Halifax to Hanoi

If I could sum up my flights to Vietnam in one word... is "terribledisastrousity" a word? No? Can I hyphenate "Hell on Earth"? Well, you get the idea.

I remember when I used to curse the four hour flight from Halifax to Toronto. It doesn't seem so bad compared to my thirty-six hour journey that brought me to this country. Three separate flights in four different countries (Halifax-New York-Seoul-Hanoi) makes for one tired boy.

My first flight was harmless enough, it took an hour and a half with no problems taking off or landing. Although the customs guard in NY gave me a hard time.

"WhyareyoutravelingtoNewYork? HowlongwillyoubeintheUS?" she barked, without even looking up from my passport.

I told her that I was traveling to Vietnam to teach English and after a short discussion about her friend who is doing the same in South Korea, she stamped my passport and gave me a smile, "Have a great flight!" she said cheerfully. I walked away thinking that life would be much easier if everyone took a few minutes to relax, and then I remembered that I had eight hours until my next flight and was stuck in JFK airport. Plenty of time to relax!

I tried to keep busy for the next eight hours but spent most of my time thinking. I thought about all of the conversations that I had with people about teaching ESL. They always want to know why I decided to leave Nova Scotia and go halfway across the world to teach English. They always tell me that the idea is so strange to them that they could never see themselves doing it. And that's exactly what I thought before moving to Asia the first time.

I recall often telling my friends "I have no interest in moving to Asia. I'm happy here, so why would I leave?" I have been a devoted Nova Scotian all of my life and a proud son of Halifax for five years, yet I hadn't seen the world apart from Canada and the US. The thirst to see the world and explore couldn't be quenched from the waters of the Atlantic. I needed to see the Pacific from the other side, to hike on top of the Great Wall, to see the ancient palaces of faraway Asian countries and to learn how to properly eat with chopsticks. The only problem was that these things take a lot of time and money. Being an ESL teacher has given me both the time and money necessary to explore Asia. Traveling Asia has been the best experience of my life. However, traveling to Asia has been the opposite.

My flight from New York to Seoul was not new for me and definitely not soulful. It was a sixteen hour flight with a sleep deprived mind and it was only the halfway point of my trip! If anything would question my decision to go to Vietnam it'd be this flight. Still, the old mantra keeps circling in my head: "no pain, no gain!" If I keep doing it, there must be some reason for doing it, I'm not masochistic.

Arriving back in Seoul's Incheon airport was eerily familiar but distant at the same time. This wasn't my home anymore, just a stopover on my way to my next adventure. It's difficult to make your home and then leave it to make a new home somewhere else. That's exactly what I was doing on my last flight from Seoul to Hanoi. I carried the same two large suitcases back home to Canada and now I'm doing the same to go "home" to Vietnam. I wonder, will the quotations ever go away? Will Vietnam feel like home to me? Can I ever go home again? Before I could answer these questions, my plane touched down in Hanoi.