When I first came to Vietnam, a year ago at the end of August, I had planned to see how I felt after a year, if I wanted to go home or move to a different country. What I didn’t plan for is a pandemic! So moving country is out of the question so I came up with a different solution.
I’m excited to announce that next week I’m moving to the city of Pleiku (still in Vietnam) and this is how it came about.
What does one do in a pandemic when they’re tired of living in the big city? For me, tired of the noise and crowds of Ho Chi Minh city where I’ve lived for over a year now, I found a company willing to help me take a big leap.
Many English centre’s are short of staff these days with teachers not being able to enter the country, small cities are feeling it more than big cities like HCM and Hanoi which have a large pool of expats. So I picked the city I wanted to move to and emailed a few of the English centres. They were amazingly fast at getting back to me.
I ended up taking a job with a well known national chain. APAX English started in Hanoi and now has hundreds of centres, including many in HCM and one in Pleiku. I passed the interview with flying colours but there was still a problem.
Pleiku is a sensitive area for the Vietnamese government. Not only is it a province with a lot of ethnic groups living their traditional lifestyles in the mountains, it is also a border province near Cambodia and Laos where a lot of smuggling takes place! So I could not relocate there with my current papers; I needed new papers to live in the region.
It took about a month to get all that sorted by now I’m very happy to say that I’m moving to Pleiku on Monday the 14th September! I’m looking forward new experiences in a peaceful mountain city.
Update: 2026
I recently went through my old photos from the last few months in 2020, and found myself feeling rather nostalgic. So, six years on, here are some of the photos that now bring back the memories of moving to Pleiku and beginning a very different chapter of my life.
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