I found something genuinely wild about my own life and I still can’t fully process it
I’ve been living in Da Nang since April last year. During the rainy winter season I did a four month stint in Chiang Mai, but I came back to Da Nang after that. Here’s the crazy part though.
I’m Korean, and before all this I had basically never properly traveled to Southeast Asia. Last April, my startup, which I’d run for six years, was basically dying. My last employee had just left, and I finally wanted to take one vacation. I vaguely remembered my sister mentioning a place called Da Nang once, so I thought, why not go there. I genuinely did not even know Da Nang was in Vietnam. I just knew the word “Da Nang” the same way you’d know “Bali” or “Maldives,” a name floating around without knowing what country it belonged to.
So I searched Skyscanner for Da Nang, on a whim, and booked a 4 night 5 day trip. Flight and resort, that’s it. I had zero intention of ever living there.
I got to the resort and it was incredible. Swimming by the beach, reading the book I brought, actually relaxing for the first time in six years of grinding on a startup. I hadn’t taken a real vacation the entire time. After about two days I got a little restless and decided to check out the city.
I was walking around at night and stumbled onto a street packed with people. Beer, pool tables, music playing. I just walked in. A woman greeted me, I greeted her back, and she asked where I was from. I said Korea, told her what I did for work, and she seemed surprised I worked in tech, and really friendly about it. There were over a dozen pool tables going. I was just enjoying watching. More and more people kept showing up.
Turned out I had wandered into a digital nomad event that just happened to be happening that night. I had no idea. I ended up networking completely by accident. Turns out there are a ton of digital nomads out here, something I had never registered before. I talked to all kinds of people, but one conversation stuck with me. A Russian guy told me he’d been living there for years. I couldn’t wrap my head around it and asked how, visa wise. He said “visa runs.”
I had never heard that term in my life. Wild timing too, because earlier that year I’d hired an immigration lawyer and was in the process of applying for an O visa for the US, since I go to San Francisco a lot and wanted to stay long term. I knew, like most people know, that Koreans can travel visa free to almost any country for about three months. But I had never once considered that long term stays without a visa could actually be a real, sustainable thing. That night completely broke that assumption.
The next day I googled how people actually pull this off, and found out you could just rent an apartment. Without hesitating, I posted in a Facebook apartment rental group and signed a lease. Two months, just like that, in the middle of what was supposed to be a 4 night 5 day trip. I liked the place enough that I signed even though I had to wait about a week to move in, so I booked a hotel for the gap. When move in day came, I just cancelled my flight home. Couldn’t even get a refund. Full no show.
I never once planned to live in Da Nang. It just happened. That was April 2025. It’s July 2026 now and I’m still here. Genuinely absurd when I think about it.
Around September last year I did something even more extreme. I had a place back in Korea I’d lived in for almost ten years, and it suddenly felt pointless to keep. But I had a full apartment’s worth of stuff, books, appliances, furniture, everything. I couldn’t bring myself to sort through it piece by piece, so I asked my mom for help, then just called a disposal company and had literally everything thrown out. Not sold, just gone. Hundreds of books, all tossed.
I’ve gone back to Korea a few times since. Honestly, I couldn’t readjust. Korea is a great society, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a place that really values rule following. Slip up even slightly and people notice and give you a look, and you end up tensing up and policing yourself too. Take recycling, Korea is intensely strict about it, and I actually liked that, never resented it. I still separate my trash here in Vietnam. I rinse out plastic containers from delivery food before tossing them, even though nobody here separates trash like that at all, it all goes in the same bin regardless. Can’t shake the habit, it got drilled in too deep back home.
The thing is, I wasn’t just following that rule quietly either. I was the guy giving other people the look when they didn’t sort their trash properly, judging them, sometimes outright criticizing them. What I’ve realized since moving here isn’t that the rule was wrong, it’s that I never needed to police other people over it. That instinct was actually a form of self imposed restriction, limiting my own freedom without me realizing it. Living in Da Nang, and that winter in Chiang Mai, is what finally freed me from that.
I’d barely touched Southeast Asia before this even though I’d traveled a lot through the US and Europe. Turns out this region is incredible. It gave me freedom I didn’t know I needed, and now I get to live as a digital nomad, building things I care about, genuinely happy. I don’t think I’m ever moving back to Korea. Getting rid of the apartment and everything in it was basically me committing to that.
Looking back, the whole thing hinges on one random decision. If I hadn’t wandered into that street on day two, if I hadn’t randomly walked into that nomad event, if that Russian guy hadn’t mentioned visa runs, I’d probably still be back in Korea right now, living a completely different life.