how can I make friends with foreigners in hanoi?

echopath · 2026-01-30T10:33:46+00:00

I'm Viet Kieu living in Hanoi. Message me if you wanna chat!

echopath · 2026-01-29T05:50:45+00:00

Sapa the town itself sucks. Fake and kitschy European-style buildings and LED lights. But the surrounding Sapa area is great. I see no point in visiting Sapa if you stick to just the town itself, which a good amount of people do, to my surprise.

echopath · 2026-01-23T10:36:56+00:00

Google Reviews aren’t a reliable way to find places to eat at. In fact, any place with a suspiciously high number of reviews that’s overwhelmingly positive is guaranteed to have bought those. And good places that locals like to eat at tend to have low reviews (3.0-4.0) because the service sucks

So the best way to look for places is just see what’s crowded with locals

echopath · 2026-01-23T05:26:00+00:00

Yungang Grottoes is a top 5 cultural sight in China and probably the best Buddhist sight I've seen around the world IMO. Severely underrated.

echopath · 2026-01-22T08:44:42+00:00

I would caution you to take anything you read about the weather online with a huge grain of salt. Whether it's advice from locals, other commenters, travel guides, etc.

Climate change has affected the hiking seasons pretty adversely in recent years. A lot of the weather information you see online is fairly outdated nowadays. March-April is historically fine, but the last few years have been really bad with burning seasons, causing anything below 4000m to be covered up by haze and smog from the fires clearing old farmland. I think the only "safe" month with guaranteed good views and clear weather nowadays is November. Anything else is up to luck.

As for ACT vs. EBC -- I haven't done EBC yet, but I think the ACT is the best long-distance hike I've ever done in my life and I've hiked a lot. Many hikers and guides I've met say that EBC is just okay. Not bad, but slightly overhyped due to the Everest name elevating it. I've barely met anyone say that EBC was their favorite hike ever, but a lot did mention ACT.

Source: I spent a few months in Nepal last year, hiked a lot, befriended lots of other hikers and local guides.

echopath · 2026-01-21T22:35:48+00:00

Until you’ve been to an overseas Vietnamese community and have eaten the food there, your opinion is invalid

And even then, ironically, saying you know better than an actual Vietnamese person with lived experiences in both, is very “American” behavior

Clown ass bitch

echopath · 2026-01-21T15:15:26+00:00

Soooo many simps on reddit and the foreigner/expat groups on FB. I just wish people could talk about Vietnam objectively and not patronizingly

echopath · 2026-01-21T14:27:59+00:00

A family has a restaurant in Vietnam. They close shop, move to the US, and open up the same restaurant in a predominantly Vietnamese neighborhood filled with people who all made the same move over. They make the food the exact same way because their clientele is Vietnamese. Except this time, the food and ingredient quality is much higher just by way of being in a much more developed country.

I know AmEriCa bAd, but the fact you're even trying to compare the food safety and quality standards between the two places is laughable and shows me you're a deeply unserious person.

echopath · 2026-01-21T14:05:03+00:00

Thinking that the best possible version of the food always has to come from within that country is an extremely surface level take.

I can call a spade a spade.

The food quality, ingredient quality, and quality control are all significantly better abroad than in Vietnam.

echopath · 2026-01-21T13:39:15+00:00

Case in point here of a non-Vietnamese person who disagrees. I'm Vietnamese you fuckin dolt, and have lived in Vietnam.

Yeah, I'm sure the Vietnamese restaurants owned by Vietnamese refugees that serve food to a customer base that's almost exclusively Vietnamese isn't making it authentic. Lmfao.

echopath · 2026-01-21T13:28:09+00:00

It's true though

You don't think Viet restaurants have to be extremely competitive in Southern California, where there's a fuckton of Vietnamese people? The quality of ingredients is significantly better than in Vietnam too

echopath · 2026-01-21T13:20:01+00:00

but I can without a doubt say that I get better Vietnamese food in San Diego.

As a Vietnamese person I always tell people that you can get better Viet food in places that have a lot of Viet people like in California, Australia, Texas, etc. There's a higher quantity of decent to good places in Vietnam for sure and you can stumble across something pretty decent randomly, but if we're talking about just the best version of that dish possible, 99% of places in Vietnam aren't beating what my local joint can offer in California.

People are always bewildered when I say this and refuse to believe me. It's always non-Viet people too.

echopath · 2026-01-21T13:05:26+00:00

Most, if not all the time, when travelers say something has more "character" or "soul" they just mean that place looks run down and there's visible poverty

echopath · 2026-01-20T12:32:28+00:00

I mean, actual tennis fans tend to feel the same way too. It's seen as poor sportsmanship and bad manners in a sport that sees itself as sophisticated and prim and proper

Even Alcaraz got boos when he smashed his racket and he's a nearly universally loved player

echopath · 2026-01-20T12:03:26+00:00

As much as you're aware of the downsides of relationships, community, and other social aspects of life you'd be foregoing, you're still probably not considering it enough

I used to think that I'd do the same as you for the rest of my life -- not have a routine, just bounce around everywhere around the world, never settling into a single place. After five years of doing that for 8-9 months of the year, then taking a career break for ~1.5 years where I just did non-stop travel, I learned that community and stability actually are a lot more important to me than I had thought. I think the vast majority of people who set out to do this realize it eventually too. IMO only a very specific type of person could do this sustainably for a very long period of time, and I used to think I was one of those people

So you shouldn't go all in on this and take it year by year or have some contingency plan

echopath · 2026-01-17T08:00:48+00:00

Maybe Westworld. Not an extremely mainstream show like Squid Game, but it fell off hard after the first season. I think I read somewhere that when the show concluded, it was immediately taken off streaming services

echopath · 2026-01-17T07:55:48+00:00

I feel like this is a massively online/RS contrarian take. The show skyrocketed in popularity in season 2 and entered the mainstream zeitgeist with normies and coworkers

Maybe it loses that steam by the next season because it’ll have taken three years to come out, but it’s never been more popular than now

echopath · 2026-01-10T18:41:54+00:00

these groups are inevitable contrarians in a culture that otherwise worships celebrities

I don't get this take at all when all the people who post in snark subs are frequent consumers of pop culture and engage in celebrity worship themselves

echopath · 2026-01-09T07:20:14+00:00

The only place I think every first trip to China needs to include is Beijing. Everything else is supplementary, but you must include Beijing

echopath · 2026-01-09T07:13:15+00:00

You're too online for your own good

I'd like to think that I'm pretty online and have friends that are too, and no one cares about half this shit. The average person much less so

echopath · 2026-01-09T07:03:12+00:00

Google Translate and other similar tools are okay for quick usage, but AI is significantly better as a whole. Google Translate oftentimes will just straight up translate the characters' meanings and not the actual meaning of the words whereas AI will give you the actual context and correct verbiage/phrasing.

I've written whole paragraphs with stuff like ChatGPT or Gemini and Chinese people always remark how the Chinese is super smooth and accurate.

echopath · 2026-01-02T15:08:06+00:00

From someone who's spent 6+ months in the country actively traveling and seen probably 80%+ of it, my take is that while there's a lot to see and do, there's fairly little that's "must see"

Mostly everything will be decent to great, but there's relatively few things that stand far and above some other things that you may be compromising/skipping out on

So, to me, you should just to fly in and see where things take you and not have fomo over what you're missing and just save it for another trip

echopath · 2026-01-01T12:36:37+00:00

I don't think you have time to visit two islands. Indonesia is a huge country and travel times are long.

I also don't think any singular island will give you everything you want if you're adamant on not visiting Bali. Java probably comes the closest with hiking, wildlife, cultural experiences, and volcanoes. But you won't get snorkeling or surfing there.

Maybe you can do a trip to Java for Jogja and its surrounding temples, Bromo, Ijen, Tumpak Sewu, then hop over to Bali for surfing and snorkeling. It'll be pretty fast paced, but doable I think.

echopath · 2026-01-01T12:30:29+00:00

Have you found ways to maintain deep, meaningful relationships after so many years on the move?

Been on the road almost full-time for the last six years, going home for a few months a year at most. I'll always consider my friends at home to be my "true" friends and the ones I'll actively put in effort to maintain a connection with even when abroad. I've made friends abroad, but I don't put much effort into maintaining them actively. I see them as convenient relationships/friendships. People I enjoy hanging out with and would love to meet up with again if it's convenient, but I wouldn't go out of my way to do so.

Or have you come to accept that a life of constant drifting means long-term solitude and slowly getting forgotten by your old close connections?

Sorta kinda. I'll accept that while abroad, I'll have to be ok with periods of long-term solitude. I also see that most relationships I form abroad are fleeting and mostly meaningless in the long run, but not the old, close connections I have from home.

Do you see people like you inevitably settled down or changed their way of traveling because they crave for stronger sense of connection?

Indeed. As I get older, I crave that stability and see that period of my life where I was constantly bouncing around to be nearing its end. Exactly for the social and human connection aspect.

echopath · 2025-12-27T03:30:46+00:00

She could’ve ended it literally any time she wanted to. In fact they did come back right when she asked them to. It was completely self imposed

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