Saigon Chronicle – Week 7 & 8: Apartment Rental Search
August 29, 2019
After a month of living in our temporary apartment, we began the hunt for our longer-term home in Saigon. The process proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated, but I am happy to announce that after two weeks of painstaking search, we have been blessed by the apartment-hunting gods, and landed on a great two-bedroom apartment, with a…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 6: Making Friends. Exploring Co-working Spaces.
August 16, 2019
One of the many reasons we put an end to nomadic living was missing a community. Yet, forming a community in a new city doesn’t happen with a snap of a finger. The steps to forming quality connections can be tedious and a little awkward. It’s a little like going on many friend dates, and hope the conversation clicks. As…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 5: Learning Vietnamese
August 9, 2019
After stumbling around on non-existent Vietnamese skills for the past month, we finally set up lessons with a private teacher to begin our Vietnamese-acquisition journey. I strongly believe the best way to integrate into a culture is to learn its language. Even understanding basic sentence construction helps one peek into a culture’s thought process. We have traveled the world without…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 4: Living Abroad in 2019
August 2, 2019
The first time I moved abroad was in 1998, from Taiwan to the United States. The Internet was slowly becoming mainstream, but the way to keep in touch with my family was still through faxes and occasional expensive international calls. In suburbia Saint Louis, my only source of Chinese entertainment was the books I had brought, a subscription to World…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 3: Home Goods. Maison Marou. Women Meet Tech.
July 26, 2019
Hello New Home After over a year of suitcase living, we moved into an apartment that is all ours. For the first time in 13 months, I unpacked all of our suitcases and put them away. Among all of the benefits of nomad living, regaining an appreciation for a physical space that we can call home is on top of…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 2: Roadside Barber. Chinatown. Eco-Market.
July 18, 2019
The initial shock from the overwhelming traffic and noise in Saigon during week 1 has somewhat dissipated. There is now even a sense of calm energy when I watch a steady flow of traffic (preferably from a café window). While slowly settling into the city’s rhythm, we are still moving about town largely clueless. More than a few times, we…
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Saigon Chronicle – Week 1: Traffic. Noise. Heat.
July 10, 2019
After a year of globetrotting, we gathered our belongings, added a couple more bags, and headed for Saigon. By now, moving across the world has become rather habitual. My first big global move was from Taiwan to St. Louis at age 12. That was seriously major. Moving to Cameroon with the Peace Corps was a rather big deal as well,…
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From Nomad Living to Ho Chi Minh City
May 16, 2019
We can read all about an experience, but until we’ve lived it ourselves, it’s just a story. Nomad Envy I have wanted to travel full-time for years. I read blogs and watched vlogs of people who trot around with their life’s possessions in a backpack (or a suitcase), and call the world home. When I was trapped in the corporate…
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