DIARY
DECEMBER 2022
A LAY-OVER IN HCMC
If you ask me "why Vietnam?" - honestly, I don't even know.
After traveling in South East Asia for a few weeks in 2022, stressed from my life as a business owner in Germany and always on the rush, I randomly came to Ho Chi Minh City for 3 days because the flight route was cheaper than flying back to Germany from Indonesia. I didn't know anything about Vietnam at that time but I found the name of the city so interesting that I wanted to learn about Vietnam's history and experience the food as everybody used to say that Vietnamese food is very delicious.
Of course, three days were not enough to learn and experience much about this beautiful country but I got very excited to learn more. I knew that I wanted to come back. But I didn't know when it would be.
JULY 2023
LEAVING MY OLD LIFE BEHIND
I came back to Vietnam after I sold my pharmacy business in Germany, got divorced and left everything behind. After moving back to my parent's house, I packed one hand luggage backpack and came back to Vietnam. I traveled all across Vietnam and other Asian countries.
NOVEMBER 2023
YOGA TEACHER TRAINING
In November 2023, I went to Dalat to stay in a yoga ashram for one month and became yoga teacher there. This was also the time where I decided to learn Vietnamese, because I made friends with other participants who were mainly Vietnamese. The lectures and classes were in either English or Vietnamese, but they had translation available. I loved to hear the sound of Vietnamese language.
After the time in the ashram, I stayed in Dalat for a few months.
JUNE 2024
HAPPYINVN
Happyinvn was founded as a travel blog when I went to South Korea.
I had the idea much longer already, but I didn't know how to start or how to create a website. When I was in Seoul for a few days, I finally started to write my travel experiences down. It was also a way to keep the memories with me and I love to write. I wrote my first travel blog about my trip around the world when I was 18 years old.
I chose the name "happyinvn" because coming to Vietnam has changed my mind completely. The old me was unhappy and ungrateful, but in Vietnam, I learned that happiness can only be found in the present moment.
JULY 2023
THE END?
After a wonderful year in Vietnam I wanted to visit my family in Germany.
I traveled for a long time, missed having a home and also some routines.
I also felt like I couldn't enjoy traveling anymore because I had seen so many places that my brain couldn't process all the memories anymore.
I went back to Germany and thought I needed to come back to "normal life". But I missed Vietnam every single day. I cooked Vietnamese food, I dreamed of Vietnam and my heart told me that there was something waiting for me.
I even worked in a pharmacy again, but it felt so wrong that I cried almost every day. I knew that I needed to go back to Vietnam.
OCTOBER 2024
I FOLLOWED MY HEART ...
... and I came back! It was so emotional to come back to Ho Chi Minh City. From there, I traveled to Nha Trang and Phan Thiet to visit friends. My final stop was supposed to be Phu Quoc, because one of my friends from the yoga ashram worked there in a resort. I took a bus from HCMC to save money and that's how I came to Can Tho. I wanted to stay for one night only because I had never been to Mekong Delta before. But I liked the vibe so much that I stayed 4 days and changed my return flight to the last possible day (the day that my visa-free stay in Vietnam would end).
DECEMBER 2024
I MET THE LOVE OF MY LIFE
I traveled from Can Tho to Phu Quoc by bus and ferry. After some wonderful days on the island, I went back to the mainland. The day before I told my mum, that my Vietnamese got so much better and I could talk to the local people more. I was so excited and joked with her that I would love to marry a man from Mekong Delta because the people were so friendly everywhere.
I came to Rach Gia and went to a coffeeshop close to the harbour that I had also been to a few days before when I had to wait for the ferry. I ordered coffee in Vietnamese and wanted to sit down to look for a bus to go back to Can Tho. Suddenly, a Vietnamese man stood next to me, smiled at me and asked me why I could speak Vietnamese. He helped me to order my drink, but he couldn't speak English. We talked a bit in Vietnamese, but it was hard to communicate with him as my Vietnamese was still beginner level and he spoke a different accent (from Mekong Delta, tiếng miền Tây) while I had learned the Saigon accent before and he sounded a bit different.
We found out that we both wanted to go to Can Tho so we went together on his motorbike because we got excited about each other - Tuong has never met a foreigner before, and I never spent time with a Vietnamese who couldn't speak English. :D
DECEMBER 2024
ONE WEEK IN CAN THO
Originally, I had the plan to travel more in Mekong Delta. But it was raining a lot so I stayed in Can Tho. The stranger I met in the coffeeshop was still around. His name is Tuong and he showed me around the city. We went to many coffeeshops and restaurants and it was a special experience to see all of these places with a local. After one week, my visa was about to expire and I had to go back to HCMC to get my flight back to Germany. It was about to be Christmas and I wanted to spend time with my family.
He took me to the bus station and we said good bye, I didn't know if we would see each other again, but leaving him behind hurt me a lot.
DECEMBER 2024
IN THE RAIN TO HCMC
When I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, I missed Tuong already. But I had no idea what he thought of me - a foreigner who spoke some broken Vietnamese only and was about to go back to her home country without a straight plan of coming back to Vietnam.
One day later, he called me. I was scared to pick up the phone because I worried that I couldn't understand him. When I picked up, he asked me where I was, because he went all the way to HCMC by motorbike in the rain to take me to the airport.
We spent one more day together and went to a free concert of HIEUTHUHAI but it was still raining so hard! Still, we had a wonderful time. And on the next day, he took me to the airport. We said good bye again, but this time I knew that we will meet again. He promised me to wait for me in HCMC until I would come back to Vietnam - without knowing when it would be.
DECEMBER 2024
CHRISTMAS IN GERMANY
After celebrating Christmas and enjoying family time in Germany, I started to miss Vietnam again. Tuong and me kept talking on the phone, he met my family and he was always smiling. I had no idea how it would be, but my Vietnamese improved with every call we had. He got used to my accent, he could remember my vocabulary and explain what he wanted to say with these words. I also got used to "his Vietnamese" and my understanding skills got much better. My heart knew it already, my head kept worrying - but I followed my heart again, back to Vietnam.
JANUARY 2025
QUICK DECISION
When I arrived in HCMC, Tuong was at the airport to pick me up.
We had nothing apart from our two backpacks and his motorbike, but after two days in the city, we decided to go back to Can Tho together.
It was a long drive and when we arrived we had nowhere to go. So we went back to the hotel room where we first stayed one month ago.
The room was so simple, it didn't even had no window.
But we had the same dream (as we found out in many conversations in coffeeshops using translation apps) - we wanted to do something meaningful for others. Build a family and work together on a project that we called "Villa Bình An" since then - but we had no idea how to start.
FEBRUARY 2025
FIRST MOTEL
We moved to a small room in a student's apartment building.
It was in a small alley and I was scared to drive there by motorbike. But I had to overcome my fear to be able to get around on my own while Tuong kept looking for a place to run a business. It was right before Tet when he decided to take over a Vietnamese motel with only five rooms.
We could only pay the rent and had to offer hourly rooms which meant a lot of cleaning and laundry. We shared the work: Tuong did the reception and cleaning, I did the laundry. We had no money to pay an employee, so Tuong had to sit at the reception for the whole time until he closed the door.
JMARCH 2025
DAU BIEC HOMESTAY
Tuong kept looking for another hotel to rent. When he found a hotel with ten rooms, I had exactly one day to pack up everything.
The new place was bigger and Tuong could afford an employee. That was when Linh joined us. Together, we kept improving the homestay every day. We callled it "đậu biếc homestay" (butterfly pea) because my family and friends liked the blue tea when I brought it over from Vietnam. It was my mum's idea to name our homestay like this to keep the connection between Germany and Vietnam.
In the beginning, Tuong didn't make any profit. There were days and weeks without customers because we needed to learn how to set up online platforms, improve the rooms and marketing. It got better after four months. But still, it didn't fit our dream. Because we had many ideas, but the place was not suitable. The reception area was small, we had mainly Vietnamese customers and it was not our style. But at the same time, it didn't make sense to invest.
JULY 2025
A LITTLE SOUL CHOSE US
In April, Tuong and me celebrated my 30th birthday in Thailand. It was the first time that Tuong left Vietnam and we also met my step-brother Marc and his friend Alex there. When I turned 30, I suddenly felt like I wanted to have children, even when I thought I always wanted to travel. But somehow, Tuong had become my home and in the night before our 6-month anniversary I had a dream similar to my vision and what he had seen already after we first met - our daughter. I once had a vision of a garden with mango trees and a girl playing with her dad. But at that time it still seemed so impossible. I wrote a letter to Tuong and told him that I saw our daughter.
And a few weeks later, we saw the heart beat of the little soul that had chosen us - it turned out to be a girl.
OCTOBER 2025
STAYING TOGETHER
I went back to Germany to visit my family. My decision was clear.
I wanted our family to be together and not separated by visa reasons. It was unrealistic that Tuong could get a visa for Germany so we didn't even try. After three weeks with my family, I returned to Vietnam without knowing when I would see them again - because I didn't know how long it would take to do the paperwork for our daughter.
It was a time of insecurities and uncertainity, I still had to leave Vietnam every 3 months because our marriage registration took much longer than we thought. Within all the mess, I wanted to leave Can Tho behind, maybe I hoped we would have less issues there. We argued a lot because Tuong didn't want to leave Mekong Delta. But we found a compromise in not living in a room in his homestay anymore but in a flat close by. Because I didn't want to raise our daughter in a homestay where we had no privacy, late night calls and hourly rooms.
NOVEMBER 2025
TUONG FOUNDED A COMPANY
When I was in Germany, Tuong prepared the paperwork to found a company. He called it "HAPPYINVN" - based on my travel blog and our dream of "Villa Bình An" that was still in our minds. The homestay just wasn't the right place.
Many attempts to do something for the vision I once had failed. Nobody bought my German cookies that I made for Christmas, nobody looked on my website, not many foreigners came to our homestay.
I kept trying hard and so did Tuong. Also, I was pregnant and worried. But I trusted in Tuong and that we could make our dream come true if we just kept trying harder. ("Trying harder" is our motto until now).
DECEMBER 2025
TAIPEI & A GARDEN
In December I had to leave Vietnam because of my visa and I went to Taipei, Taiwan. It had been on my list for a long time and I saw it as my last solo trip before becoming a mum. Luckily my pregnancy went very well and babygirl and me were fit and healthy.
Right before I left, Tuong told me that he had found a garden close by where we lived. It had a sign "for rent" and he saw it when he drove past and called the owners. He took a look and showed me by video call, later we drove past there together. When I saw it for the first time, I said to him: "that's it!" - and he rented it.
From then on, he put all his effort in renovating and improving everything step by step - supported by Linh who also took care of the homestay.
Some nights Tuong didn't sleep at all, he took care of the homestay and the garden, I was about to give birth, we still worried about the paperwork but we kept trusting that this was finally the right place to make our dream come true.
MARCH 2026
BORN IN CAN THO
Our daughter was born in Can Tho. After we came back from Cambodia and after Lunar New Year, so her Vietnamese zodiac sign is "fire horse".
That's also the energy she brought with her - no matter the sleepless nights with a newborn, Tuong kept working hard. For me, it was hard to overcome the emotions during my postpartum period but I felt better after one month. Healing after giving birth was a process that was not straight, it took time and there were days with setbacks same as the project of our new project.
At some point Tuong had to make a big decision: he gave up the homestay to take care of the garden and our daughter and me, because we had no family support as both our families live far away. It was good to take some time off and rebuild, especially for me. When our daughter turned one month old, we slowly came back with our ideas and put them into actions.
MAY 2026
WORK IN PROGRESS
Thinking of how to build up everything in the garden with an old hall, buying materials, managing the construction site, taking care of a newborn, recovering after birth, starting to share our story on YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok is CRAZY! But luckily, we have the support of Linh and our babygirl is healthy and peaceful and by that also supporting the dream of her parents.
"I have traveled the world and seen
many beautiful places, but I have never seen anything more beautiful than people making their dreams come true."
Anni
