Category: Excursions
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Welcome to Sapa: Notes From the Hub of the Curiously Dystopian Hill Tribe Folk Villages
Last week, we took an overnight train to Sapa, the hill tribe tourist hub in the northern reaches of Vietnam. It’s way up there near China, so far up that it’s shrouded in mist and fog, with palpably moist cloud tendrils snaking down steep, narrow streets and into open doors. It’s up in the…
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Time Travelling Postcards: Cairo, in the Mad Summer of 2006
In the summer of 2006, I decided to take the train from Istanbul to Damascus, leaving from Haydarpasa station on the Asian side of the city and ending up in Aleppo some days later. I was totally going to do it. All my friends were doing it. Syrians were lovely people. Aleppo was lovely.…
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Time Travelling Postcards: Anatolian Road Trip, 2003
I didn’t always live in Shanghai. Or Hanoi. Although this blog places my online identity firmly in heart of east Asia, I have actually spent more time living in Turkey, both in European Istanbul and Asian Anatolia- 6 years in total. Sometimes even I forget what a huge chunk of my formative adult years that…
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Time Travelling Postcards From: Christmas in New York, 2002
It’s damp season here in Hanoi. The moldy months are in full swing and I’m feeling super protective of my electronics and my reams of ephemeral life data. Hanoi, like Shanghai before it, kills electronics. I’m quietly doing multiple back ups, fully aware of the three external hard drives and two laptops that Shanghai’s humidity…
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Notes From Hanoi: Post-Tet Bling, Wise Men and Orion Pies For the Gods
I’m surprisingly comfortable with having no clue what’s going on around me. I’ve spent most of my adult life in countries where I’m not only far from fluent in the language but am also illiterate and still learning the cultural ropes. Vietnam- and specifically here in Hanoi because I can’t really speak for the rest…
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Sometimes You Just Need to Get the Hell Outta Dodge
The French had a word for those long grim grey drizzly damp Hanoi winters. Le crachin, they called it, which also applied to similarly grim, grey, drizzly damp French places like Bretagne. They probably attached a grumbled maudit to it, shrugged their shoulders, lit up an unfiltered cigarette, slugged back a swig of tannic Dalat…
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Let’s Hear it For the Boy: Notes on Thwack’s First Birthday
Have you seen this baby? A year ago today, he made a mad dash for the outside world, narrowly averting a first appearance in the hospital elevator, born in a hastily cleared labour room to the sounds of John Coltrane on the iPhone. Everything went so quickly not according to plan that the home birth with the pool…
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10 Practical Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Move to Hanoi With Your Baby
Last week, I adamantly insisted that Vietnam- or, more specifically, Hanoi- was the place to be if you have a small urchin to care for. Because reasons. Lots of very good reasons. However, I was totally lying. Kind of. In a hyperbolic, contrarian fashion, I now intend to tell you exactly why moving to Hanoi would…
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You Should Definitely Move to Vietnam With Your Baby
I’m going to preface this by noting and underlining the fact that I am an unreliable narrator. I’m also a barefaced liar (intermittently) who is concurrently preparing a post arguing the exact opposite thesis. Frankly, I’m not even sure which one I believe the most. It changes from minute to minute, depending on how much…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Like Downton Abbey, Except Different
We have a house, people. A whole house to ourselves, partway down a narrow scooter-wide lane, off a side street, a block from the lake. After two months of living out of suitcases, over a month living with family (both sides, on both sides of the Atlantic), and over three weeks camping out in hotel…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: Everything is Amazing When You Leave Your Phone at Home
Yesterday I left my phone in the hotel room when I went out with Thwack strapped to my front. We were just popping out for a moment to hunt and gather some sort of lunch for me before I had to take a cranky, snoozy baby back to the room for a midday nap.…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: A Home, a Banh Mi and Thou
Welcome to Day 2 in my return to blogging, miniature stylee. Today we went and visited our new house. It isn’t ours yet- there is a lovely Danish family still living in it- but we got to have a second look around it for the first time since we paid four months’ rent up front…