Okay… I’m finally able to settle down for some 57 hours and reiterate my month of January to you. I haven’t stopped moving since I got back on the 31st, and I’m only going in circles. Although I had (yes, another) vacation during the first week in February, I didn’t spend it relaxing at home like a genius would have done. Instead, I ended up going with 7 of my friends to Busan (finally!).


I figured, why should I miss out when 7 of my friends are going?
The Chinese New Year is widely celebrated here, more so than the calendar New Year, and it landed on the 7th of February. It was a really fun trip, but let it be known that 7 people is about 5-too-many to travel with :) And, being that we were still in Korea, it paled in comparison to everything I had experienced just weeks before... it was still beautiful however. Our hotel was right on the beach, and that water teased me every morning. And here we go:
Our first destination on the adventure was Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon) in Vietnam.
I really couldn’t believe what my senses were going through right away. Sensory overload is what I like to refer to it as.
Motorbikes are abundant here, and when I say abundant I really mean excessive in every possible way. It took me a long time to adjust to the atmosphere. We spent 3 days there, and that’s about all I could handle in one dose. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed every minute of it, but every time we sat down at a restaurant there would be a beggar at our sides within minutes, trying to sell sunglasses/ gum/ postcards/ cigarettes/ books/ you name it. It was so hard to say no to them but eventually we had to, otherwise we would have come back with 70 pounds of postcards… and there’s only so much a person can do with a few of them.
Some highlights from this city:
1. We fed elephants.
2. We rode in contraptions called cyclos (‘see-klo’: a bicycle with a carriage in the front, in which you get carted around through the heavy traffic) around the city.
3. I had some of the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life.
4. We fed an orangutan an orange (how fitting) and he performed for us.
5. We were able to step foot into any restaurant, open the menu, and order from –not kidding- over 700 items listed. And it was cuisine from all over the world. I’ve never had that option anywhere else on this earth.
6. We went to the WWII War Remnants Museum (very difficult to go through).


7. I had some of the best spring rolls I will ever have had in my lifetime.
8. We had some really fantastic massages.
9. A boy stuck his tongue out at me when I didn’t buy postcards from him.
10. We became accustomed to and comfortable with seeing tiny lizzards all over the walls and ceilings of every hotel and restaurant we went to, which also helped us later on in the trip because they helped the mosquito and other bug problems.
After the 3 days we decided we wanted to spend some time on a beach. Nha Trang was our next destination. It’s in the southern half of the country, so we knew it would be warm, and that’s what we wanted. We took an overnight train (gotta love those things…) and arrived early in the morning. Jamie, the dude of the 3 of us, ended up getting REALLY sick that night (food poisoning we believe). He will remember it as the worst and most miserable night of his life. When we arrived, we found a cheap hotel and stayed there for 5 days. Hospitality is really important here (and in Thailand too). The hotel workers were more than willing to go out of their way to make sure we were more than satisfied with everything.
The highlights from Nha Trang:
1. We rented bicycles and rode down the beach front one morning.
2. We played with the stray cats and dogs everywhere.
3. The delicious food.
4. More phenomenal massages (if only I wasn’t so ticklish).
5. While sitting on the beach, we tried swimming in the slightly chilly water.
6. Leah and I went parasailing (!!!) all for a total of $11.

7. We went to a hot spring and sat in a mud bath… eugh… it was pretty gross.
8. We went to Monkey Island and fed hundreds of those crazy little animals...


...and Leah and I got slapped in the leg by them.
9. We sat on an elephant and he also lifted us up with his trunk.

10. We fed African ostriches and deer.

One night, a boy came up to us when we were eating at a seafood restaurant, and this was the conversation between Leah and him: “Wanna buy some postcards?” “No thanks, we have many.” “Wanna play Connect Four?” “What??!” (a game I had literally forgotten about from my childhood). He explained, “If I win, you buy postcards. If you win, I give you postcards. I’m a hustler.” This had us rolling with laughter. This kid was so funny, cute, suave, and maybe 14 years old. How can you say no to that? So Leah played him; she lost, and she bought ...more... postcards (we think he cheated though ☺).

So then we took an overnight BUS (a bus with 3 rows of beds going all the way to the back, pretty cool) back to Saigon to give it another go for another day. We then went to another beach, called Vung Tao, just outside of Saigon via hydrofoil. We spent 2 nights there, decided we didn’t like it too much, then headed back to HCMC to fly out the next morning.

Nha Trang Beach...

Monkey Island tour...


That delicious food that swims...


Thailand: wow. We stayed in Bangkok BANGKOK for the first 2 days then we flew out to the islands. Koh Samui was first one for us, though only for a day. It’s the largest (and therefore the busiest) island off the east coast of Thailand. The airport was pretty interesting; in fact, it wasn’t much of an airport. It was a tiki hut with a landing strip out in front. No walls, just breeze. We stayed at a resort called Samui Mermaid on Big Buddha Beach for one night.


The following day, we decided to take a ferry to the island of Koh Tao. This island is considered “a diamond in the ruff” by the Lonely Planet book and is more known as a diver’s paradise than anything else. But we didn’t dive ☹ the whole time we were there. Getting certified was out of my spending limits. We were hoping for lots of seclusion on this island, but I think many tourists had the same idea of it being a pretty phenomenal place. And it was, absolutely, breath taking. We stayed on Sairee Beach in a little bungalow the whole time and the teal water was just down the sidewalk.


The highlights from Koh Tao:
1. Our days consisted of: breakfast, beach, lunch, beach, dinner and sunsets, and beach.



2. We got really, really burnt from so much beach.
3. A tree nearly fell on top of us one windy day on the beach... or rather, the tree that nearly killed us...

4. We went swimming in water warm enough to be a bath.
5. We met a St. Bernard named George Bush (no one knows where he came from or HOW he got to an island in the first place, being nearly the size of a small horse).
6. All restaurants were on the beach so we could just relax… even until night.

7. I enjoyed eating pad Thai and coconut curry in its origin…mmm.
8. All restaurants had floor cushions with back rests to eat and relax on, and look out towards the water and the horizon.

9. We sat on our porch some nights by candlelight and incense, listened to music, played cards (or rather, I watched Jamie and Leah play cards), and talked.
10. And… waking up to the most obnoxious sound EVERY morning: a rooster, sometimes right outside our door.

We stayed in this paradise for 5 days before venturing onward. Next up: the island of Koh Phangan. We took another ferry to get here and then took a wild, wild taxi ride to a resort called Sea Sun Set Resort. The taxis on these islands are basically the open backs of pick-up trucks, with the exception of a few toppers on some.

It was an as-many-as-you-could-possibly-squeeze-in-free-for-all ride. A little frightening.
The resort we stayed at was really awesome. It was far enough out of any town or city so we had to do all of our eating and hanging out there, which I was totally fine with. Our bungalow was more on the dingy side, but hammocks were hanging on our porch and all around the trees by the water, which made up for lack of furnishings in my opinion.

The hospitality here was incredible, and the whole place was run by one big, extended family.
The beach had huge boulders in the water that we could swim out to and climb on.


I ended up injuring myself (foot) on one of them whilst trying to get down, and it hurt pretty badly for a few days. During the low tide at night, we were able to walk all the way out to the rocks.

The sunsets here were fantastic (quite a reasonable name for itself).


I only recall having one rainy day throughout the entire month-long vacation, and even rain couldn't ruin a perfect paradise.

There was an outside lounge area, called Chocolate Bar...


...where we would sit at night and listen to the best mix of music I’ve ever heard.
A few nights were spent sitting in the hammocks by the water and playing Scrabble on Jamie’s portable PlayStation, or relaxing on the floor cushions at Chocolate Bar, watching the moon grow and the stars twinkle above us.


After 4 days there, we decided to head back to Bangkok for a day or 2 before flying out to Cambodia. We spent one entire day in transit to get there, but we got to see a lot of the countryside of inland Thailand. This time in Bangkok, we made sure to visit the Grand Palace where the King once lived, and the legendary Emerald Buddha. All of the walls were gold-plated and covered in gems. It sparkled like a glass of champagne (figuratively speaking).




And a monk in the mix...


We spent some time hunting around the backpacker district of the city, and also admiring the stance of Ronald McDonald around the city...


taking some tuk-tuk rides (‘took-took’, another contraption that is more or less like a motorbike, partly enclosed, with a covered back seat for the passengers)...

... and eating some more delicious cuisine before heading out.

Siem Reap, Cambodia was our next and final destination and we arrived in the early evening of the 26th. That airport was pretty hilarious too. It wasn’t much, but this one at least had walls. We landed in the parking lot, more or less.


This is the city outside of which Angkor Wat is located. Having only 4 days in this country, we decided just to stay in this city (more like a town than a city) for the duration. Besides Angkor Wat taking up one of our days, this place had enough things to see and do to fill up the other 3 days. We took a tuk-tuk ride in and around the city and saw a major part of the impoverished areas in the beautiful setting.
The guy behind us on the left is 'peacing' the camera, haha.





Basically, it gave us a glimpse into how much Pol-Pot and the Khmer Rouge mangled this country. We saw a shrine that was full of skulls and bones. It put me in my place, and it was really dramatic to see. On a lighter note, we went to many of the markets around the city and more delicious restaurants too. I have a new love for lemongrass-flavored anything. The major highlights of this city were:
Horseback riding through the countryside...




... Running into a free-for-all cattle drive/stampede in the road, while riding in a TUK-TUK, on our way to ride those horses.
What are you looking at?

... momentary petrification.

... Seeing Angkor Wat. Being that it’s nearly 1000 years old, it blows my mind how it was constructed; just like the Pyramids. I know how they were built but I still wonder HOW they were built, if that makes any sense. All around, there were faces carved in the stones of the walls. The pictures speak a little for themselves, although my photography skills don’t do the place justice… at all. I could go on and on about this, but I won’t.




The stairs at this place were like climbing a wall out of a hole; extremely steep.













... A hot-air balloon ride to see Angkor Wat from the sky, which was pretty cool.
You can see the moat that surrounds the entity.
Not too many hills in these parts..


... And all the little kids running around the area of the temples, and throughout the city at night, many of them trying to sell things. I bought some bamboo bracelets from a little girl at Angkor Wat and when she saw us leaving, she caught up to me. She had written on a postcard and drew a flower and included a free bracelet to give to me. The post card says (I still have it, of course): “Hello! Very nice to meet you. My name is Oun Res May. I give you a flower for a souvenir. I wish you good luck with your job and all your family. Thank you for coming to see Angkor Wat. I hope you don’t forget me. I hope to see you again. I hope you like your flower. I like your smile. From Oun. Bye! Bye! Good luck.” This girl was maybe 13 years old… not any older than the kids I’m teaching in Korea. The fact that she’s able to spill out such fantastic English AND grammar AND spelling with minimal mistakes really says a lot. Yes, maybe these kids are forced into this “beggar” lifestyle where a lot of their income comes from foreigners feeling sorry for them. Regardless, there’s no way a single one of my students would be able to write the same thing HALF as well as she did. The kids and the street people in Vietnam spoke very good English as well. The 3 of us found it really ironic that children in these not-so-rich countries had better English abilities that all of our students, collectively. The thought of this festers inside me. Suddenly, my efforts being put forth in Korea don’t seem as important –or as meaningful- anymore. Oun wasn’t the only child we encountered. I will show you what I mean:






Little boys finding amusement in upside-down chairs= simple pleasures in life.
The sweetest little girl in the world.


Another memorable conversation with one boy selling books one night was: “Where are you from?” “The United States.” “The population of the USA is ###### minus 3. Wanna know why? Because you’re here!” So I bought a book from him. How funny is that… seriously. These kids are pretty clever I would say.

I hope my words and pictures helped you understand a little bit about my trip. It was one of the most fulfilling and eye-opening vacations I’ve ever been on, and I feel like it changed my life. I’m not quite sure what my next year (after Mokpo) will entail but I will keep you guys in the know. My apologies for how long it took me to post this, even though I've been told to stop apologizing for such things. It’s a lot of information to regurgitate into coherence. Take care, all of you. Loves.