I’ve always been somewhat cold-hearted. I’m not sure whether it’s a byproduct of my “Field Marshal” personality where there’s “not much room for error” and where “feelings are a weakness”. Or perhaps it’s simply been honed (or blunted?) by 11 years of seeing daily poverty in Asia....
Life As Art – Failing to Succeed
Failure is not an option for me. I hate to fail. At anything. Anytime. I blame it on my massively type A personality. Or my ENTJ Myers-Briggs type, affectionately known as “The Field Marshal”, the Bringer of Order to chaos, the need to control everything and everyone....
Pretty in Pink
I have a confession. I’m a bit fancy. There. I said it. I just spent $100 on a water cooler just so that I don’t have to drink water from a jug in the fridge like a plebe. People who come over always remark on how many...
Wacky World of Work – Craigslist Edition
“Work” is a such a strange thing. We all dream of the day when we don’t have to do it. And yet, it defines us for most of our adult lives. When I moved to Vietnam about a year ago, I was anticipating a full year off...
Luxury Redefined in Ninh Van Bay
Brigitte Bardot in St. Tropez. Beyonce in St. Barth’s. George Clooney on Lake Como. There’s a reason celebrities flock to these destinations. They’re exclusive. They’re gorgeous. They’re either hard or expensive to get to or sometimes even both. They’re an unreal slice of the luxe life where...
Confronting the Past: A Story of Two Families
The past has a way of catching up to us. No matter how fast you run, no matter where you try to hide, it inevitably finds you, for better or worse. I was born in Vietnam, a child of the war. Here, it’s referred to as the...
The Real Housewives of Luang Prabang
Money spoils everything. It’s at once an evil that changes everyone it touches and yet we all need it in order to travel to these far flung magical places, so beautifully illustrated in glossy magazines. I’m always a little sad to visit “minority villages”. They’re inevitably a...
The Perfect Day in Luang Prabang
Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, Luang Prabang is the Brangelina of scenic towns. A gorgeous marriage between traditional Lao architecture, on display in its many wats, unchanged wooden houses and a smattering of royal residences, and the gentility of French colonial buildings and their...
Wish it, believe it, and it will be so
It started with a persistent thought, a tiny ember of an idea, really. An ember so fragile that the softest breeze would be more than enough to snuff out its light. A desire so improbable that to say it aloud in anything more than a whisper would...
Laos
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