I Moved to Vietnam!
“Why the hell do you want to move to Vietnam?”, “You’re going all by yourself?”, “Isn’t it dangerous there?”, “Are you going to war?”, “Do they have electricity there?”, “Wait, you don’t have a job or a place to live lined up yet?!”
I won’t go into all of these questions I’ve gotten from people after telling them about my plans to move to Vietnam but I would like to share just how the hell it was I came upon this decision to leave everything I’ve ever known behind, fit as much as I could into a backpack, and take the leap into the complete unknown.
I planned on this post being titled I’m Moving to Vietnam as I anticipated writing all about my plans well before I actually moved to the other side of the world, but alas time got the best of me again. So I’m writing this nearly three weeks after getting settled into my new home, but I’m not even going to get into what these last few weeks have been like in this post, I’m going way back to the beginning of how it all started.
Why Made Me Decide to Move to the Other Side of the World?
Well, if you know me at all you probably know that I love nothing more than traveling and experiencing anything new. Walking around a new city, trying a new dish, or admiring a new landscape gives me my greatest thrill in life. For that reason traveling as much as I possibly can has been a dream of mine for a long time.
Final view of America
In my very first post I wrote a bit about when I first got inspired to take a long term trip and that idea has been in the back of my mind ever since that moment but it’s been real easy to get too bogged down with work and life stress to make any time for making dreams come true and shit like that. But after spending more than two years in northern Michigan during a pandemic, being single, not being happy at my job, and feeling like I was going nowhere—it felt like there was no better time to stop putting off what I couldn’t stop thinking about and make a plan to just get out there and do the damn thing already.
I was a few months away from turning 29 when I started seriously considering this decision and I had been saying to myself that I want to get out into the world, however that looks, before I turned 30. So I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter unless I was okay with looking back later in life and wishing I would have at least tried. It was now or never, baby.
I didn’t have nearly enough money saved up to be able to travel for a year without having any money coming in, but I didn’t want to wait another year or two or three and have to save every single penny I earned, so I started looking into what options I had to get me out of the United States and be able to make money at the same time. I had heard stories about people going to China or Japan after graduating college to teach English and how it was one of the best experiences of their lives, but it hadn’t even really occurred to me that I could do that too. That was until I came across a blog post about how much money you can make doing it and how you get to have the experience of living in a new country and be able to travel around too! It all sounded too good to be true. The best part was I already had most of the qualifications that they want English teachers to have. All I needed to do was get my TEFL certificate, which I could easily do online in a few months, and then I’d be good to go.
So, I said to myself “wow I could actually do this, I could really go live in an entirely new country”, and I committed and started making all the plans to do just that.
What Made Me Choose the Country Vietnam?
In my research on what countries were the best to teach English in I was able to narrow it down to Vietnam pretty quickly. Asia was definitely the best continent to teach in to make the most money, Southeast Asia was the best part of Asia to have a low cost of living and work less hours, and Vietnam was the country to earn the most money compared to other Southeast Asian countries, be close to so much natural beauty and exciting cities, and of course there’s the food!
Vietnam just seemed to offer everything I was looking for. I’d be able to live in an incredibly unique and beautiful country, be able to save money because the pay is good and the cost of living is so insanely cheap, be just a short flight away from so many countries I’ve never been to, eat some of the best food of my life, and immerse myself in a new language and culture.
When it came to deciding what city in Vietnam I would live and work in, that didn’t take long at all either. There are basically three good options for cities to work in as a teacher, Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, Da Nang in central Vietnam, and Hanoi in the north. Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, is the largest city in Vietnam with a large population of young people and expats and has more of a new, cosmopolitan, and party kind of vibe from what I understand. Da Nang is right on the ocean and is the smallest compared to the other cities and therefore somewhat less opportunities for teaching and a smaller expat community.
HCMC is pretty much hot as hell year round with no distinct four seasons, just wet and dry, and for that reason, along with it being so massive, it was out of the running. Being on the ocean in Da Nang sounded great but there wasn’t much about the city that was pulling me in and I knew it might be a bit harder for me to find a job since there wouldn’t be as many schools being a smaller city.
To be honest I didn’t even consider any other cities to live in, I already knew Hanoi was the city I wanted to be in before I could even put much thought into it. I didn’t even know that much about the city so I have no idea how or why I knew that was the place I was meant to be, but I just knew. It may have had something to do with how ancient the city is—over a thousand years old—and it still being filled with old and traditional culture but very much existing in the present and being relevant at the same time.
I have to admit that not that long ago the only things that came to mind when someone mentioned Vietnam were the war and pho, I know very American of me. It wasn’t until watching Anthony Bourdain’s shows that I got an entirely new perspective about Vietnam. This country held a very special place in his heart and you could see in the way he talked about it on his show that it was a place unlike any other. He made the country sound like living and breathing poetry and I just needed to go and experience it for myself. Ever since I made the decision, I just couldn’t get my mind off the country I would be calling my new home.
How Did I Prepare for the Move?
For starters I simply typed into Google “how to move to Vietnam” and just sort of went from there. I spent about a month or so just reading tons of blog posts and watching videos by people who had embarked on the same adventure I was about to embark on and just got really geeked up and inspired. I was still keeping my plan my little secret until I felt assured enough in what I was doing to be able to say it out loud and not let anyone’s concerns cause me to doubt myself and my plan, and if I’m being honest saying it out loud would make it feel so much more real and scary and I needed a little bit of time to feel ready for that.
My To Do List Before Leaving:
Renew passport - Very important step and glad I did it as early as I could.
Complete TEFL course - If you don’t already know TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I was glad I was able to find a company that was very affordable but still widely accepted by schools all over the world.
Tell family - As wonderful and supportive as I knew they’d be this was naturally one of the hardest parts.
Get FBI criminal background check - To be honest I kind of forgot about this requirement until a couple months before planning to leave.
Get FBI criminal background check authenticated - So apparently the document itself that states I have a clean criminal background isn’t good enough and it has to go through some process where it goes through the state and the federal level to prove that it’s legit? Yeah and it costs a good chunk of change and takes months to process. I’m still waiting on this because I was dumb and waited until late in the game to send mine off.
Get necessary travel vaccines and medications - Thanks mom and dad for not being crazy anti-vaxxers and getting me all my shots as a kid so I didn’t have to start this process from scratch! And yay for not having to use my anti-diarrheal medication! Really hope I didn’t just jinx it.
Book plane tickets - This step was HUGE. I knew that I wanted to leave in the fall but deciding on a date and actually booking the tickets was like “oh shit, it’s really happening, I have exactly this much time left, ahh!”
Get travel insurance - Every traveler I trusted said this part was absolutely necessary and I definitely didn’t want to be in a foreign country without some sort of help if I needed it.
Find loving home for my cat and the love of my life, Taco - This is the part that brought me the most tears and sadness and brought all of my excitement about my new life to a screeching halt. I couldn’t be happier about the wonderful home I found for her but this part hurt like an absolute bitch.
Give notice at work - Oh boy I was really about to be unemployed and moving to a new country without a job lined up, but it was time to move on!
Apply for visa - I still don’t fully understand how this all works but I basically applied for visa approval letter through a company to get a visa on arrival. I paid the fee and they emailed me the approval letter a few days later and that’s what I presented at the airport, not nearly as complicated as I thought it would be.
Open Charles Schwab checking account - Vietnam is a cash country and I knew I needed a debit card I could use to withdraw cash without having to pay international ATM fees and Charles Schwab had the best option for that. When I called to open the account they actually wouldn’t let me open it because I made the mistake of making small talk and telling the person that I was moving to Vietnam and because I would be “residing” in another country for more than six months they said they couldn’t open the account for me. After being put on hold for a long time so they could talk to their manager and eventually told me no I realized they just didn’t want to have to pay all the foreign transaction and ATM fees. I was pissed at myself for willingly giving away too much information. I just applied to open the account online on my own right after and hoped that they didn’t blacklist my name or something and it worked! If you’re reading this and you work for Charles Schwab please don’t close my checking account, I really need it.
Buy all the supplies I needed - There ended up being a lot more little things to get than I thought seeing as I was only bringing two carry on backpacks, but there hasn’t been much of anything that I haven’t gotten good use out of so it was well worth the stress of whether or not all my packages would arrive on time. I take that back, there is a dress I still have yet to wear, but it’s got island vibes written all over it so I know I’ll get good use out of it when I’m able to jet off to some Thai island.
Grieve, cry, freak out and spend as much time with my loved ones as I could - This one is pretty self explanatory.
So there you have it, I moved to fucking Vietnam! It’s been the scariest, hardest, most gut-wrenching decision I’ve ever made in my life and I feel like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, because I don’t. But I’m here, I’m doing it and I’m figuring it all out as I go.