Michael Powell's Blog, page 40
April 4, 2017
The Quiet Life in Sadec
After a couple days exploring Vinh Long and An Binh, we took a bus further inland until reaching Sadec, a small city in the Mekong Delta with a wonderfully tranquil pace.
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Sadec is home to a healthy population of 150,000 people, but feels like a village in comparison to Saigon or even Vinh Long. Everything is relaxed here, with wide streets you don’t have to be a daredevil to cross, lush flower gardens, silent historic mansions, and a sleepy way of life. We loved it.
We arrived with a lot of...
April 2, 2017
The Pottery Kilns of Vinh Long
On the outskirts of Vinh Long, a set of factories produces bricks, vases, statues and a million other ceramics. With towering brick kilns poking out of the palm trees like the stupas of Angkor Wat and an absolutely relaxed policy toward visitors, visiting them make for a unique and rewarding excursion.
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March 31, 2017
The An Binh Candy Factory
Part of our boat tour around An Binh Island was a stop at a small candy factory, where we learned how to prepare a few of Vietnam’s favorite traditional sweets.
We hadn’t exactly signed up for any of the “extra stops” our boat had been making during the tour. The first had been at a honey farm, where we saw a box of bees for two minutes, then spent the next fifteen minutes refusing to buy honey products. So when our boat pulled into another “surprise traditional experience”, Jürgen and I made...
March 30, 2017
A Delta Tour around An Binh
It’s unavoidable. If you plan on spending any time on the Mekong Delta, you’re going to be taking a boat trip. Who visits the Mekong and doesn’t take a boat trip? And it’s just as unavoidable that, unless you’re willing to invest a lot of money, your trip will be pretty touristy. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun.
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Our tour of the area around An Binh and Cai Be started at seven in the morning, and lasted for about five hours. We weren’t sure what awaited us, since the guy selling the...
October 7, 2016
Montreal For 91 Days – The E-Book
After three months spent living in the Canadian metropolis of Montreal, Jürgen and I came away with some unforgettable memories. We’ve now collected our experiences into an e-book, with all of our articles and over 200 full-color photographs.
Amazon Kindle Barnes & Noble (Soon) Direct Download (PDF, MOBI, EPUB) Paypal
| Coinbase (Bitcoin) This e-book is perfect for your Kindle, Nook or any other e-reader. With over 200 full-color pictures and all our articles, indexed alphabetica...
July 19, 2016
Bonne Journée, Montreal!
Another 91 days have come to an end, and this time we bid adieu to Montreal. The cultural capital and financial powerhouse of French-speaking Canada proved to be an interesting home for three months, with some great food, incredible festivals, bad weather, colorful neighborhoods, and welcoming people.
Montreal was the sixteenth location we’ve visited over the course of our travel project. By this point, we’d recognized a dependable pattern in our feelings towards our new homes. Usually, we f...
Bon Journée, Montreal!
Another 91 days have come to an end, and this time we bid adieu to Montreal. The cultural capital and financial powerhouse of French-speaking Canada proved to be an interesting home for three months, with some great food, incredible festivals, bad weather, colorful neighborhoods, and welcoming people.
Montreal was the sixteenth location we’ve visited over the course of our travel project. By this point, we’d recognized a dependable pattern in our feelings towards our new homes. Usually, we f...
The Montreal International Jazz Festival
The Montreal International Jazz Festival invites over 3000 musicians together from dozens of countries, for well over a thousand performances, most of which are free. We wouldn’t have the chance to see much of the festival, as it began during our final night in Montreal. But we did get a taste.
The Montreal Jazz Festival was first celebrated in 1980, and has since grown into the world’s largest, certified as such by the Guinness Book of World Records, in 2006. But looking at the lineup, you’...
July 17, 2016
Our Home in Montreal
The most difficult part of our travel project is the search for a suitable temporary home. 91 days is a strange amount of time, neither short- nor long-term, and it’s always scary to book an apartment in a city we’ve never even visited. So, when we luck out with a place as nice as our home in Montreal, we feel like we should share.
Our studio apartment was found in the very heart of Old Montreal, literally around the corner from the Basilica de Notre-Dame. Despite its prime location in a zon...
July 13, 2016
Montreal’s Real Underground – The Saint Leonard Caves
Montreal has a man-made underground city, through which millions of people pass every day. But there’s also a place you can see a more natural underground setting. In the northern neighborhood of Saint Leonard is a set of small caves which long ago opened up in the earth.
Jürgen and I love visiting caves, and over the past few years have explored them in places like Iceland, the Yucatán, Curaçao, Macedonia and Sri Lanka. The Saint Leonard Caves of Montreal don’t exactly measure up to any of...
