Saita Traveler

02/11/2023

Minneapolis last night.

02/11/2023

Chicago last night.

02/06/2023

In the USA green Fanta is green apple flavor. In Thailand it’s banana, orange, pineapple. Had to try it. Honestly, not very eventful. But maybe we should get a review from someone that actually likes pop! But it is fun to try funky things when you see them.

02/04/2023

There is a saying over here. If you want to know what SE Asia looks like today you have to go today. Tomorrow it will be different. I never really knew exactly how true this was until now. We were in Bangkok in late September then we came back a few days ago. It’s crazy how much has changed in the 4 months we’ve been away. But it’s still one of my favorite places on earth. Chen Rak Koon Groongtaehp.

02/04/2023

This explains it all. It’s us! Slow travel is definitely our style. Here is a cool article about what it is.

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01/30/2023

After letting the Vietnam experience sink in, here is my general opinion of the place.
Vietnam is fantastic. We both liked it a lot. We’re already talking about the things we want to see when we get back. The people of Vietnam were warm and friendly. There was a lot less pressure from people selling things on the street than there are in other parts of SE Asia. The food was some of the best we’ve had on this entire trip. And not expensive at all. We found a lot of great places to eat in a restaurant for under $2.00 each. As well the history is rich and their national museum was unbelievable.
I personally found the language barrier to be a little more tricky in Vietnam. Not everyone there spoke what I would call clear English. And Vietnamese is a very difficult language to pronounce. A few people tried to help me with pronunciations but I felt like I wasn’t getting any better at it. And unlike other places we’ve visited not all menus had English descriptions.
As well, being there during their new year celebration, Tet, was not something I’d do again. Most of the businesses close during Tet and Vietnamese people go home to visit their families for 10 days or more. A few places stayed open but they all raised their prices 50% or so for the holiday. And even those restaurants were running out of stuff constantly. It made a tricky situation slight more tricky.
But overall, we loved Vietnam. It was an amazing experience and it taught us a lot about being travelers. Every day we are getting better at this. But in reality, Vietnam made our learning easy. It’s a wonderful place full of kind smiling people.

01/28/2023

Todays adventure was a Thai cooking class. Was a blast and we learned a lot. And yummy!

01/27/2023

Chiang Mai is so beautiful.

01/26/2023

Tonight’s menu includes Tum Lady’s Fingernail. Nope, I didn’t try it.

01/26/2023

Chiang Mai is awesomel. Needless to say we love it here. We had our coffee this morning in the beautiful garden next to the coffee shop.

01/24/2023

We’re gonna miss you Vietnam. Tomorrow we’re off to Chiang Mai Thailand.

01/23/2023

It’s the new year now in Vietnam. The year of the cat. Here is a cheesy song from the 70’s about the year of the cat. After reading the lyrics I decided this song is about traveling through Asia and meeting an Asian girl, then staying to be with her. Seems to be a lot of peoples stories around here.

01/21/2023

Just a few days left in Vietnam. We’re going to miss this place. Amazing food, amazing people, amazing energy.

01/19/2023

One of our favorite things to do.

01/19/2023

On tonight’s Me New we have several delicious beverages!

01/18/2023

We’re going to miss this place! Tiệm Mỳ Tiên Sơn. One of the best noodle places we found in Hanoi.

01/17/2023

They are decorating like crazy for Tet. Tet is the celebration of the lunar new year and it’s the biggest holiday in Vietnam. The celebration lasts a week and officially starts on Sunday Jan 22nd this year. 2023 is the year of the cat and that’s why there are cat decorations everywhere.

01/16/2023

Tonight we went to a Vietnamese water puppet show. It was amazing. By far the best puppet show I’ve ever seen.

01/14/2023

On the weekends they block traffic on the major roads around Hoan Kiem Lake and let kids roll around in these awesome little cars and motorcycles. You can see them lined down the street in the far side of this video. You can rent them for your kid and they are radio controlled so the parents are actually operating the vehicles. Which explains the totally erratic toy car traffic which isn’t much different than the real traffic on these streets. We have a blast watching these kids have so much fun. It’s great.

01/09/2023

While in Bali we kept hearing this super unique song played on radio stations. Because we were always in restaurants at noon and at 6pm we put together that radio stations played it at set times. Just found out what it is.

01/08/2023

A few of our favorite shots of Hanoi.
Today while walking around the lake we met a bunch of Vietnamese school kids. They were all doing an assignment for their English language class where they had to approach people from English speaking countries and have a conversation with them in English. It was a hoot! We stopped a few times and helped different groups of them. We learned as much as them. We asked them where to eat and what we should try and how to say basic things in Vietnamese. They asked us about the USA. If everyone owned a car and if it was expensive to live there. They also wanted to know what we thought of Vietnam.

01/08/2023

Cool street performers in Hanoi.

01/07/2023

Halong Bay in Vietnam is incredible. Looking through the pictures to find a few to sum it all up for you, but a few wouldn’t do it. It would take hundreds and hundreds of pictures to scratch the surface of how cool Halong is. So glad we got this incredible experience to add to our adventures.

01/02/2023

We are no longer going to Malaysia. The airline we had booked totally screwed us over and we’ve already made other plans to chill in Thailand again after Hanoi.
Here’s the short story. We booked a flight to Malaysia on Malindo Air. Just after we booked it they changed our time and day to a time that didn’t work for us. We spent several hours getting it changed. In the final moments they changed our flight day and time after we requested, but never sent us an email confirmation to let us know any details. Then they sold the entire airline to Batik Air. Batik Air can’t look up our flight cuz we never got a new confirmation number or flight number. Then Malindo totally stopped replying to us. We have spent hours tying to get Batik to help us, but they don’t know how. They can’t move our flight or refund us cuz they can’t even tell us when it is. We even went to the Bali airport hours early to meet with a Batik rep and there was literally nothing he could do. No refund, no reschedule, nobody know how to move forward from here. We last left Batik Air with them telling us if we pay them $200 they’ll figure it out one way or another. But that’s more than the initial flights were. At this point we’re walking away from our flight and changing plans. You can’t dispute a credit card charge if it’s more than 3 months old.

Moral of this story, Batik Air are criminals. So are Malindo. When traveling this far for this long we have to be open and adaptive to s**t like this. We are learning as we go. Don’t want their BS to influence our vibe in Hanoi, so we’re over it. Going to enjoy going back to Bangkok for a few days and chillin in a favorite city.