Most teachers in Vietnam operate on self-acquired visas. Vietnam, still coming to terms with the fact that people actually travel here now, is pretty anal about visas and is constantly changing it’s rules. The bad news for me is that it has recently discontinued visa extensions. This means that in order to continue working in Vietnam, every 3 to 6 months I have to leave solely for the purpose of coming back with a new visa. So the good news for you, reader, is that I get to talk to you about how to get a visa for Vietnam.
Travel plans! On this trip, we'll be visiting Da Nang, Hoi An (in Vietnam), Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh (in Cambodia). Included in these destinations will be Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, as well as a legendary lantern lighting festival in the backwaters of central Vietnam.
I was pretty infatuated with the island already as we navigated the labyrinth of strange, narrow, mossy alleyways to our ‘bungalow’ accommodations for the first night in Ubud. I was pretty fed-up with the island 2 days later as I trudged through the crowded, dirty streets looking for a motorbike in Kuta. I'm pretty sure that everyone hates Kuta. But then I was back to liking the island again later on as I road a motorbike along the winding mountain roads on the less developed Northern side of the Island.
I haven’t been working weekends for the past 6 months for just a short little trip so I shrugged and blocked out about 3 weeks. I have known that I wanted to do something a little bit crazy so I had been brain-storming things I could do during Tet for the past few months. So without further adieu, here’s the plan.
I write this article to let you in on some of the issues you can have interacting with foreigners whilst you are abroad. You meet an interesting mixture of people when you are traveling, and in spite of their differences, the usually have one thing in common: extreme personalities. Another issue is that there are nearly always cultural differences that can muddle interactions. To make matters worse, many people living abroad are scared, stressed, or thinking that they are beyond the reach of consequences, so they will do extreme and selfish things from time to time.
