My wife Liz is fortunate enough to have a good job working in the field of developing educational games, and sometimes that job provides opportunities to travel overseas for work. She had one such trip lined up for the last week of November 2023 which was taking her to the country of Vietnam, first to the smaller city of Da Nang and then on to Ho Chi Minh City. This was an expedition to the literal other side of the world from our home in the Washington DC area and I was fortunately able to tag along for part of the trip. Since the flights were scheduled with Korean Air and passed through Seoul on each leg of the journey, we decided that we would extend this trip for a few additional days in South Korea as neither of us had ever visited the country before. It had to be a short trip since our one-year old son William was going to be watched by his grandparents, but we did our best to take advantage of the time that we did have when Liz wasn't busy with her work responsibilities.
The follow pages detail some of the sights that we saw and places that we visited along the way. Vietnam and South Korea proved to be extremely different countries and it was fascinating to compare what life was like in Ho Chi Minh City versus Seoul. If nothing else, the climates that we experienced were polar opposites of one another, with sweltering heat in Vietnam only a short distance north of the equator as compared against bitterly cold temperatures in South Korea. It certainly made packing our suitcases tricky for this short trip! Thanks as always for reading along, we hope that you enjoy the travel reports below.
