Danang, what is it about this city that has brought me here? Why have I decided to call this place home for the foreseeable future? Why are you here? Why do you call this place home? There are plenty of more glamourous, exciting and interesting cities in the world to create a website about and even better places to decide to settle down and live, then why Danang?
This is a post I published last but I am posting it again because I am interested in finding why other expats have chosen to call Danang home. Danang’s expat community is growing and I would some of your thoughts about this city.
Personally, I think Danang is a great city and it fulfills most of my needs. Danang is big enough to have most of the things I am looking for the place I call home but not too big that I complain about all of its negative aspects. I never complain about living in Danang, well almost never. Most Vietnamese I know think that Danang is such a poor city and has nothing going for it, a large number of my students who were born here would rather pack up and move to Ho Chi Minh Cty or Hanoi, been there done that and of the 3 biggest cities in Vietnam, Danang is the best choice for me.
The biggest difference between Danang and the other two cities is choice, you have more options. Having said that, almost anything that you can do in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City you can do in Danang. Clubbing, bars, cafes, cinemas, bike rides, gyms, sports or anything else is available here but on a small scale. For example there are half a dozen reasonable clubs compared to the dozens available in HCMC or Hanoi, both of those cities are loaded with expat establishments whereas Danang has a handful.
In my mind, Danang is a perfectly scaled city, if it were much bigger or it had more options it would start to resemble the bigger cities and that is the last thing I would want. I love the fact that you can get almost anywhere in the city in less than 20 minutes, the city centre, the beach, Son Tra or even the Marble Mountains are a quick drive away. There is no traffic to delay your Journey and the city has been well planned with reasonably wide streets to allow any “heavy” traffic to flow freely. It would be fair to say that one of the biggest complaints of any city would be traffic congestion, this is not an issue in Danang.
All photos courtesy of Patrick Burns
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