the Benji Karmis website experience

              It’s funny, sitting down to write after being in Vietnam and not having anything I want to say. It’s like going into a full fridge and thinking there’s nothing to eat. What a wild paradox that is.               It’s also odd to say that it’s been more of the same, as if living in this quasi-lawless land has become something resembling a routine. It starts off like this: wake up late (I tell myself it’s to avoid the sun). Get a meal that’s exotic to me, but not terribly abnormal to someone who lives here (I had crocodile for breakfast yesterday, and bahn xao today, which was basically a giant seafood and meat taco served in a crepe). Mull about (like visit the roof of a tall building or an interactive art museum). Eat some more (yesterday blessed me with several different types of snails and grilled chicken feet). Walk some more. Do something at the absolute last minute, li...

              We used to do this thing growing up where, instead of calling each other just “bro,” we’d make up punny nicknames with “bro” in them. Brohan, Brosef Stalin, and Seth Brogan to name a few. But one of the most popular ones, so popular that we use it decades after, was Bro Chi Minh. So it’s funny to me, after all this time, that here I finally am in Ho Chi Minh city.               Now, I’ve done a fair bit of travelling lately, virtually exclusively in Japan. So I thought that I had a decent understanding on how a country in Asia operates. But Japan is only a fraction like Vietnam.               Take my arrival. I quickly noticed that there was hardly any English – probably even less so than in Japan. After navigating my way through the airport, I found my baggage sitting outside the baggage claim, all lobbed ...