My biggest mistake was moving to Saigon

Twenty years ago I sold my house with a huge garden in Da Lat to buy two houses in Saigon.

I had thought that it was a very smart move.

I was offered a job in Saigon at the time and my children were going to enter university, and so I had believed that moving to a rapidly growing city with a lot of opportunities made sense.

We even had a second house for rent, and it seemed perfect.

But now I have realized that was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

Saigon is indeed a land of opportunities and convenience, but there is a price to pay for that: traffic jams, polluted air and flooding.

I live in an area that floods whenever it rains.

Since moving to Saigon I have become irritable.

Even worse, when I visited relatives in Da Lat, I learned that my old property had changed hands several times and the current owner is doing pretty well running a tourism business there.

One of my children says if we had stayed in Da Lat, we would not have had to jostle through traffic every morning to go to work.

My other child was running a homestay business in Da Lat with some friends.

We could have stayed in Da Lat and done that for a living, running a hotel or a restaurant serving large cohorts of tourists visiting during holidays and summers.

Life would have been much easier.

Many people believe that owning a house in a large city like Saigon is important for a stable life, which is true. But we should be prepared to sacrifice certain things. Life in such a crowded city is not all good.

There are many good places to settle in Vietnam, and in this Internet era we can stay connected and find opportunities anywhere.