After hearing that I went to Vietnam for a month this summer, everybody and their cats and their dogs and their birds have been asking me about how my summer went. I’m so tired of explaining my summer to everyone individually, so here’s an entire article about what I did this summer.
Sometime in the beginning of the summer, I went to Canada with some friends. We had no idea what we were really doing there. We just spent the first few days trying, and failing, to find good food so we just ended up going to a nearby McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We got so tired of it that we ended up getting an Uber just so we could ask them about food recommendations. We tried a few locations and the food was pretty decent, but as broke college students with little money to their name, we just ended up going back to ol’ reliable, though we did hit up a market and buy 50 baguettes that we had to finish before we left.
Other than the sad and slimy weather during our stay, Montreal was really fun. We spent our days going out to museums and exploring the old looking city. And we spent our nights playing Smash Bros. Ultimate until our neighbors knocked on our door. We were so obviously American tourists that on multiple occasions, when we walked into a small store, they never failed to switch the music to Kendrick Lamar’s diss tracks.
After that, I went back to New York City, where I stayed for the majority of the summer. I played so much badminton with my friends, and won so much that I could probably shuttlecock a shuttle. Shuttle a shuttlecock. Shuttle a cock? With my eyes closed. All of that to keep myself busy to forget the impending doom of the upcoming school year.
And then, around the beginning of August, my Vietnam adventure began. Altogether this summer, I definitely got on a plane more than 10 times. Call me the traveler the way I be traveling.
My family and I followed tours for the majority of the trip, and only near the end did we do some self-exploration. At one point, I was even debating whether to wear pants or shorts. One could say that we saw the highest of highs and almost the lowest of lows. Or I guess if I had to put it another way, we went from the highest mountain in Vietnam (3,147m high) to the tunnels of the Ho Chi Minh trail, witnessing a lot of cool monuments and historical sites.
Although I was too lazy to actually take pictures of myself near those sites, I definitely wasn’t too lazy to take pictures of literally everything around me. I might’ve gotten lost from the tour group a few times because I was too focused on taking pictures, but that’s not important.
More importantly is that my cousin drove me around on her motorcycle. And that was very cool. We even took a picture with me in the front, as if I was the one who drove it. There’s probably some statement about the patriarchy in there somewhere.
Overall though, vacations are never about the times you forget your sunscreen or the mosquito bites you get — they’re about the fun and friends you made along the way (even if you didn’t make any friends). So maybe one day I’ll stuff all of my mutuals in a suitcase and then we’ll travel the world together.
