I could go 'stream-of-consciousness' about this for pages, but I'll spare you my existentialism. The point is, I loved Hanoi, and I will miss Hanoi, because it challenged me. And I think that was the whole point of coming here, although I didn't expect it to happen quite in this way.

While I was between jobs I begrudgingly began working for a company called TOPICA. This company employed teachers to do classes online. It didn’t pay the best but it was easy money, had no commute, and they could make international direct deposits. One day I got an email from them telling me that I was a “cool teacher” and asking if I would be interested in being in their upcoming commercial, which was to be filmed from 7am to 11pm on the 4th of July.

During one of my rainy days in Sa Pa, one of the hostel workers told me about an organization that had just been initiated that allowed foreigners the chance to have a question and answer session with former Viet Cong soldiers, and interact with children who were growing up with disabilities caused by Agent Orange. I was beyond excited to hear that such an organization existed. This was going to be the real deal. 

Sorry guys, this is gonna be a gross one. It all started one particularly hot week in Hanoi... er... well, the symptoms did at least. 

This is the story of my worms. R.I.P. 

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.

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?

Most of what happens to me in the classroom isn't enough to merit its own extended blog post. But as the Vietnamese school year comes to a close, I want to share a collection of stories from my classes. This is the first of 2 installments of the teaching 'story basket'. So without further adieu, here are 4 little windows into what class with Peter is like.

Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum is mammoth. It takes up a solid 10 square city blocks and it looks kind of like a slick, chrome, communist version of the Lincoln Memorial. It is only open in the morning. Entry is free but you had best be there at the butt-crack of dawn if you want to avoid a multi-kilometer long line. Most of the line is not tourists either. It is mostly Vietnamese families.

Yeah. Gross, right? Vietnam has a lot to offer to the dark side of the culinary world and I’m doing my best to try all the weird cultural dishes I can whilst I am here. This week’s dish is a beating snake heart. Also included in this post will be snake organs, bones, skin, and poisonous stomach bile. 

It was good to get back home so that I could start making money instead of spending it. Spring has come to Hanoi. With summer just around the corner the streets are now littered with the flip-flops of small children and we are receiving more rain than I thought possible. One rainy Tuesday morning around 6am I woke up to my phone ringing.

I write this article to let you in on some of the issues you can have interacting with foreigners whilst you are abroad. You meet an interesting mixture of people when you are traveling, and in spite of their differences, the usually have one thing in common: extreme personalities. Another issue is that there are nearly always cultural differences that can muddle interactions. To make matters worse, many people living abroad are scared, stressed, or thinking that they are beyond the reach of consequences, so they will do extreme and selfish things from time to time.

There was a huge, black SUV stopped in the middle of the street. There was a mysterious white powder all over the shattered windshield. The rest of the vehicle was already very badly dented, as if a crowd of people had attacked it. There was an angry mob gathered around around the drivers seat door. Something was happening there.

Since moving to Southeast Asia I've felt that I would be robbing myself of the true experience if I didn’t at least try every strange dish that is pushed across the table in my direction. So that is exactly what I have been doing. And it's been a lot less disgusting than I expected... until the Buffalo penis.

This was disgusting.

Within the first few months that I spent in Vietnam, I had a couple gnarly accidents, the second of which landed me in the hospital. But before I got to the hospital—while I was I was lying in the street at the end of a long skid mark of blood and metal—it occurred to me that passing on the wisdom I had gained through learning to drive in Hanoi would be prudent. They say that the first 3 to 4 accidents are a rite of passage for driving in Southeast Asia, but that doesn't mean that you need to go into the experience blind. What follows are my 10 rules for staying safe on the road in Hanoi. But, before we get to any of that, I have a lil' treat for you.

That’s when it happened. I was broadsided by a taxi that took a sudden, unexpected turn. And I hit the pavement hard. You’d think that in an event like this there would some sort of adrenaline rush that would kick in and help with the pain, at least initially, but there was nothing. In the second or two between my impact with the taxi and my impact with the ground I think my emotions are best expressed this way: “Really? Again? REALLY?”

During rush hour I spend as much as an hour at a time weaving through the insane Vietnamese traffic, all the while breathing in exhaust and all sorts of nasty chemicals. It wasn’t long before my virgin immune system succumbed to the advances of all these noxious gases and I got sick.

What does it feel like to get sick from pollution? 

After about a week and a half of making my way on foot I knew that I needed to get my ass on a motorbike, ASAP. That is the mode of transportation this city is made for. Getting chauffeured around town on the back of other people’s motorbikes was getting old and I was feeling like a big, white burden. And the Vietnamese bus system… no thank you. Not that the 3 hours per day that I had been spending on it feeling like Gandalf in a Hobbit hole weren’t fun… I’m just a free spirit and no cage (nor bus) can contain me.

This is a minor event I suppose… but it's Halloween and there is an interesting video to accompany this story so I felt that it merited its own post. One night I came home to find my two female housemates sitting in the kitchen together. I asked them what was going on and they told me that there was a cockroach and a giant spider in the bathroom. Their plan was to keep the door closed forever. To their credit, this was actually a feasible plan because our downstairs bathroom serves primarily as a storage room and to enclose the smell of our cat's liter box.

As an English teacher, I often find myself giving the ‘food’ lesson. I will ask my students to tell me all of the different foods they know in a given category and they will help me compile a list of all the different vocabulary words they know. One day I was teaching this lesson to a class full of 8 and 9 year olds. I was asking them about different kinds of drinks and one of them kept saying a Vietnamese word that I didn’t understand. Every time he said it the class laughed and my teaching assistant scowled at him. I asked my teaching assistant what he was saying and she explained that he was talking about a traditional Vietnamese dish that is essentially blood soup. Cue my first food post.

I know that I said that my next post would be about my new motorbike… but something came up, so I thought we could take a little break from our scheduled programming for some live reporting. It was another Tuesday night in Hanoi. I was having drinks with a few friends at a nearby place that we like to go to. And that's when I saw the smoke... 

First, I'm sure that you will be relieved to hear that my missing luggage was recovered about 24 hours later. It was actually delivered to the office of my employer (where I was living) by the airport staff, which is much nicer than anything I have experienced in the Western world. I wasn't living in that office for very much longer though. I found an apartment within 2 days of being in Vietnam through Facebook. Thank you social media. And guys, this place is amazing. It is coolest place I will probably ever live and it is only $210 per month. But rather than try to describe it I’ll just give you the tour...

Fast-forward to 30 minutes after my plane landed and I was the last remaining passenger watching an empty baggage claim carousel circulate. My bag (the one that we had paid so much money to get onto the flight to Chicago) never arrived in Vietnam. I spent the following 30 minutes trying to break down the language barrier that separated me from the poor souls working at the ‘lost baggage’ counter. It didn’t help things that I mysteriously had 2 baggage claim tickets for the same bag.

loved my time in Hanoi, but it came to an end when I decided to relocate to Nashville, Tennessee to try my hand at music. I started a band called The Great Palumbo, and this project is still where I spend all my time, money, and emotional energy. I don’t know where this thing is going, but it’s on its way! And I’m very blessed to have some super talented musicians along for the ride with me.

Today, we released some new music that was inspired by the time I spent living in Hanoi. And since this is the topic that put this blog on the map, I’m sharing it here as well.

I was both relieved and disappointed that our 25-kilometer trek up Mount Fansipan had been canceled. In fact, thanks to the torrential rain that morning, every hike had been canceled save for one. It was called the “Non-National Park Trek”. Everything about this promised to be less than ideal, but it was the only option I had left, so I went for it.

Located in the Hoàng Liên Son Mountains in the Northwestern limits of Lào Cai Province, Sa Pa is one of the most famous places in Vietnam. Travelers will fly into Hanoi to go to Ha Long Bay, and then Sa Pa. Sa Pa itself is just a little mountain town, but it is famous because of what it serves as a jumping off point for. Surrounding this little piece of civilization are some of the most beautiful mountains and rice paddies that you’ll ever see. 

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.

Most teachers in Vietnam operate on self-acquired visas. Vietnam, still coming to terms with the fact that people actually travel here now, is pretty anal about visas and is constantly changing it’s rules. The bad news for me is that it has recently discontinued visa extensions. This means that in order to continue working in Vietnam, every 3 to 6 months I have to leave solely for the purpose of coming back with a new visa. So the good news for you, reader, is that I get to talk to you about how to get a visa for Vietnam.

Hội An was a very important trading post of the old world. It was the opinion of most Chinese and Japanese merchants that Hội An was the best trading post in Southeast Asia, if not Asia at large. However, thanks to a treaty signed with the colonizing French, Đà Nẵng eventually became the port of choice in lieu of Hội An. Also, due to a build up of silt at the mouth of the river, Hội An became all but inaccessible to the large ships that used to frequent its docks. The effect of this was isolation. The ancient town of Hội An was all but forgotten about during Vietnam’s tumultuous next 200 years.

Travel plans! On this trip, we'll be visiting Da Nang, Hoi An (in Vietnam), Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh (in Cambodia). Included in these destinations will be Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, as well as a legendary lantern lighting festival in the backwaters of central Vietnam. 

With the 40-year anniversary of the end of the war between Vietnam and America in a few days, the timing of this was fortuitous. Our story begins with a dinner, as many of my stories do. One of my former students, Linh (pronounced “ling’), had invited me to have dinner with her and her family. Soon they would be leaving for Newfoundland, Canada. They would be living in a small college town on the Eastern coast while her husband, Dzung (pronounced “zoong”), earned his Ph.D. At the end of this dinner they invited us to come to Bac Ninh Province (just North of Hanoi) to have a large dinner with their extended family.

Before going into this museum I was vaguely aware of most of it's contents but I had never been forced to really consider any of it or face what America has actually done in this country. I'm not very political so I can have the tendency to be lazy in this department.

On Christmas night, two friends and I walked into a bar in District 1 to have a beer and play a game of pool. This was maybe not the most traditional activity for Christmas night, but at least we had each other. I was the last to arrive at the pool table on the third floor of this bar because I had been distracted somewhere en route. When I walked up the stairs I was handed a pool stick and introduced to my teammate: a random guy in the bar. His name was Leonardo.

Is there even anything to do in Vietnam for Christmas? Asia has definitely bought into Christmas for the pure commercialistic value of the holiday (check out below if you don't believe me) but does anybody here actually care? It was the evening of December 24th and though some light Googling I had happened upon some vague information about Christmas Eve festivities at or around Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the city. So we got in a cab and told the driver to head over!

We were driving overnight and I was doing my best to sleep but it was tough with our bus driver trying to break some sort of land speed record on the winding, bumpy mountain roads. It didn’t help that I had to twist and mangle my long white-person legs into terrible positions to fit into my seat in the first place. We made it to Mù Cang Chải a little bit before sunrise. This town would serve as our ‘base camp.’

When I woke up I was instantly confronted with one of the more ridiculous landscapes that I have ever seen. Green, mossy giants shot abruptly up out of the earth all around me as our bus weaved down a narrow road. We were also arriving in a dense fog, which made the whole thing a little more dramatic.

Within a few weeks of arriving in Vietnam I had the blessing of more than one day off work in a row. It would be the only time that this would happen naturally (that is, without twisting any arms) until February so I wanted to make the most of it. I asked everybody I knew (which at that point was not a lot of people) what their plans were for the Holiday but nobody’s off-time coincided with my own. It was two days before my holiday and I had become gloomily resigned to not doing anything. But then one of my roommates’ plans changed at the last minute. 

Welcome to my travel blog. The point of this blog is first to keep everybody updated on what I am doing and verify to the world that I am still among the living. Secondly, this blog will chronicle my story as I make my way through uncharted waters. Hopefully it can serve as encouragement for anybody else out there considering doing the same thing.