The Return to Taipei: Fooooooood

I was long overdue for seeing my girlfriend in VN, so we agreed to meet for a 3-day weekend in Taipei, roughly halfway between Ho Chi Minh City and Seoul. I had greatly enjoyed my first visit to Taipei for a wedding in 2013 and I was eager to return.

Xiao Long Bao time

Much like my return to Hong Kong, Taipei’s charm and allure faded a little for me on the 2nd visit, but I still consider it a highly appealing and overlooked travel destination — a “diamond in the rough”. Some facts about Taipei that became more apparent on Trip #2: there isn’t a lot to do besides eating delicious food all the time; it is very Chinese, though certainly far more civil and refined than the mainland; there aren’t many tourists besides those from mainland China.

To coordinate flight schedules my girlfriend and I both scheduled strange overnight itineraries: I landed at about 3:30am on Saturday morning from a flight eventually bound for Singapore, and my girlfriend landed at about 5:15am. At about sunrise we were heading on a bus into the city.

We put our bags down at our boutique hotel in the Ximending district and took a walk around to look for breakfast. Fortunately there was a “Breakfast Street” nearby … perfect! At 7:30am people were starting to queue for sticky buns and street dumplings and other foods. We found a food counter with a little bit of seating. I grabbed a wrap of pork surrounded by sticky rice … almost like a breakfast burrito. It filled me up. By the time we were finished a long queue of locals had appeared at the food counter, which certainly justified our decision to eat there.

I touched the top of Taipei 101!  (well, not exactly...)

After coffee, which was actually rather difficult to find, we jumped onto the Metro for early brunch at the original Din Tai Fung restaurant on Xinyi Road near Dongmen Station. At 10am the restaurant was already starting to fill up, it seemed largely with tourists judging my the number of cameras taking pictures of food! We ordered several sets of xiao long bao still steaming in bamboo pots when they arrive at your table. Our favorite was the shrimp with fish roe xiao long bao — the shrimp was so fresh! By the time we finished at 11:30 there was another long queue outside the Din Tai Fung … maybe an hour’s wait for a table … I am glad that we arrived early!

We next checked off the Taipei 101 box by staring up at the tower and taking photos. We didn’t feel the need to ascend … it’s a beautiful building and the only thing you won’t be able to see from the observatory at the top is the tower itself! Plus the entrance fee, about US$15, we deemed too high. The mall below feels quite luxurious and is worth walking around.

Next the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, a big building dedicated to what seems like an important guy, but most of the exhibits were written in Chinese only so its pretty indecipherable. There is an entrance with a big statue of the man guarded by armed soldiers, and the hourly changing of the guard ceremony drew a big crowd. By this point, lack of sleep caught up with us and my girlfriend could barely walk in her high-heels, so we napped at the hotel before going out for a delicious all-you-can-eat hot pot buffet at Mala Hotpot by Zhongshan Station. Though right on top of the station it was a little difficult to find, but quite filling and enjoyable — the certified Angus beef here was superb!

Falling in love with conveyor belt sushi!

When we returned to Ximending in the evening my girlfriend was surprised to see how the pedestrian area had come alive with shops and street vendors and crowds of young people. She thought it was similar to Myeongdong in Seoul, but I agree with the prevailing sentiment that it is more like Harajuku in Tokyo. The area definitely has a Japanese vibe with anime characters plastered on billboards and punk teens walking the streets.

On Sunday morning we got a much-needed late start with lunch at a Sushi Express restaurant near our hotel. Conveyor belt sushi! Fresh and wonderful and a great value! We found some milk bubble tea from one of the many stands and wandering Ximending in search of swimwear for my girlfriend … not the easiest thing to find! We finally found a bright orange bikini and my girlfriend was able to use fingers to negotiate the merchant down a little on the price. Then, we were on the Metro north to the hot spring district of Xin Beitou.

I chose for us to visit the Millennium Hot Spring, a public facility which opens for 2-hour shifts and attracts many Taiwanese senior citizens on a Sunday afternoon. It was crowded and had makeshift changing facilities, but eventually we found our way into one of the cauldrons of hot water. Ow ow ow ow ow! I think I saw a sign that said the water temperature was 43C. It was an endurance challenge to submerge one’s body from the neck down for more than a couple minutes. But once you get out of the water… ohhhhh, it’s so relaxing! We dipped ourselves in the water a couple times before the shift ended and the elderly masters of the facilities shooed us out before the beginning of the next shift.

On our walk back to the Metro station we searched in vain for some bubble tea — it is not as ubiquitous in Taipei as I would have expected — and then took a Metro ride to the Shilin Night Market, which seemed to have opened a little earlier (around 6pm) on a Sunday. This was dinner time… we tried street dumplings and street fried squid and street sausage. So many other foods we could have tried but skipped. The whole place was mobbed with people shopping, eating, or just out for a walk.

Monday morning was another sleeping-in day before a big lunch at Chao Pin Ji Cantonese dim sum restaurant in the San Want hotel by the Zhongxiao Dunhua station. Also some really delicious shrimp dumplings here as well. The atmosphere was more formal than Din Tai Fung but isn’t mobbed with tourists, and certainly the food was of similar quality. The time flew by on Monday, as it always does on days when my girlfriend and I are separating yet again. Before we knew it, we were at the airport eating pork at the cafeteria food court and saying our goodbyes…

India Business Trip

I work in South Korea for Samsung, but I have seen very little of South Korea this fall. After a 3-week business trip to Brazil and a 5-day trip to see my girlfriend in Vietnam, my boss soon had us packing our suitcases for another 3-week business trip to New Delhi, India for a project with Samsung India.

Welcome to India ... NOT!

I had been to India once before during my business school days, and let's just say that I did not enjoy it. Most people who have visited India tell me, and I agree with them, that India is a polarizing place — you either love it or you hate it. I had recollections of bad pollution, intense heat, burning trash, chaotic roads, strange smells, and food poisoning.

At least I had remembered Delhi Airport to be a decent place. ENHHH! Wrong! It's crap. Just witness the chaos at the immigration line when I landed at 2am from Seoul. Why on earth do a ton of flights land in Delhi in the middle of the night, and why does Asiana Airlines (an otherwise decent airline) operate the only direct flight from Seoul to Delhi from 8:10pm to 1:00am?  (our flight was delayed) Anyway, the Indians have not figured out that they should staff enough immigration officers to meet the demand in the middle of the night, or maybe immigration officers there like everywhere else in the world don't want to work the graveyard shift. Anyway, the immigration line at DEL moved at a crawl ... it took an hour to get through and I was not in my hotel room until 3:30am. Ugh ... terrible.

This Punjabi restaurant in a Gurgaon shopping mall was excellent (and one of the few Indian meals I was granted)

Thankfully I had a day to sleep in on Sunday before the long work week began. We were staying at the Westin Gurgaon, a nice hotel but with nothing around ... it's a fortress. Not that India is a walkable country anyway. I looked outside my window, noticing the cloud of smog and a dusty grassless field where dozens of Indian men were playing cricket. I will admit that I am a man that greatly prefers comfort in business travel, and when faced with the choice of staying in the hotel and getting a massage and taking a nap on the Westin Heavenly Bed, or going out on a rickshaw into the polluted chaos outside ... I chose to stay at the hotel all day.

Humayun's Tomb

It was to be one of only 3 free days that I had on my whole 3-week business trip to India. Korean-style business trips are stressful and unpleasant ... "You're not there to shop," as they say ... and we worked long hours of 6-day weeks in a conference room at the crowded Samsung India subsidiary. After 6 days of hectic work in a week in the chaos of a Korean-Indian task-force environment, the last thing I wanted was to hang out with my teammates on Sunday and go around to explore things, sadly.

However the Indian-Korean office environment was certainly a fascinating experience. For one thing ... Koreans do not eat Indian food! Samsung India has 2 cafeterias — a hidden bunker that serves pretty terrible Korean food (and felt like a prison to me) and a chaotic loud crowded cafeteria serving Indian cuisine. 99% segregated lunch hours ... I once saw an Indian in the Korean cafeteria. Then for dinner, to "take care of us" the Korean dispatcher walked us to the nearby Korean restaurant just outside in a pathetic half-abandoned shopping mall next to the subsidiary. I was so sick of eating Korean food in India that I needed to go on Korean food strike upon returning to Seoul. The one saving grace is that somehow the Korean restaurants were able to serve beef, which I thought was outlawed in most parts of India.
(Actually, we did not eat Korean every night for dinner. One night the dispatcher took us to an Italian restaurant, and once a Japanese restaurant, and once a Chinese restaurant. But absolutely no Indian food!)

The big meetings were chaos. A ton of people would fill the room. So much commotion. At one point in one of my meetings I counted 6 simultaneous conversations going on in the room between Hindi, Korean, and English. You have the authoritative Korean boss and the constant Indian chaotic debating. So much commotion and head nodding and "Tikka" this "Tikka" that. I also had one of my meetings interrupted by an earthquake...and the rather disorderly evacuation of the Samsung building (thankfully there was no damage and no one was injured).

Fortunately I discovered that Uber still operates in Delhi/Gurgaon and we used them all the time to get to/from the office. So thankfully we could avoid being trapped in the 15-passenger rickshaws. The big advantage of Uber is that the drivers were honest and didn't try to cheat us, unlike a couple of the terrible normal taxi drivers. Also Ubers are cheap — the 5km daily commute only cost about $1.60. Unfortunately, Uber drivers in India have almost no idea where they are going. I thought a 5-star hotel (the Westin) would be a major landmark and every Uber driver would know how to get there, but probably half of the drivers relied on GPS or needed direction on how to get to the hotel. And most of the drivers only speak Hindi ... not all Indians speak English, apparently.

Indian emergency room experience

The operative word to describe my first trip to India was "Unclear" ... why were things happening the way the were around me and what would happen next? Nobody knew. It applied on this trip as well. Why don't Uber drivers in Gurgaon know how to navigate? Unclear. Why does GPS give you bad directions? Unclear. Why are there no signs to mark the roads? Unclear. Getting around was stressful. The traffic was terrible in Gurgaon, the whole road outside the subsidiary office was torn up and there were cars and rickshaws and buses and diesel-spewing trucks and farm tractors honking everywhere. There are cows and pigs in the road and cars sometimes drive the wrong direction on one-way streets. Gurgaon has a lot of offices for overseas IT companies, and could be a little like California's Silicon Valley if you added a toxic dust cloud in the air and tore up all the roads and added cows and pigs and rickshaws.

I did manage one day on sightseeing on a 21-day trip. I went into Delhi and saw Humayun's Tomb, the National Museum, and ate dinner (Indian food!) in Connaught Place. Humayun's Tomb looks like a mini Taj Mahal made of sandstone. It has quiet grounds around it with green grass that actually felt pretty peaceful. My colleague got caught up speaking with some teenagers masquerading as "English students" who wanted to take us somewhere and scam us, but we thankfully shook them off easily. National Museum is old and has too many items .... my colleague liked it but I am not much of a museum person. Connaught Place was a chaotic mess but at least we ate well there.

Honestly, I felt I was beginning to adjust to the rhythm after 2 weeks on the ground in India ... but then in my 3rd week I fell ill and I remember why I hated India in the first place. Remember how I said I was "sick of Korean food" before? I let down my guard and tried the bibimbap in the restaurant. Two hours later I was racing too and from the toilet and three hours later I was in a Westin hotel car on the way to the emergency room. I was not seeking an Indian hospital experience on my trip! Thankfully I ended up at a decent facility in Gurgaon, surprisingly to me, and I laid there for 4 hours as I took an IV in my arm filled with antibiotics. The hospital doctor wanted me to stay the night but I didn't feel comfortable and just wanted to sleep in my Heavenly Bed in the hotel room. Thank goodness I had a helpful Westin hotel employee there the whole time who helped negotiate my release. I spent the whole next day in bed, eating nothing but bananas and plain boiled mashed potatoes. I lost 2.5 kilograms. THE IRONY! Korean food, which I was so mentally tired of had made me physically sick. I forgot the cardinal rule in India -- avoid uncooked foods when you eat outside of a 5-star hotel. I forgot that even at a Korean restaurant which my teammates and I had safely eaten at almost our entire trip your bibimbap vegetables are rinsed in the local feces water.

I was glad to see these elephant statues at Delhi Airport ... and get out of town!

Our trip ended just before Diwali ... all the lights were set up on the buildings in the the city ... and I cannot remember ever feeling so happy to return to South Korea as when I got off the Asiana Airlines flight on Sunday afternoon at Incheon Airport. Clean air! (relatively speaking)  I can brush my teeth with tap water! No more honking or crazy drivers! (again ... relatively speaking. Korea is not the US or Western Europe.) I imagine at some point in my career ahead that I will need to return to India, but I am certainly not looking forward to that day.

Sapa: The Alps of Vietnam

To say I was a little discombobulated is an understatement ... after an enervating and stressful 3 week business trip to Brazil, then 25 hours of flying back to Seoul, 1 night rest in my house while fighting jet lag (a 12-hour time jump), then a 5-hour morning flight to Hanoi, I was rather out of sorts. However my crazy business trip had been scheduled just before a major Korean public holiday (Chuseok: the harvest moon festival) and I hadn't seen my girlfriend in 5 weeks so I wasn't about to change my plans. Fortunately my final destination was perhaps the most beautiful place in Vietnam, Sapa.

Flights full of restless Korean tourists, much more so than the experienced business crowd, are always a chore. I thought by booking a window seat of Vietnam Air that I had bought myself the chance for a long nap, but I was sorely mistaken. I was in a loud section full of tour group trailers and my seat neighbor was a Korean man from the countryside who may never have been on a plane before. He was talking to me in Korean, and I think was explaining that he was visiting his newly-married Vietnamese wife in Haiphong. It is common now in Korea for low-status farmers living in the countryside, devoid of domestic options, to marry Vietnamese women. Though I appreciated this man's story, I did not appreciate that he was reaching over my lap every 30 minutes to open the window shade. Dude, let me rest!

Room with a view

On little sleep, walking around central Hanoi was even more overwhelming than when wide awake. Motorbikes everywhere, noise, few sidewalks, street vendors and little plastic chairs to dodge... I just wanted a little place to sit down and relax. My girlfriend and I finally found that at the Cafe Runam coffee shop, which had an elegant, quiet and supremely comfortable set of sofas in the upstairs section. I fell into a deep nap as my girlfriend snapped photos of her sleepy boyfriend.

We took the 10pm overnight train to Lao Cai, the nearest station to Sapa. Unfortunately on the rickety Vietnamese train, perhaps not upgraded since colonial times, I was not going to get any beauty sleep. The train was loud and rode roughly over the tracks. When we arrived at 6:10am at Lao Cai, I was even more of a zombie than when we departed Hanoi. After another 75 minutes by van up winding mountain roads, we arrived at our hotel. Thankfully our hotel, the H'Mong Sapa Hotel, offered us a room for a nap while our room was being cleaned, and when we finally arrived at our room... I was blown away by the views. Wow! The mountain valley outside was majestic and so green. I loved the clean air and wispy clouds grazing the mountain tops and the little bits of morning fog still in the air. This is truly the most beautiful place in Vietnam.

After a little more rest my girlfriend and I were ready for an afternoon exploratory hike of the area. By late September we had just missed the peak of the real attraction, the rice harvest, yet we still saw many yellow rice terraces stacked up on the mountainsides. In full bloom, perhaps late August, these would have been truly spectacular. In the grassy fields nearby you see buffaloes grazing and young children running around while their parents pull the rice plants from the ground and beat the stalks against the edge of a big wooden bin, separating the rice grain from the plant. Unfortunately the harvested fields are brown and barren, so do time your Sapa trip appropriately!

On our first day we hiked downhill from our hotel to Sapa town, then further down to Cat Cat Village, a tourist attraction where ethnic minorities try to sell the clothes they have knitted. There is a nice waterfall and the walk is great for seeing the slower pace of mountain life. We watched a traditional dance performance where bored-looking teenagers went through the motions of courtship dances and the like. Fortunately a motorbike taxi spared us the grueling trek back uphill to the town. My girlfriend found a massage parlor for us, and I fell into another nap as the local woman relaxed my shoulders and neck.

Rice terraces

For our second day in Sapa we took motorbike taxis out of town to see the countryside and pass through the mountain villages. I would recommend taking the motorbike taxis rather than renting a bike yourself ... some of the roads are in treacherous shape and best handled by a professional. The drivers only spoke Vietnamese (and probably also their local language) but they were able to explain some of the attractions to my Vietnamese girlfriend. Again the landscape was beautiful, and we were only nagged by a couple children looking to sell us knick knacks. Back in Sapa town, mostly a tourist village with little ethnic feel, my girlfriend and I were able to enjoy a date night with a steak dinner.

Beating the rice grain from the stalk

For our third and final day, nature gave us a sunny day with clean air and beautiful views yet again. We took another motorbike trip to a different set of villages ... you could spend a week exploring and trekking through all of them ... and had a hike through a large cave. Unfortunately the clean air goes away later in the day as afternoon fires and set to burn the expired rice stalks, so I advise to plan your sightseeing for earlier in the day if you can wake up. Also I advise you to be careful with the "medicinal oils" in the villages ... my girlfriend dumped one on my hand and it inflamed my skin.

It's a beautiful day!

The van ride back down to the Lao Cai train station was a little frightening... the reckless driver careening at high speed down the windy road made my girlfriend feel ill ... but thankfully I sleep better on the overnight train ride back to Hanoi. Definitely pack a pair of ear plugs if you are a light sleeper! An early morning walk around Hoan Kiem Lake and a couple strong cups of ca phe sua da were just the thing to wake me up! There are more attractions to see in Hanoi, of course, but my previous trip there ticked most of those boxes. With my long-distance relationship now firmly established, and only limited time to spend together before my overnight return flight to Seoul, those attractions could wait for another day...

Brazil business trip

I had a long 3-week business trip to Brazil in September. Though business travel is not like leisure travel, particularly when you work for Samsung Korea, but it was a new country for me to experience so I thought I should write a little something about it.

Caipirinha

For one thing, Brazil is really FAR from Korea, about as far away in the world as you can get (I think only Argentina is more distant). To get there, we flew 10 hours to Abu Dhabi and then another 15 hours to Sao Paulo! Thank goodness we had business class seats on Etihad. It was my first time flying quality business class for a long flight (I have had subpar business class experiences on shorter United and Vietnam Air trips) and I enjoyed the luxuries of high-class travel. Champagne before takeoff... Yes please! Sleeping is much easier when you are actually flat. The Etihad business class lounge in Abu Dhabi is quite splendid and has a great buffet (the airport there is not so splendid, however). It's hard for me to believe that I have survived 9 business trips to US/Europe with Samsung flying economy.

Once we landed I stayed awake in the car to watch late afternoon in Sao Paulo. We landed on a cool overcast day and the city felt quite bleak. Everything felt dilapidated somehow. Motorbikes zipped between lanes in the traffic, graffiti everywhere on the sides of the road. Sao Paulo seemed to have an endless array of unfinished buildings and work-in-progress pillars for new roads and trains. I couldn't help but wonder how many of these projects had been abandoned. My young Korean colleague in the car said, "This doesn't feel so exotic."

We had all been scared pre-trip with warnings about Brazil's safety. Don't walk alone at night. Beware looking conspicuous at the airport. Pray that you're not kidnapped by a gang. I expected Koreans to be paranoid, but my external research was similarly ominous. I felt anxious.

However, thankfully the Samsung Brazil subsidiary, near Morumbi Mall, was in a decent part of town away from the favelas. I quickly grew comfortable with walking on the sidewalk from hotel to office during the day (a lot of people were also walking), and in the early evening I would walk in a pack with colleagues. If I felt afraid, smartphone apps like GrabTaxi seemed to work well and taxis in Sao Paulo are cheap.

Brazilians, Koreans, and *me* ... enjoying steak

That said, I was not in Sao Paulo to enjoy myself or explore. Korean-style business trips mean long hours and a lot of Korean food! Actually being forced to eat Korean food in Sao Paulo with my team was really frustrating. There is enough Korean food in Korea... Expand your palates a little! I really wanted to visit a traditional Brazilian steakhouse, a churrascaria, and was really sad that my team did not want to try this uniquely Brazilian dining experience.

I had a bit of time to myself during the first 2 weekends that I was in Brazil. I went out to try drinking caipirinhas and enjoy life music. The Sao Paulo social scene seemed to have a relaxed dress code and I felt like I fit in quite well.

Actually, I fit in a little too well... Everyone was trying to speak Portuguese to me! I hadn't known how diverse Sao Paulo is, a lot like New York or Houston in the US. I told my girlfriend that I seemed to blend right in and she was shocked, thinking that all Brazilians have dark features (definitely not all).

Real pizza and dark beer ... I love it!

I quickly discovered that Sao Paulo is a center of business and not a good place for tourism. My first 2 weekends there were cool and gray, and after seeing the Parque Ibirapuerra (a nice walk) and the Sao Paulo Cathedral (dangerous neighborhood), I didn't feel like there was anything more to see. Avenida Paulista was dull.

I did enjoy Sao Paulo food greatly. Beans and grilled vegetables and delicious grilled salmon and chicken and beefsteak... Yum yum yum. Also so many tropical fruits in Brazil. Passion fruit! Starfruit, guava, papaya as well. In addition, because Sao Paulo was settled by so many Italians (more even than New York) one couldn't help but find great Italian food too! Speaking of which, Sao Paulo is full of Italian-style espresso shops. A shot of espresso, a cube of sugar, and a little biscuit or wafer... For $1.20, so cheap! It made me feel a little bitter what I pay to drink mediocre coffee in Korea.

Diversity ... you see I do fit in at Brazil!

Sadly, despite the lack of attractions I did not escape Sao Paulo during my 3-week stay. Rio de Janeiro would have been the obvious place to visit, but my first two weekends in Brazil had awful weather, and my Korean team called me into work on the third weekend when the weather had turned sunny and glorious. Damn. I have a 10-year visa to Brazil now, so I guess I will need to return.

Cat Tien National Park: An Outdoor Adventure in South Vietnam

Finally able to use some of my accumulated frequent flyer miles (40,000 on Asiana), I scheduled an impromptu flight down to Ho Chi Minh City to see my girlfriend for the second time in a month. Needless to say, she was excited, and she planned an adventurous weekend in Cat Tien National Park, about 150km from Saigon.

Excited to see real primates!

A traveler to Vietnam must understand that the “highways” in the country are quite slow, and distances take much longer to travel than in more developed countries. For us, this journey took about 3.5 to 4 hours each way, meaning we were only traveling about 40km/hr.

We meant to depart early from Saigon but we had an oh-so-nice! boutique hotel (I Am Vietnam — highly recommend) and we wanted a little extra time to enjoy the room and the lavish breakfast. By the time we finally reached the bus depot we had missed the direct 10:30am passenger van to Cat Tien (no A/C, I am told), so my girlfriend quickly improvised and found an 11am air-conditioned van traveling north that could drop us off about 25km from the park. The rest of the journey we would complete by taxi (400,000 VND). This is not something that an English-speaking tourist would be able to figure out, though. The journey was crammed full of people in a van that inconceivably kept picking up passengers en route, even though by all appearances it was quite full. Definitely not a luxurious mode of transport — I don’t know how one could do this without A/C.

We finally reached our lodging at about 3pm, the overpriced and uninspiring Forest Floor Lodge, about 1.5km from the park headquarters (thankfully there was a golf cart to transport us). We had missed our planned tour for the afternoon so we borrowed a couple bicycles and rode back to the HQ area for an early dinner, while a late shower burst outside. Our Night Safari tour at 6pm was “rain or shine”, so we bought some ponchos and sat on the top of a van that drove us out a bit into the wilderness. An extravagant adventure full of exotic animals it was not — we saw one snake and several packs of deer. The Vietnamese were fascinated by the deer … such common animals they are in American suburbs, but in Vietnam these are a real rural treat!

The hiking trail in the forest was a little difficult to bike on!

The second day was our big outdoor day. We woke up early (the power returned to life at 6:30am), ate a quick breakfast and took a boat to the Dao Tien Primate Rescue Center. This is an educational reserve where golden-cheek gibbons and other primates are placed after being rescued from illegal captivity in Vietnam or other countries. These animals need to be returned to full health and need to learn the skills to survive in the wild.

Later in the morning we rented bicycles and drove to the Crocodile Lake — 10km on a rocky road and 4km on a difficult and narrow trail in the forest… we hiked the last 1km to the lake. I was already exhausted, sweaty and hot after reaching the lake, which had no crocodiles or birds to see during the mid-day sun. Some men who were filming a wildlife documentary cooked us pork and we rejuvenated ourselves for the long ride back to Park HQ. My girlfriend and I sang songs to lift our spirits in the empty woods, and after a scary short boat ride and a scary 25km on the back of a speeding motorbike through the rural roads near Cat Tien, we finally reached the comfort of a sleeper bus that drove us the rest of the slow way back to Ho Chi Minh City. We watched American action movies like “Expendables 3” and Vietnamese-American music videos, and it was great to lay down flat to catch a nap.

Already exhausted, and we're not even all the way to Crocodile Lake yet

A lazy Monday in Ho Chi Minh City capped off my trip, and I slept as best I could on the red-eye back to Seoul for Tuesday morning. Someday I hope to be rid of those red-eye flights!

Nha Trang: Easy-going Vietnamese Beach Town

With a steady Vietnamese girlfriend now, I am becoming much more of a regular in Vietnam. I scheduled two relatively impromptu trips to see her recently … fortunately there are many direct flights to Vietnam from Seoul.

Po Nagar Tower looks a bit like Angkor Wat in Cambodia

For the Buddha’s Birthday 3-day holiday weekend at the end of May I flew to Nha Trang, a Russian-dominated beach community in southern Vietnam. The international airport there is certainly the smallest I have visited in Vietnam, and I was a little uneasy landing close to midnight on a flight full of Koreans (who do not need a visa to visit Vietnam, lucky bastards). The visa on arrival office was closed when I arrived, which brought a momentary pang of panic to me, but thankfully an immigration officer eventually showed up and processed my paperwork — overall the time to exit the airport was still less than in Ho Chi Minh City. I was happy to have mastered the murky Vietnam visa system once again, and to receive a big hug from my girlfriend waiting on the other side of security.

The good thing about traveling with a local in Vietnam is that renting a motorbike is no hassle. Though it’s a little strange to be a man hugging a woman from behind on the motorbike, rather than the other way around, I would rather have that than trying to learn the obscure rules of the road in Vietnam. The Vietnamese don’t seem to mind.

The motorbike tour of Nha Trang was rather uneventful, as there aren’t many tourist-worthy attractions. We stopped at Nha Trang Cathedral (my girlfriend loves churches), walked around the Long Son Pagoda (with a large Buddha statue), took in the Po Nagar Tower (built by the ancient Cham people, and resembled Cambodia’s Angkor Wat), and stumbled around the rocks on the Hon Chong Promontory (a fine picture-taking destination with the Nha Trang coastline). It was a relaxing May day, hot but dry with the occasional friendly cloud to shield us from the intense tropical sunlight.

The rocks on Hon Chong Promontory are relaxing!

The second day featured a boat tour to nearby islands off the coastline. The vessel was an old crammed wooden design, I muttered a small prayer to myself that the boat would not sink that day — taking my valuable electronics into the sea. At Mun Island my girlfriend and I did a little snorkeling together… coral reef here was bare and dull but it did make for some good swim time (requiring *strong* sunscreen). Lunch was served onboard and there was music time afterwards… a guitar, drums, and a microphone. It was karaoke time and as the only Westerner onboard (there were also Vietnamese, Koreans, and some Indians), I was asked to sing a song. Surprisingly “Hotel California” is well known in Asia … and the crowd loved it! This was followed by “happy hour” on the water, and I forgot to reapply sunscreen, leading to my first sunburn on my shoulders in some time … tsk tsk.

Day 3 in Nha Trang was a visit to Thap Ba Hot Mineral Spring mud bath resort. Don’t want to get dirty, you are thinking? Think again! I was skeptical too, but this place rocked. The mud baths are warm and relaxing and make a great day out for couples. Once you have had about 20-30 minutes of mud, you get to clean off in nice, gushing showers. This place also has swimming pools to clean off further, and a large seating area to enjoy a nice afternoon with a cocktail.

For Day 4, we flew back to Ho Chi Minh City to visit the Saigon Opera House and catch the À Ố Show (pronounced “ahhh! ohhh!”), a cirque performance full of baskets, bamboo, acrobatics, and Vietnamese working songs. It is pretty simple, short, and not really worth the inflated ticket price, but it was still an entertaining performance. If you are accustomed to the amazing acts in Cirque du Soleil, À Ố will seem a bit like a college drama performance in comparison, but it is a good diversion for a tourist’s trip to Saigon — it is certainly a unique performance.

After the performance with the cast of À Ố Show

Singapore: Week of the Lee Kuan Yew funeral

After a whirlwind couple of weeks of work and a grueling European business trip, it was a relief to get on an airplane to see my Vietnamese girlfriend for a few easy days in warm Singapore. On my first visit to Singapore in 2010 I had regarded Singapore as a dull, sleepy island nation. Quite frankly, that type of place was quite alright for me to visit in March 2015, as I was in no mood for long days of sightseeing.

Memorial messages to Lee Kuan Yew could be found all around the city

This trip I was staying in a more historic, less gentrified part of Singapore — Joo Chiat Rd in the eastern part of the city. It was a little distant from the subway but certainly a better value than being somewhere more central. The area was lively at night as it is known for go-go clubs and, interestingly, Vietnamese restaurants. I did not subject my girlfriend to Singaporean renditions of her local cuisine.

After a very late 1am arrival at Changi Airport the night before, the first day in Singapore (Thursday) was lazy. We ate a late lunch at a Chinese seafood restaurant in my neighborhood (where, of course, the waitress tried unsuccessfully to speak to my girlfriend in Chinese), then a slow coffee. We weren’t in the sightseeing area until 4:30pm, which was perfectly fine as we avoided the intense daytime sun and heat of Singapore.

We exited City Hall station and noticed it was very active, with signs pointing to the Lee Kuan Yew memorial site. I suggested we follow the signs — would be a once in a lifetime sort of thing to see the coffin of the founding father, and might just have a bit of a line…

Well, the line stretched and snaked for many blocks, around War Memorial Park several times before extending down the street beyond where the eye could see. This line was massive, and we would be here for hours. My girlfriend and I backtracked through the very orderly crowds and escaped — turned out the queue time was anywhere from 5 to 8 hours for most of the week!

What my girlfriend called the "Durian" theater

My girlfriend really wanted to see the “durian” theater (Esplanade), and we detoured a little around the crowds before we found a path. The sun was covered by a friendly cloud but I was still sweating. We made it down to the Marina Bay and snapped all the typical pleasant tourist photos of Singapore: the Singapore Flyer, the Marina Bay Sands, the Merlion. We strolled along Boat Quay. packed with Aussies and Indians watching their teams compete in the Cricket World Cup and finally dined on hamburgers for dinner in Clarke Quay. In the evening we strolled through the bright markets in Chinatown before retiring.

Friday was all about seeing expat acquaintances who had moved to Singapore — an Italian who works for Intel, a Taiwanese who works for Thomson Reuters, and a Brit at a renewable energy company. I learned surprisingly little about how one actually might find a job in Singapore, but I did enjoy seeing everyone and eating and drinking coffee. In a way, I saw how the “locals” live. In between appointments we walked along Orchard Road, desperate for a coffee and cake cafe (not found on the pricey sidewalk real estate), but did eventually settle into one for a nice air-conditioned break, where I introduced my girlfriend to the delight of French Press coffee.

On Friday evening, my girlfriend and I tackled my former arch nemesis… the Singapore chili crab!! We visited Long Beach at Dempsey Hill, a nice wooded area by the Botanic Gardens. This time I had two big advantages from my first messy encounter… my girlfriend who could eat some of the crab, and a friendly waiter who offered to bring the crab out cut into smaller pieces. Though it still made my hands red, the crab was delicious and considerably better than before.

Above Singapore, at a rooftop pool bar near Somerset station

Saturday daytime brought more tourism, the new Gardens by the Bay. The outside was a little hot for daytime walking, thankfully free of charge though. However we needed the air conditioning beckoning from the two domes on the site: the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest. At the ticket counter we had sticker shock at the price of visiting both (28 SGD / person), so we received the ticket for one conservatory (16 SGD / person) and needed to make a choice… which dome?! We chose Cloud Forest, a cool misty tropical sanctuary with lots of nice flowers. Trekking the dome took about an hour … after leaving we felt refreshed and a cloud had covered the sun to give us a pleasant walk back to the Marina Bay Sands. The hotel itself looked kitschy and overrun with tourists (the queue area to go to the top of the hotel smelled like bad body odor and the price was exorbitant), but we greatly enjoyed sitting along the Bay outside the mall with a view of Central Singapore’s skyscrapers.

For dinner that evening I met my long-lost friend Stefan, who was now married with a daughter! Thankfully, Stefan and his wife love cooking for guests, and we had a great take on local food: Gado-gado salad, Sio Bak, and Laksa pesto pasta. And the locals seem to be living pretty well!

Sunday, our final day in Singapore, was state funeral day, and our lunch plans with a Singaporean business school colleague were quickly changed as the ceremony was slated to begin at 12:30. We munched on a satisfying dim sum breakfast and escaped just in time for the funeral madness, but not the pouring rain! How fitting that the heavens opened up as the founding father was being led down the Singapore streets. Actually, aside from some street closures the city didn’t seem vastly affected… that said we had been advised to avoid all areas along the route, so my girlfriend and I settled for a lazy afternoon walk along East Coast Park. The trail was pleasant free of cars but the water view was not romantic, unless you’re the type who enjoys staring at container ships in the Singapore Strait!

Looking back on the city center from the Marina Bay Sands

In short, my original verdict on Singapore still stands … as a tourist destination it is certainly a bit dull. But nowadays I look at Singapore in a different light, as a potential place to settle down for a few years after leaving Korea, and in that way Singapore scores well… my friends seem to be enjoying life and living well.

Tet Holiday in Vietnam

Chúc mừng năm mới! That means “Happy New Year” in Vietnamese! In February 2015, I visited Vietnam to see my girlfriend during the Lunar New Year holiday, known as Tet in Vietnam. I would be there for the first day of the Year of the Goat, also known as the Year of the Sheep in Korea and northern China, apparently due to the lack of goats naturally in those places.

Going from Seoul (avg. temp. in February: roughly 0C) to Ho Chi Minh City (avg. temp. in February: about 28C) was a welcome change! Going through immigration was a chore as usual — you never know how long those Visa on Arrival people will take — but at least there were people issuing visas during the Tet holiday! (my girlfriend had been worried about this) Vietnam takes its Lunar New Year very seriously, more so than South Korea even. Most major companies were shut down for the entire week on which the holiday fell, and most good restaurants as well. In fact, I had read an expat in Vietnam joking that Tet actually was a 3-week holiday…1 week to prepare, 1 week to celebrate, and 1 week to recover!

My girlfriend had me set up in a good 3-star hotel near her house … from there we headed to a water puppet show near the center of Ho Chi Minh City. A triplet of musicians sat on each side of a small pool in which the puppets appeared. The skits told old Vietnamese fables, dictated and sung by the musicians on the edge of the stage. About what these fables were about I have no idea, as the whole show was in Vietnamese with no translation available, which I found a little odd as my girlfriend was the only Vietnamese person in the audience. She tells me that only foreigners attend these shows! The artistic quality was good… lots of people and farm animals and the Four Holy Beasts of Vietnam: the dragon, the unicorn, the tortoise, and the phoenix. At the end of the show, the puppeteers emerged from behind a curtain shaped like a Vietnamese pagoda, and everyone applauded.

Water puppet show in Ho Chi Minh City

The show got me in the mood for the inevitable awkward, nervous moments upon first meeting my girlfriend’s parents. They lived in a modest, comfortable house, built vertically like most of the houses that I have seen in Ho Chi Minh City, and had a feast prepared for my arrival. My girlfriend’s parents spoke little English, and I only speak the little Vietnamese that I learned in the first 5 sessions of a Pimsleur course, so I just tried to smile, eat all of the food placed in front of me, and wait for my girlfriend to translate what they were asking! Her father had learned some English over 40 years ago from a US military soldier, but was of course very rusty. Her mother, like most mothers was very concerned that I had eaten enough. My girlfriend kept thrusting food — a lot of pork, I remember — into my bowl, and even though I felt stuffed like a pig my girlfriend’s mother was still asking me to eat more!

After dinner older people handed younger people red envelopes filled with small amounts of money. I received the envelopes — one contained a US $2 bill! — and also distributed some that my girlfriend prepared. My girlfriend then let me lay down for a nap and when I woke up the time was almost midnight. On the top floor of my girlfriend’s house her family had built a small shrine for ancestor worship. Some fruits, sodas, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (imported from the USA!) had been left for the ancestors. Vietnamese people believe on the Lunar New Day that their ancestors will return to enjoy some of these foods and bring good fortune to the lives of the living. Just before midnight, my girlfriend’s family members, 1-by-1, lit incense sticks and prayed before an image of Buddha atop the food.

Then, at midnight, lots of fireworks erupted all over Ho Chi Minh City. After watching fireworks I followed the family to a neighborhood pagoda. The pagoda was packed with worshipers. Monks handed out red envelopes and people were bowing their heads several times in front of every deity they saw.

Ho Chi Minh flower festival

The next day, my girlfriend picked me up from my hotel and we rode on her motorbike to her grandmother’s house outside of Ho Chi Minh City. Her grandmother is no longer living; her uncle maintains the house and the family returns every Lunar New Year to pray to a shrine with her photograph on top. How quickly the city changes from gritty urban buildings into short houses with small yards filled with chickens. More food, more ancestor worship, more time with my girlfriend’s family. A little rain shower popped up in the afternoon, which my girlfriend claimed was lucky on New Year’s Day!

We escaped my girlfriend’s family to into central Ho Chi Minh city, where a large pedestrian flower festival had been set up on a main street of the city. The festival was mobbed and it was hard to get the good pictures that everyone else wanted.

On the 2nd day of the new lunar year, my girlfriend picked me up before sunrise for a flight to Phu Quoc, Vietnam’s island beach destination. The rickety 72-seat propeller plane barely held our carry-on luggage, and as it always seems with these planes we had a rough landing. Fortunately the island town is close to the small island airport and we were able to catch a pre-arranged 9am tour from a local tour agent. We hopped on a bus for a loop around the southern part of the island. A pearl farm, an old Vietnam War prison, a pungent fish sauce factory, then Sao Beach for lunch and relaxation time. The beach was a pleasant walk and there seemed to be some good resorts in that area. In the afternoon a black pepper garden, a fishing village, then back to town, where we caught a ride up to our own resort on the northwestern corner of the island.

Sao Beach, Phu Quoc

That evening we rented a motorbike for a seafood dinner at Dinh Cau night market in town, which I had read was the best place to dine on the island. The market was certainly lively and full of markets and diners, though disappointingly the majority of the seafood on display was no longer swimming. Though we ate well — prawns and shellfish and squid — my girlfriend was not happy with the freshness of the food we were eating.

The next morning I fell ill from exhaustion (not tainted fish, thankfully), and we skipped our pre-arranged morning boat tour to rest. In the afternoon, we ate a late lunch at a popular seafood restaurant for locals — well recommended by our hotel, but one of those places you can only visit with a Vietnamese girlfriend. In the late afternoon, we hung around a fishing pier where we caught a sunset squid fishing cruise out in the sea. We were given rudimentary fishing equipment: a line with no pole and a little rubber lure. No one seemed to be catching any squid, but at least we saw a nice sunset and ate a good meal prepared onboard.

The third and final day in Phu Quoc started with the boat tour that we had skipped the previous day. The snorkel boat picked us up directly from the beach near our resort hotel — a cheap little river cruiser ferried us to the same sightseeing boat from the night before. It took about an hour of traveling northward until we reached the snorkel area: an island surrounded by coral reefs. To avoid the intense sun, my girlfriend opted to stay in the shade of the boat. She watched me plop into the water, when almost immediately I heard “watch out for the jellyfish next to you, mate!” I couldn’t see a jellyfish anywhere. “Just swim for the island!” I paddled my arms and kicked my fins as fast as I could. My girlfriend says that I avoided a big jellyfish. I got lucky.

Thankfully no jellyfish were in sight around the reef and the views were quite nice. The coral was very big … deep but almost touching the water’s surface. Plenty of colorful fish swam below, and large spiny sea urchins sat menacingly on top of the coral. A good snorkel spot.

Ong Lang Beach, Phu Quoc

The snorkel boat fought against the current for an hour and a half to get us back to our beach, where my girlfriend and I enjoyed snipping drinks and snapping pictures. Our time on Phu Quoc was too short — it’s a nice island.

Back in Ho Chi Minh City, my sixth and final day in Vietnam was an easy one. We met my girlfriend’s best friend for a Chinese-style dim sum lunch, then headed to the “Victory Palace”, formerly the presidential palace for the president of South Vietnam. The palace is offers a nice snapshot of presidential life under the old regime and teaches some history lessons from the final years of divided Vietnam. More lazy coffee time followed. I could not believe how many Vietnamese students owned an iPhone 6, which costs roughly $1000 in Vietnam, according to my girlfriend. She tells me that the average take-home paycheck for a new university graduate is about $150/month, meaning that these students are saving for a long time to buy these iPhones!

The final stop was dinner with Ms. Lam Huong, my old Samsung friend who directed my first trip to Vietnam and introduced me to my girlfriend. This was my first trip to see her since, and I did not feel as welcome in her house as I had imagined. Probably Ms. Lam Huong was tired from Tet holiday. She seemed happier to see me once she saw the lingzhi mushrooms that I had brought for her from Korea.

Tet holiday would probably be a difficult time to visit Vietnam as a tourist without a local guide, given the number of businesses and restaurants which are closed and the number of local people traveling around the country. But if you are invited to experience Tet from a local, the holiday is not to be missed!