Hoi An

Hoi An - an ancient town in Vietnam, a UNESCO world heritage, a thriving digital nomad community and a place with many hidden gems I tried to uncover. I lived there at the start of 2024 and survived to tell the story.

Two months, one scooter (🛵) crash and a metric fuck ton of karaoke later - the fever dream that was Vietnam came to a close. I couldn’t get rid of the palpable obsession I developed for the people I met and the life I lived in the little village of HoiAn. So, as it is the case with every self-respecting journalism major, needing to process experiences and emotions means putting them on paper. 

First things first, I heard about HoiAn a year before boarding a flight from Sofia to Bangkok. I was spending March 2023 subletting the apartment of a Russian girl who lives in Bansko, snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoon. There, at the going away dinner for my friend Juan, I met Nick and Toby, who described the coastal town of HoiAn as their permanent base. My empty, yet intrigued look that night must have given away the fact that I knew embarrassingly little about Vietnam and even less about HoiAn. 

We had one of those big pointy hats at home, a souvenir from my parents’ trip to South East Asia, and that was about the only thing that formed my mental image. 

Somehow that, combined with too many conversations with drunk brits in the smoking area during freshers had created the impression that all of South East Asia was reserved for either gap-year wankers or 50-year old Easter Europeans. The only exception were thirty-year old divorcees who love pasta, prayers and sex. And as much as I wanted to fit into that third category, I lacked a certain level of desperation and paperwork. 

Turns out I was wrong. Hoi An attracts possibly the best kind of westerners who want to escape the terrible weather at the start of the year. A refreshing combination of genuine people with diverse interests and a laid-back, yet authentic attitude towards life. But more on that, later. 

HoiAn seemed like a very good base to explore South East Asia. It is mind-blowingly cheap, located next to a big city with a well-connected international airport and positioned in the middle of Vietnam with access to gorgeous beaches, everyday comforts and a thriving community of “digital nomads” (yes, I also get the yik from that term).

What to expect from HoiAn?

If you’ve ever spent summer school breaks at the country-side in Bulgaria, when the air isn’t too hot yet and the pace of life slows down - expect that. If not, I’m sorry, your childhood sucked. In more serious terms, you can expect a decent accommodation for about 400$* (bills included), great vegetarian food (if you’re not a snob) and complete lack of traffic laws.

Speaking of traffic laws, you’ll probably need to rent a scooter. Or at least a bike. My word of advice is don’t crash into taxis. Best not to crash at all but if given the choice, don’t choose the taxi car. I made this mistake on day one and regretted it until the end of the trip.

Survival guide for your first car crash in Vietnam

Picture this - you arrived in Vietnam late last nigh, and you woke up still kinda jet-lagged but beaming with excitement to begin your adventure. Your villa host, a 30-something Romanian, has already booked you a small motorbike that is waiting for you downstairs. He offers to show you around and point out the grocery stores, market and other helpful and notable things around the area where you are staying. Sure, he gives you kinda creepy vibes, but you’re too tired and excited to notice, so you get in the back, and he starts driving. 

At first, everything is fine, you visit a couple of small local stores, buy some dragon fruit from an old lady at the fruit market and negotiate criminally cheap avocado rates. Then you get to a red light, and the host gets off the bike and says, “your turn to drive”. At this moment in time the narrator could have paused the video and said, “this is where things went horribly wrong”.

First of all, don’t start driving a new vehicle you are not familiar with in the middle of a busy crossroad. Secondly, check that the breaks work. Thirdly, don’t expect that rules of the traffic exist - Vietnamese people navigate based on vibes and whoever has the loudest honk. I learned this very quickly when three seconds in, I found myself on the ground.

My head was spinning, my leg was bleeding underneath the bike and sounds around me were muffled. What the actual fuck. In the following days, I learned a few more important lessons:

1. Third-party insurance is only theoretically mandatory in Vietnam. 

2. A taxi driver is a special breed of person, identical across cultures and borders. When confronted by a seemingly wealthy (I’m not, but I look the part) white woman, they’ll do their very best to get as much money out of her as possible. 

3. When your villa host is inadequate, he’ll give your phone number to random taxi drivers.

4. Five men waiting for you outside your home at night is scary. 

5. Travelling alone can become daunting, but there are good people everywhere (special shout out to everyone who was next to me, virtually and in person,n during this scary episode)

And a few final words of advice if you’re ever in a weird situation when abroad: whatever you do, do not give your passport to anyone. Okay, enough about this. After a few days of obsessing about the crash, I was over it and wanted to move on.

Here are some places I spent my time to relax and feel better.

Notable stops in HoiAn for a great time:

🥥 Sound of Silence - my favourite beach restaurant/ coffee shop with yummy coconut coffees and good WiFi. 

💆‍♀️ Citrus Health Spa - the Vietnamese massage there will make any future massage you ever receive appear inadequate.

🥜 Peanuts - if you only try one Banh Mi in Vietnam, it has to be their Gourmet Vegan one.

🍸 Mezcal Cocteleria - awesome music, unique cocktails, speakeasy vibes and endless popcorn on the house. 

🛒 Xanh Xanh Market - if you are looking for Western products and the comforts you were used to back home, this shop is your best bet.

🧘‍♀️ Om Factory Yoga - challenging yoga practices with a view towards the rice paddies.

💪 HealthFit Gym - decent fitness equipment and running machines with more views towards the rice paddies.

🪡 Båo Diêp - You walk in with a Pinterest board, and you walk out dressed like one. 10/10 recommend.  

👩‍💻 Hub Hoi An - a wonderful community, a calendar full of fun things to do and generally the best vibes I had experienced for a while.

🌊 Cham Islands - lush beaches and cute monkeys.

And if you are planning some nearby weekend trips I strongly encourage you to explore DaNang and Hue. You can get your fix for party and electronic music in the former and soak in the history in the latter. 

I miss all of the above-mentioned things plus the sea, the landscapes and the endless supply of fresh Mango but …

What am I not going to miss in HoiAn (read this before you go)

The noise

Vietnam is a loud country. I’ve lived in busy cities before, and I figured that a population of 120,000 people was not even something to consider. I was wrong. Every day in Hoi An felt like the Vietnamese were aiming for some loudness world record that I didn’t know they were in the running for. It’s not just the car and scooter horns, it’s the karaoke.

So. Much. Karaoke. It’s the go-to way to relax for local people, which might make you think they are good at it, but you would be wrong. In their defence, the guiding criteria for good karaoke in Vietnam isn’t the quality of the performance, it’s the loudness. If you want to do well - scream!

This became even more apparent during Tet, the only annual holiday that locals have and the only time they are allowed to take two uninterrupted weeks off from work. It’s a celebration of the lunar new year and a time to get blindly drunk and scream in your living room with a microphone in hand (a ritual also reserved for pretty much any other day of the year).

And speaking of loudness... I went past a local wedding one day. Fun fact, weddings are celebrated in the morning and people go back to work in the afternoon. I won’t describe too many details, I’ll just leave the clip below. 

Vietnamese wedding 💒

Feeling like a walking ATM

Vietnam is cheap compared to pretty much anywhere else. Which at some point makes you feel like you’re trading monopoly money. That, however, didn’t make it less palatable whenever locals** would try to scam me. The “scam” is usually always the same - they’ll quote a price for something, and then when the time comes to pay, they’ll invent a reason why *actually* you need to pay them 20% more. It’s like when the washing machine tells you your laundry will be done in 60 minutes, and then 75 minutes later, it is still spinning. Just let me know what you want from the start.

The pace of life

You never realise just how anal you are about little every-day situations until they completely change. If this were a rom-com, it would have suddenly dawned on me that I need to slow down, reconsider my life priorities and start a rice farming business that supports deaf Vietnamese children. But it’s not. The pace of life in Hoi An didn’t make me second-guess my neurotic behaviour; quite the opposite actually. I found appreciation for my otherwise pathetic time-management skills and reconsidered them as quite advanced. Still a happy ending, if you ask me. 

Please forgive the typos.

Yours & delightfully dyslexic,

Dimana ✌️ 

*Pre-booking for a short time and finding your long-term accommodation on the ground is your best bet. 

** This happens only on occasion, and I interacted with man,y many businesses and people who were completely honest and transparent 

Paris

Paris is the ultimate cliché and thank God for that. Hedonism wouldn’t have a home if it weren’t for the naked women performing at Crazy Horse, the music scene in the 19th and the sex clubs dans le marais. Unlike any other place, Paris is a playground for people who live life. 

Londoners will try and convince you that they have all the same things. They’ll believe it, too (mostly because they’ve never actually crossed the channel).

Londoners are masters of brutality. The cabaret à la The Box, with its grotesque performances, the Killing Kittens orgies, only popular because of good PR and a remarkably distant connection to the Queen, and last but not least the claustrophobically loud clubs that smell like cheap chlorine and the aim to send you home deaf. London has the money to buy expensive clothes, Paris has the innate style to make anything chic.

If you don’t believe me, go spend a couple of hours in a laundromat in any area of Paris. I used to do that at minimum once a week. Right opposite Parc de la Villette, there is a small pedestrian street with buildings that look like Hausman was dreaming of summer in Spain. That street is home to a small Italian restaurant, a Carrefour Express, one pharmacy with a very uptight pharmacist and a laundromat.  

For three months straight, I would spend an hour and a half there each week - the exact time it takes to run a washing machine cycle at 40 degrees, followed by a ten-minute dryer. For the first few weeks, I was setting a timer and spending my time at the gym around the corner. This is the kind of behaviour you’ll learn in a city like London. Optimise your everyday life, hoping it’ll give you an extra sense of control or at least an imaginary gold star. 

In Paris, I learned rather quickly, people laugh in the face of “optimisation”. Once that lesson sank in, I began spending my laundry time people-watching at the coffee shop next door. 

A kaleidoscope of people would walk in and out of the room filled with washers and dryers. Nobody had the means to rent an apartment with a washing machine, yet paid to get their clothes clean by tapping a 1200 EUR iPhone to the self-service machine. 

Laidback young people, dads of three, mums of four, dog walkers, people who look borderline homeless … everyone would come in and out. And they *all* had that aura about them. A je ne sais quoi that says “I’m here to live life, and once I’m done doing that, I’ll go”. 

This is what the city of love gave me. The feeling of effortless living. 

List of places to visit in Paris:

Thrift shops:

Apartments in the city of love are too small to hoard. Even the rich regularly purge and when they do, you can find amazing vintage pieces here:

🛍️ Episode
🛍️ Untucked friperie
🛍️ Tucked friperie
🛍️Chinemachine

Cocktails:

🥂 go on top of Gare de l’Est at sunset and enjoy cocktails next to the old train station clock
🥂 you know the cocktails ought to be good when the place looks like a crack den. For the absolute best drinks, visit Le Syndicat

Le Syndicat

🥂 Bambino almost didn’t make my list, but I’ll give it an honorable mention for their playlists
🥂 Hoxton’s courtyard is a little oasis in the centre of Paris, many use it to work during the weekdays, but I can confirm it’s just as nice if you stop by for an after-work drink

Art:

🎨 I first saw Frederic Forest’s art on an instagram page with a few hundred followers in 2016. I forwarded one of his sketches to my flatmate at the time with a text reading “I want this tattooed on me”. Years later, he has a gallery in Paris, a dedicated account for everyone who gets his work inked on them and countless admirers. I have a tattoo of that sketch. 

🎨 To describe Aftersquat as eclectic would be an understatement but that’s exactly what’s so charming about this place. A home to the artists who otherwise wouldn’t have one.  

🎨 LVF gets an honourable mention for the building’s architecture and the possibility of finding yourself an awesome temporary exhibit. I was lucky to go during their Andy Warhol x Basquiat exhibit. 

🎨 Bourse du Commerce is everyone’s recommendation always. There’s a good reason for that. 

 🎨 Palais de Tokyo - few places allow modern artists to have the space to unleash their true creativity; it’s worth seeing.

Answering emails in Paris?

In between the cheese, the wine and the pastries, we occasionally have to find a way to afford them all. If you also found yourself in the unfortunate position of not having a trust fund, a sugar daddy, or a thriving Only Fans account,t here are a few places that are good for opening your laptop.

👩‍💻 Le Pavillon des Canaux

👩‍💻 The Hoxton

👩‍💻 La Bibliothèque nationale de France

👩‍💻 I won’t tell you to go to WeWork and pretend it’s solid advice but I will say that the Spaces office opposite the Opera has 10/10 views.  

Please forgive the typos.

Yours & delightfully dyslexic,

Dimana ✌️ 

Sri Lanka

This is the story of how I replied to a LinkedIn message and, two months later, was praying for my life in a tuk-tuk on the streets of Colombo. 

The LinkedIn message went something like, “Hello ma’am, I am contacting you on behalf of the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing, and we would like to invite you to present a workshop”. 

Naturally, this already sounded somewhat suspicious. If you have ever worked for yourself you’ll know you get approached for all kinds of stuff and most of them are utter bullshit. A few messages later, I find myself on one end of a WhatsApp call; on the other end, someone is lighting a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and exhaling audibly before our conversation begins. 

We talk budgets, objectives and the content for this potential workshop that I will be presenting. In the back of my mind, I’m sceptical, but so far, it sounds mostly legitimate. That’s when I ask what platform they typically use to host their online workshops. Silence. 

• No, ma’am, this is in-person training we want you to do.

• But I live in Europe… 

• Yes, ma’am, we’ll take care of the flights and your accommodation. 
  

More silence. This time, it’s me who’s gone mute. 

The Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing will pay £1000 worth of flights to get me to Colombo so I can deliver a workshop?! What was next? The prince of Nigeria calls to ask if I wanna marry him?!

I promised Ash, the smoker from the WhatsApp call, to think about his offer. After a few moments of deliberation, I decided that the least I could do was a proper due diligence before politely declining the offer.

I turned to my parents’ neighbour who knows the Italian ambassador of Sri Lanka. Surprisingly, he confirmed that SLIM (The Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing) is completely legit. I also got in touch with my friend Helen, who moved to Colombo after leaving Hoi An (where I met her) and had been staying there for the past four months. She also reassured me.

There wasn’t much else to do other than say yes to the seminar, say a prayer and pack my bags.

Colombo 

Five weeks, one flight to Dubai, four hours at the world’s stupidest airport and a flight to Sri Lanka later, I was in the back of a taxi headed towards Colombo. As I was politely chit-chatting with the driver, the reality of the situation suddenly hit. I had arrived.

When we finally made our way to the location, I knew the 8.5 rating for the hotel room I had reserved was looking doubtful. 

If I have to be politically correct, I would tell you that I was in the middle of a neighbourhood that is currently developing. But I’m not, and I’ll tell you I was in what can only be described as a third-world country nightmare. For my Sofia friends, imagine a mix between Fakulteta and Lulin 9. My international friends, I hope you have a vivid imagination because I don’t know what reference would ever do this area justice. 

After Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, I genuinely wasn’t expecting much of a culture shock. I was so wrong. Minutes later, I was being ushered through an unmarked door after the hotel manager had come out to unlock the gate for me.

After a quick nap, a call with a client, and a massage, I met my friend Helen for dinner. She definitely didn’t reassure me about my safety. I suggested we take a six-minute walk to a nearby supermarket. Helen was terrified of the idea. She insisted we Uber, and I insisted that I wanna go home now (please).

Sigiriya

After a night of well-deserved rest in Colombo, I headed towards the bus station to make my way to the next destination - Sigiriya. 

I boarded a bus that was probably manufactured when they first invented buses, and the wait to depart began. The single seats on the left were soon full. The double seats on the right were slowly filling; surely, we would go soon. Right? Wrong. 

Two hours late,r we were still at the bus stop in Colombo. Ten street vendors had come on the bus to ask us if we wanted to buy drinks and snacks for the journey. Only one of them was selling loose olives in plastic bags - clearly the only true entrepreneur out of the bunch. 

Two and a half hours later, the driver started opening extra seats that occupied the aisle. In case you are wondering, I didn’t ask about health and safety.

Sigiriya is the size of a small village. One main road makes its way through the entire length of the place with small, makeshift bungalows on each side of the road. It is mostly a quiet place with incredible nature surrounding it. That is, until nature is in your backyard.

The house next to my hotel had to evacuate in the middle of my first night there. A wild white elephant had come inside their garden, and the family of five was worried he might go crazy and destroy their home. How’s that for a second wave of culture shock (and my second night in Sri Lanka)?

This is when I started to realise that the life Sri Lankan people lead was nothing like anything I had experienced before. 

Places:

• Pidurangala Rock - the rock opposite the lion’s rock. Literally, what *everyone* told me was that there’s no reason to pay £30 to go up the Lion’s rock when you can pay £3, climb the one opposite and then actually take photos of the Lion rock, which looks way better. Fair enough, that’s exactly what I did. At 4am. To see the sunrise. Manic? yes. Worth it? yes.

• Dambulla Cave Temple

• Cappuccino - having decent coffee in Sigiriya is hard. Having good coffee + stable internet is harder. This is the best place I found for when you need to open your laptop.

• Little Hut Sigiriya - a small, cosy place with cheap, authentic food and lovely people.  
  

Kandy

After the bus experience from Colombo to Sigiriya, I wasn’t necessarily exhilarated at the idea of another inter-city bus journey. I decided to call for an Uber to Kandy. Little did I know that the local taxi drivers were boycotting Uber, and half an hour of waiting on the app gave absolutely no results. That’s when I remembered I had saved the number of a local taxi driver. 20 minutes later, a random German couple I had met at breakfast and I were on our way to the old capital city of Sri Lanka.

The 89km journey took nearly five hours to complete. How? I promise you, I don’t know. Rules of physics just don’t apply in Sri Lanka, I guess. 

The speed of travel, however, wasn’t the most shocking thing that day. No, it was the scene that unfolded in front of our eyes as soon as we entered the city.

*A little backstory here*

The city of Kandy used to be the capital of Sri Lanka. It’s a gorgeous city with old colonial buildings and a temple that houses Buddha’s tooth. Yes, his tooth. Legend has it that when the Buddha died, his body was cremated, and his left canine tooth was retrieved from the funeral pyre. Why are they saving it? Unsure. But once a year, there is a big festival that parades the tooth across the streets of Kandy. 

Locals believe that if they arrive in the city, stay there for the entire duration of the ten-day festival and make sure they see the tooth on each day, they’ll have good fortune for the rest of the year. For reference, Sri Lanka is home to 22+ million people. Not all of them had made their way to the city centre of Kandy… but it was more than enough people. 

As a result, the sidewalks were completely unusable. I often found myself walking on the pavement surrounded by people, buses, cars, mopeds, elephants and tuk-tuk rickshas. Needless to say, getting anywhere was a nightmare.

The festival itself was a magical experience that I’m grateful to have experienced. My aforementioned friend Helen and her boyfriend had arrived in Kandy and together we sat on a balcony where you could pay to have a better view of the show. The four-hour-long spectacle featured music, fire dancing, elephants in fancy dress, more dancing, more elephants and about five women who were allowed to take part (patriarchy is alive and well in Sri Lanka, I guess). 

Places in Kandy: 

• Soul Food for brunch 

• Hideout Lounge for lunch/ dinner

• Department of Coffee - to rest, recharge & grab a cuppa 

• Royal Botanical Gardens (yes, it’s really worth it) 

• Temple of the tooth

Colombo #2 

After Kandy, I headed back to Colombo for the seminar I was going to present. I got back to where I started effortlessly and ordered an Uber. I was headed towards the hotel that the kind organisers from SLIM had booked for me and, to put it politely, was managing my expectations. The views from the car, however, went beyond anything I had anticipated.

Complete contrast to my first day in Colombo.

We first went past the neighbourhood that houses all the embassies and (presumably) a lot of the people with money who live in Colombo. You could really tell the Brits had been here because this felt remarkably close to South Kensington, with beautiful white buildings and well-maintained green parks.

Once we stepped out of that part of the city, we entered what genuinely looked like London’s Holborn area. Tall office buildings made entirely of glass and steel would hit the skies and leave you dizzy. Perfect roads, busy shopping centres and trendy restaurants create the feeling that you are in the capital of a developed country. 

Did the people here know about their fellow Sri Lankans who wait for the wild elephant to leave their garden? Were they aware that people sleep on the streets of Kandy for ten days in a row? Or are they too busy buying the latest iPhone, eating at Asian fusion restaurants and attending workshops about the future of Generative AI? 

Speaking of this last crowd, this is exactly who came to the workshop. 160+ people came to attend a four-hour seminar followed by a panel discussion. They wanted to learn how to use GenAI to propel their business forward, achieve more at work and ensure they are optimising their time efficiently.

It was a genuine pleasure to speak at the event. At the end of it, I felt like I had learned at least as much as I had tried to teach.

Places in Colombo: 

• Swasthya Wellness and Spa

• Life’s Good Kitchen

• Gangaramaya Temple (temple with the smallest Buddha) 

• Beach

• Department of Coffee (again!)

Please forgive the typos.

Yours & delightfully dyslexic,

Dimana ✌️