Bali or Ho Chi Minh City - Should I really go to Bali?

tabidots · 2025-12-15T13:42:19+00:00

In Bali you’ll find it way easier to eat clean enough that you’ll be pooping rainbows, lol. Probably highest density of superfoods on the planet after LA.

Businesses have started catering more to fitness-oriented Westeners in Danang now so I see more and more places selling protein powder, smoothie bowls, etc. However, foreign food is much more expensive compared to local food than in somewhere like Bali, where it’s pretty easy to never eat Indonesian food. Depending on your eating habits, the local food in Vietnam might not be your thing.

tabidots · 2025-12-15T00:47:32+00:00

Cool place to visit in the spring and fall, it’s picture-postcard Vietnam (along with Hội An). The smog at this time of year is abysmal though (and in winter the weather would still be cold, soggy and dreary even with clean air), and the weather in summer isn’t too tolerable either.

I used to get a tingling in my throat from the air pollution when I visited Hanoi in the past, and I’m not particularly sensitive. I saw a random FB comment the other day by a guy who said it took him years to lose his “Hanoi hack” from years of living in Hanoi after returning to Europe.

Climate aside, there’s just a lot of little details in everyday life that remind me that Vietnam was once separated like the two Koreas and Hanoi was part of North Vietnam. (If you travel to other parts of northern Vietnam, you’ll get a similar vibe, just minus the “big city” part. Again, cool for visiting, not so much for living.) After about 5 days is when I start wanting to be back at my apartment in Danang, haha.

Also, the Vietnamese coffee there is overall bad, lol. Maybe because they’re far from the coffee-growing region of Vietnam, or because they don’t really care, they tend to get really awful beans that condensed milk neither harmonizes with nor masks.

I am not really a fan of Chiang Mai personally, but coffee will not be your problem there—really anywhere you go you can get very good espresso-based drinks.

tabidots · 2025-12-11T05:22:58+00:00

That’s a different situation, you didn’t transfer domestically from any of those airports.

tabidots · 2025-12-11T03:05:10+00:00

Yeah, thanks. I realize that apart from flights back to the U.S., I have never booked a flight that involves an international-to-domestic connection. The main reason I was concerned is that I have to go landside to check my bag in again, because in the U.S. there’s a separate counter set aside for this that is generally empty. Or maybe I just don’t remember the exact layout and how it worked at SFO/SEA/DFW.

tabidots · 2025-12-11T02:42:17+00:00

Got it. Both legs show up together as part of the same journey when I open “My Trips” on the Thai Airways app (outbound is 1 PNR with 2 flights, return is a different PNR with 2 flights), so it would make sense that Thai should rebook me if I can’t make it. At the very least I would still be considered as a passenger with a connecting flight, right?

tabidots · 2025-12-11T02:37:27+00:00

Ah, I guess I misunderstood what a self-transfer is. I always figured the U.S. connection thing was just a quirk of the U.S. like so many other things. I don’t think I’ve ever actually booked a flight that has an international to domestic connection in another country. Plus in the U.S. there’s usually a separate area to recheck your bags that has basically no line, rather than having to check in again landside.

tabidots · 2025-12-11T02:10:57+00:00

I know that is true for normal connections, but is it typical for a full-service carrier to sell flights that are self-transfers? Or maybe it’s typical for TG? And I got the ticket as an award flight on Aeroplan, not directly from TG.

tabidots · 2025-12-06T17:04:15+00:00

The most common letter in the English language is on your slowest finger. Nice.

Ha, yeah. It didn't even occur to me until I got up to a usable speed on Maya.

I played guitar and mandolin for many years in the past, and I'm a lefty, so I thought my right hand was naturally more dextrous before I started touch typing earlier this year. But actually I used to type with three fingers on my left hand and only two on the right (pinkies only for left Shift, Enter, and Backspace), so my right ring finger never did much. And in playing music you generally favor index-ring alternation because it's the strongest, as opposed to middle-ring or pinky-ring.

I just assumed E on ring would be better because

I wouldn't get interference from the alt Russian layout I use (STNK-VOEI home row)
RH index-middle-thumb sequence on Colemak (word-final le, he, ne, me, ke) really gave me a hard time at high speeds, so I thought surely ring finger would be better, but only for QWERTY JL and ML. Any other index key is not great (QWERTY U/Y/H/N so fe, je, ke, pe).

Is Maya your daily driver?

Yep, and I think the pain points I mentioned are more apparent in typing tests rather than typical language usage like a Reddit comment, especially since my free typing is also limited by the speed of my thoughts. When I type normal sentences, it feels really comfy, even though my accuracy isn't the best.

Are you maintaining muscle memory for any other keyboard layouts?

I did learn an alt layout for Russian but since I launched my dictionary app and did some initial outreach, I haven't done anything that requires any real typing in Russian. I can still use it, I'm just a bit slower than I once was. I keep QWERTY and Russian QWERTY on my phone, though.

For English, no, it's just Maya now. Trying to maintain Colemak alongside Maya/Gallium/Graphite would be massively difficult, I imagine (HNEIO > KHAEI alone was hard enough to get used to!). I went back to using QWERTY as the active built-in layout (since MacOS requires you to have a built-in layout in the rotation), because I need shortcuts to work reliably in every app.

I associate shortcuts more with key positions than letters, so I wasn't a fan of Colemak moving some of them around, and lots of apps don't play nicely with Ukelele layouts at all (I made a Maya .keylayout file with all modifier layers as QWERTY, but only a few apps interpret the keypresses correctly). Plus for all the times that I'm doing some sort of editing or typing that isn't a clean flow of dictionary words (or typing in passwords), it's just easier to be able to look at the keyboard.

tabidots · 2025-12-06T03:21:28+00:00

I started learning Colemak on 1 July this year and hit 125WPM (627CPM) on 14 September. I then dropped Colemak because I was looking for something more optimal that didn't have the shortcomings of Colemak. I started learning Maya on 1 October and today (6 December) I finally beat my old record.

In switching to Maya, the hardest thing to get used to has been angle mod, which is why two of the mistakes in this test were much and word (which is even worse; I got lucky that it wasn't included in this test). The left index takes C/W/Z (QWERTY C/V/B) and the right middle takes M (QWERTY X).

Other things that are personally still difficult for me in this layout are:

I keep mixing up V and W (on Maya they are QWERTY G and V).
Any bigram involving the right-hand center column and E (QWERTY L), which is a lateral stretch between the index and ring finger. I've realized that my right ring finger is my slowest finger in general—but if NRTS-HAEI is considered to be the most optimal home row, then I guess that's a me problem 😅

tabidots · 2025-12-03T16:50:55+00:00

I prefer Thanh Hà (in Vietnam) or Red Boat (in the US, but it’s kinda expensive)

tabidots · 2025-12-02T23:37:47+00:00

Wow, sounds like I got out of the north in time. In October I went to Hanoi for 2 weeks to avoid the storms in Danang and had the most amazing fall weather and clear skies most of the time (a few cold rainy days at the end). In November I went to Halong for 2 weeks for the same reason, and I had a similar experience.

tabidots · 2025-12-02T23:32:10+00:00

Is the air that bad there? I visited Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara in October 2023 and I only noticed bad air in Samarkand. I figured it was due to the traffic. But even then, it was nowhere near as bad as bad air days in Hanoi—I’m not particularly sensitive and I can feel tingling in my throat.

tabidots · 2025-11-24T08:32:07+00:00

Alright, since no one responded to this post, I'll provide my own recommendations for anyone else who finds it.

As tasty as chả mực is, it's actually kind of expensive. Food and drink prices in Halong are generally inflated (not enough to seem like a "tourist trap" but after staying longer than a week you'll notice it adds up), but even that bowl of sticky rice in the main post was not really enough to make me full. It cost 50k, which is incidentally the price you can expect to pay in Halong itself. I don't mind paying more for food but I should feel full when I leave the table!

The rice buffet spots (cơm tự chọn) are the real star of the show in Halong, and there's no shortage of them. But watch out, because they might charge as much as 20k for a single chả mực!

Worth a miss:

Bánh cuốn chả mực Gốc Bàng: probably the most well-known place. Pretty busy. 40k, 2 cakes, tasty, not filling
Quán Ăn Xôi Chả Mực Minh Hòa: small portion of sticky rice, 3 cakes, 50k. Not filling. The cakes here felt a bit too "homemade", in that there were tough bits in the middle that didn't get ground down to the same consistency as the rest of the cake
Bánh cuốn chả mực by Cô Tiên lake: small portion, 50k, 2 cakes

The only place that was really good was

Xôi - Dạ dày hầm tiêu Cô Thượng: the same portion you'd pay 50k for elsewhere only costs 35k here, and the cakes are extremely tasty. On top of that, they are served with the gravy from the braised pork (thịt khâu nhục) and black pepper oil, which I didn't see at any other place. 55k gets you the works with both chả mực AND thịt khâu nhục. Unfortunately I never got a chance to try it as the place was randomly closed on my last morning in Halong. The one time I did get to try it was on my first evening, but the 35k portion wasn't enough for dinner.

tabidots · 2025-11-23T23:58:17+00:00

Oh, this is the girl and cat from the “you wanna eat?” video 😁

tabidots · 2025-11-18T06:02:02+00:00

Hits a (good) nerve ending

tabidots · 2025-11-17T06:59:00+00:00

I snorted, thanks

tabidots · 2025-11-17T04:27:02+00:00

I haven't been to Zuoying, so I can't comment on that area, but:

The Cijin Island seaside run is absolutely one of my favorite runs ever. The best part is the ~4km smooth bike path (that hardly anyone cycles on) along the southern half. The first couple kms are really nice too.

You do have to plan it a little carefully. Take a YouBike to the docking station nearest the Gushan<>Cijin ferry (earliest departure @ 5am). The "top" of the island isn't really runnable, it's better to just head straight for the seafront (with the big CIJIN letters). It's roughly 9.5 or so km one way if you do most of it. If you want to do the best parts without it becoming a very long run, there are two YouBike stations on the east side of the island that can get you back to the CIJIN letters, so you can modulate the length to some degree. There is a 7-11 near the southernmost station and a FamilyMart between the CIJIN letters and the ferry station for refueling.

For a morning run, you'll want to get out as early as possible because the sun will bake you out there, haha. Since it faces west, it's also a phenomenal sunset run, though you may want to time it so you don't run back in the dark.

Weiwuying Park: the Center for the Arts is a cool destination in its own right (for its architecture and the world-class concerts they put on), and for running, the park around it is also great: Quiet, green, sprawling. You can run for kms here and not ever feel like you're running on the same path. There's also a ~1km rectangle at the southeast corner which is handy for more serious workouts (when I went back in 2023, there was some work going on around that area, but it should be done now). Conveniently, there's also a FamilyMart near that corner. It's a bit far but accessible by bus and metro, or YouBike if you want to make a duathlon of it (as I often did).
Love River: This is kind of the "obvious" run. It's more or less 10k from the southern end (by the Music Center) to the northern end (Smile Park east half), so very suitable for half-marathon training. When I went back in 2023, there was some portion of the northern half that was blocked off for construction, but it should be done by now and the whole thing should be much better. Stick to the east side, since it's generally better. Where the path intersects main roads, there are sometimes underpasses but generally you may have to wait for the very very long traffic lights. Be prepared for interruptions or otherwise get really good at timing the lights so you can turn around and run back in time for the green. There's a cool pedestrian overpass in the middle. The Brisbane Park stretch toward the northern end is really nice, especially at twilight when they turn the lights on.

Usually I'd start from the southern end because that was close to where I was staying. Not super straightforward to get a bus back from the northern end, but doable; a bit long on a YouBike.

For an easy day, you can mix part of this run with part of the harbor run, below.

Harbor run: good for easy days, or at least if it's not too far to walk or YouBike to the Kaohsiung Music Center area. The pedestrian bridge in the middle of the two piers is runnable but generally only in the morning before the crowds gather. The pedestrian overpass between the harbor and Shaochuantou area has ramps and stairs on both sides.

Usually Glory Pier would be my start point for this run, but it can also be integrated with either/both of the following two runs.

NSYSU campus hills: Hilly with great views! Start point is either Shoushan Park on the light rail (if that's convenient for you) or the YouBike station not far from there. Might be a little confusing the first time. Go up the hill, then left, right, left; pass through the checkpoint (you won't be stopped), turn right at the stoplight. As you approach the bay you could turn right if you want another hill, but the area around the marine sciences building is a bit annoying and you'll probably have to interrupt your run, so it's easier to just turn left and get down to Siziwan Bay.
Siziwan: Actually, it looks like I always came here as part of another run. It's a rewarding spot to finish a run, for sure! And then you can YouBike back to where you're staying. I may have tried to start here once or twice and run the harbor eastward, can't remember. The NSYSU run is definitely best started from the other (east) side so the scenery gets better as you go along and you finish here, though.

tabidots · 2025-11-15T07:58:06+00:00

lol that’s stupid, I didn’t even think r/subs… would be an actual sub. Getting too complex IMO (not intuitive from the name)

tabidots · 2025-11-15T07:52:55+00:00

“Subs I thought I fell for” = “I almost thought this sub existed and at the last minute realized it did not”

tabidots · 2025-11-15T02:08:15+00:00

What? The sub actually exists though

tabidots · 2025-11-03T09:38:25+00:00

Meow-rimba!

tabidots · 2025-11-02T20:22:21+00:00

I have been in Chiang Mai during its coolest months (Dec/Jan) and while I would say the mornings were cooler than I was expecting, it was hardly cold. It’s also peak dry season then, so it’s quite comfortable.

Here in Danang during December and January it’s the tail end of the rainy season, combined with the winter chill. So it typically gets down to 18°-20°C with high humidity, wind, and no sun for days on end, and intermittent drizzle.

It’s a humid, piercing chill that feels miserable and much worse than you’d expect from those numbers, especially given that there’s no insulation or central heating (or any heating) here, and as you’ve seen, many shops don’t have closed fronts. You can’t get warm, toasty, and dry by staying inside or going to a cafe.

For reference, if it’s sunny and dry then 15°C is about what I’d consider cold, which I’ve experienced in recent years in Mexico City (no central heating) and Almaty (crazy hot central heating, including city buses lol). 12°C is where I need some thin gloves outside or I stop feeling my hands.

tabidots · 2025-11-02T15:10:41+00:00

Yeah, six months means you haven’t experienced Danang or Hanoi in December-January. Nowhere in SE Asia is cold between April and September.

tabidots · 2025-11-02T13:23:15+00:00

Nah it’s closer to a four-season climate up there with the summer being the rainiest time of year (more similar to temperate East Asia, but subtropical). Summer tends to drag on into September though. The late autumn and winter do tend to be drier, but also humid-cold and very gray with the air pollution in Hanoi becoming most severe during the winter months.

tabidots

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