Nefelibata

Category: English Delights

  • The Imitation Game of Thinking

    The Imitation Game of Thinking

    We used to sit with not knowing. We used to search, browse, stumble, and discover. In the digital age, intellectual curiosity has been quietly replaced by instant answers — first by Google, now by AI. This essay explores what that trade-off really costs us: our ability to think slowly, to tolerate friction, to learn from…

  • The Case for Debating Until Language Is Exhausted

    The Case for Debating Until Language Is Exhausted

    A line from a modern staging of Sophocles’ Antigone — argue until language is exhausted — has stayed with me for years, and feels more urgent than ever. We live in a time when debate has been reduced to point-scoring, and listening has given way to filtering. This piece explores why truly exhausting language —…

  • Roughly a Decade Ago

    Roughly a Decade Ago

    In your early thirties, you’ll have to make a choice and take a professional path that doesn’t look its best and doesn’t have the best prospects. It’s important that you make the choice, that you say yes, and try to enjoy every moment of this extraordinary journey, to see where that gets you.

  • The Things No One Tells You About Dalat’s Forgotten French Quarter

    The Things No One Tells You About Dalat’s Forgotten French Quarter

    A chance visit to Dalat’s abandoned French Quarter awakens memories of Wuthering Heights, blending colonial decay, literary nostalgia, and the haunting silence of forgotten imperial grandeur.

  • Bà Đen Mountain, Vietnam: What You Need to Know Before Visiting

    Bà Đen Mountain, Vietnam: What You Need to Know Before Visiting

    Bà Đen Mountain, located in Tay Ninh Province near Ho Chi Minh City, is the highest mountain in Southern Vietnam at 986 meters. Known for its sacred pagodas, ancient legends, and one of Asia’s longest cable cars, it is both a spiritual pilgrimage site and a breathtaking travel destination.

  • Côn Đảo Island: Where Vietnam’s Dark History Meets Pristine Paradise

    Côn Đảo Island: Where Vietnam’s Dark History Meets Pristine Paradise

    Côn Đảo Island is a remote Vietnamese archipelago known for its pristine beaches and its haunting past as a colonial and wartime prison complex. Once a place of suffering and political imprisonment, today it stands as a powerful symbol of remembrance, resilience, and quiet beauty.

  • What a Remote Vietnamese Village Taught Me About Serendipity

    What a Remote Vietnamese Village Taught Me About Serendipity

    Sơn Đoòng Cave, located in Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng National Park, Vietnam, is the largest cave in the world. Discovered by local logger Hồ Khanh, it contains its own rainforest, rivers, and weather system and can only be visited through a guided six-day expedition.

  • Flat Lines and Dark Forests

    Flat Lines and Dark Forests

    Understanding Artificial Intelligence: Mimicry, Limitations, and the Human Mind. Explore how artificial intelligence mimics human intelligence, its limitations in reasoning and understanding physics, and the implications for human cognition in the age of AI.

  • The Fondness of Past Travels

    The Fondness of Past Travels

    There is a fondness to coming back to a dearly beautiful place, on a lovely beach she basically had, now as back then, all to herself, to stepping again in a nice little tailor shop where she had bought summer dresses or checking the flea market to look for wonderfully embroidered silk slippers. Her heart…

  • The French Quarter of Dalat: There is Vintage in Ruin

    The French Quarter of Dalat: There is Vintage in Ruin

    They say it’s disrepair that the beautiful colonial villas from the French Quarter in Dalat have fallen into, for lack of interest, investment or both, but I reckon it’s also despair. Maybe it’s disrepair as payback for decades of oppression and exploitation, the once-upon-a-time show of grandeur from the long gone oppressors. Could be it’s…

  • Sleeping Among Dragon-spat Jade Islands

    Sleeping Among Dragon-spat Jade Islands

    A place called the bay of the descending dragon, where fewer than 1.600 people live mostly on floating villages in shallow waters, plying tens of species of fish and other hundreds types of mollusks and cultivating marine plants and algae while also navigating among almost 2.000 islands and islets qualifies in my book. Legend has…

  • French Delights on la Rive Gauche

    French Delights on la Rive Gauche

    Paris was to me that lazy July afternoon I spent in le Quartier Latin, under the unusually scorching sun that had set over the Rive Gauche of the French capital: the stroll I took from Notre Dame to Shakespeare and Company, sipping the iced cream coffee I happily bought in a traditional Vietnamese cafeteria, in…

  • Greener than the greenest green in Cat Cat

    Greener than the greenest green in Cat Cat

    Vietnam is full of green, even in towns and villages, on beaches and in hotel rooms and bathrooms, because tropical rains can fall at any given moment within the season and I suspect people don´t ever have to water any plants, not even the ones they seem to have planted or kept in pots around…

  • My Best Friend

    My Best Friend

    *** SPOILER alert: this is not the kind of BFF description where you’d read it’s the person that knows you best, understands you perfectly, and sometimes don´t even have to talk to in order to convey any message whatsoever, since they know exactly what you´re thinking. I am not saying such people are impossible, just…

  • Stranded on Cù Lao Chàm

    Stranded on Cù Lao Chàm

    And then it started to pour – nothing that different to basically any day in the monsoon season on this realm. Only it never stopped until the next evening, and it came with thunderstorm and lightning, with the occasional power cut and with darkened skies. The day before, the clear skies, the crystal water, the…