The year was 2011, and thanks a set of extraordinarily unpredictable and fortunate life events, I’d spent the best summer of my life living in Paris, France. For reasons I can’t remember today, I decided to take the wad of over 7000 euros I’d saved from working a cash-in-hand job in Paris’ 6th arrondissement and embark on a solo backpacking trip through Southeast Asia by myself for month and a half. Had you asked me months before to locate Vietnam on the map I would have been comically wrong, but in my 24th trip around the sun I never claimed to have it all together…

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