Hey, Hi, Hello I’m back! Sorry for the impromptu hiatus, I’ve been out of the bloggersphere for a few months now. Some ‘malicious’ code fiasco meant I had to change things up around here ya know. So that’s what I did. Look, I made a snazzy new logo and everything. Changed my theme. Added some pops of colour, sorted out my destination menus. Wrote a new about page. And loads of other boring ass SEO things (if you’ve noticed anything drastically wrong please let me know). Huge huge huge thank you to Josh because although he has equally little knowledge of website creation, he does have the patience of a saint.
A life update:
If you’ve been following along, whether that’s reading my content before I went awol or following me on Instagram you’ll know we quit our jobs and left the UK with one way tickets to Singapore in November 2018. Since then, we have travelled through seven different countries. We marvelled at the immensity of the SuperTrees, watched the sunrise at Angkor Wat, spent a dreamy four days on Koh Rong, hung out in the mangroves in Kampot, saw some of the best sunsets in Koh Phangnan, took a hot air balloon over Vang Vieng, spent the duration of our thirty day visa island hopping and swimming with turtles in the Philippines, took the leap and travelled for two months on an epic adventure across north and south India before flying to Vietnam.
And that’s where we are now. Hanoi, Vietnam. We have been here since the end of April and absolutely love it. We flew in on a Sunday, had training for teaching jobs lined up for the Monday, signed a lease on a flat on the Friday and began teaching English in the evenings a week later. I was part of the grand opening team at a new centre, where I teach the cutest little kindergarten kids and Josh rolled into a position teaching kids on the slightly older programmes at a more established centre. Recently, I bagged a side gig as an editor/Proofreader for a bilingual travel magazine and we are just enjoying our time here whilst saving up for the next big adventure.
In the not too distant future we plan to swap Asia for New Zealand, to give van life a go and honestly we can’t wait. In saying that though I already know that I’ll miss Vietnam desperately when we leave. The people are the kindest, the way of life is so chilled, the iced coffee is phenomenal and I can get a bunch of roses for less than £2 at the local flower market.
We have had a whirlwind nine months and it’s been incredible. I can’t talk about all the good stuff though and ignore the bad. Being away from home for a prolonged period of time does come at a cost. A bloody big one at that. Not being able to be there to give the people closest to you a hug when they need it most, really sucks. Equally, not being able to celebrate the good stuff going on in peoples lives is pretty shitty too. All I can say is that I’m forever grateful that we have each other in this crazy life.
Content to expect:
As you can imagine after six months of solid travel, I have a whole array of content to share with you. From hotel recommendations, homestay experiences, veggie food guides and itineraries, to TEFL, finding a teaching job in Hanoi and lots of details about how to master expat life 6000 miles away from home.
Thank you for coming back and for taking time to read this. Thank you as ever for your support and if you have any comments, questions or just lovely things to say then please do leave them below.
¡Hasta luego!
Abbie x
Welcome back lovely! I’m missing Hanoi SO much, I wish I had longer to explore there.