After three years I am back in Vietnam! 🎉
Vietnam was the last stop on our (almost) 2-month stay in Southeast Asia. After some workcation in Bali and a pure vacation in Thailand, we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City!
Disclaimer: In the rest of the article I may refer to Ho Chi Minh City by its old name — Saigon.
Our whole stay in Vietnam was around three weeks. We were stationed in Saigon during the whole period, and we were doing weekend trips around the country. Vietnam is only 6 hours ahead of Berlin, so we had to adjust our Balinese working hours and habits, a little bit.
Mornings — indulging in food and adventuring 🍲
We still kept the tradition of waking up early-ish and kicking off the day with some nice food. To be honest this nice food most of the time was bánh mì. 🙈
For those of you who don’t know, bánh mì is like a Vietnamese sandwich. The baguette is soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside. It can be filled with different ingredients, that you can sometimes customize. I was lucky enough that my partner is Vietnamese and speaks the language, so my picky taste was able to select all the right goodies. My go-to is Bánh mì Ốp la, which is bánh mì with fried eggs, veggies and (sometimes) sausages.
When our friends were in town, we tried to spend the mornings with them and do different activities. One of my favorites was taking a cooking class altogether. We did the Hoa Tuc Cooking Class, which I think we booked through Klook (affiliated link). We did the morning class, which included going to the farmers market in the morning, buying all the fresh ingredients, and then going to the kitchen to cook. On the menu of the day was:
- Mustard leaves rolls
- Green mango salad
- Char-grilled pork
We did a pretty good job, didn’t we? It was really delicious!
Afternoons — work, work, work! 💻
After the morning food adventures were over, responsibilities called and it was time to work, work, work. We’d usually spend the early afternoon in a cafe or a coworking space. One of my favorite locations was this cat cafe we went to.
There is a small entrance fee, if you are there just to pet and play with the cats. But if you are there to drink/eat and play with the kittens, then you don’t need to pay the extra entrance fee.
We would do a short food break around 2/3 pm and go grab something to eat. We were usually getting food from local restaurants, brought it to our apartment, and ate there. The aparthotel we were staying at had a nice common area on the top floor, so we ate there most of the time and continued working till the rest of the day.
I’m planning to write a whole article about all the food spots that I loved and enjoyed during my stay there, so stay tuned for that one. 😄
Evenings — More food and late-night work 🍜
Around 6/7 pm we would do yet another food break, but this time for dinner. This was a bit longer break for us because most of the time we tried to go somewhere to sit down and enjoy the food (with friends and family). There were nights when we would go and check out some night food markets. As someone who loooves street food, this was heaven for me. 😍
Pro tip from someone who didn’t get food poisoning after eating debatable food for 3 weeks in Vietnomnom: Don’t go to a food market on your first days. Eat in clean restaurants for the first couple of days, to adjust your belly to the local food, and only after hit a local market. Also, never drink your sugar cane and fruit juices with ice. You never know where that ice is coming from.
After a couple of hours of food break, we’d come back to our place and wrap up work, with some last calls and syncs with Berlin folks of the day.
I think that I personally preferred working from Bali a little bit more, because of the +7 hr difference it has with Berlin. It seemed like our days were less interrupted and we had more focus time to work. But the Vietnamese food was too good, not to do all those small food breaks. 🤤
Would do it again, over and over again. Maybe even sooner than you think. 👀
