Mai also gets a good bit of press. But there was a time when the center of culture and politics was entirely different. Have you ever heard of Siam?
Thailand is known all over the world for, among other things, its food. And I wanted to try some authentic Thai food. “The weirder the better” I told my hosts. They were pretty amused with my antics and sent their maid to the market for some goodies. I would have liked to see the market but I ate all the food just the same. So let’s start the count down of strange foods. We’ll order these according to weirdness and save the weirdest for last.
