Category: Notes and Confessions
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Notes on Resuming my TEFLtastic Educatrix Career (with Toddler in Tow)
Earlier this week, I found out that this particular blog of mine had somehow made it onto the improbably mammoth and random Top 2300 Travel Blogs list, clocking in at number 18 on the Teaching English Abroad category. Aside from calling it by the wrong name (hello, Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai, y’all,…
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Parenthood and Place: Notes on Writing About Stuff When You Have Nothing New to Say
Aside from being commissioned to write ridiculously detailed 20,000 word guides for relocating to Chinese cities I’ve never even visited much less lived in (I’ve written ten of these in the past year, which must qualify for a work of relentless, massive fiction on par with Tristram Shandy or War and Peace), I’ve been notably…
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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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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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Do Shared Memories Still Exist if One Party is Trying Really Hard to Forget?: Notes on Losing 5 Years of Travel
This one has been worming its way through my head for about a week or two now. It’s a tricky one, one I can’t quite articulate without giving too much away. I write publicly, but I have boundaries. I need to tread carefully sometimes. I’m going to make this one about a specific…
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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…