This wall says kindergarten and shit in the same breath. A dog pees on a heart/diamond. A body slips downward. Numbers float without explanation. Nothing here is subtle—and that’s the point. Thai street art loves childlike language when it wants to insult power. Not poetic. Not symbolic. Blunt. Bodily. Embarrassing. The vocabulary of early childhood turned into a verdict on what we’re taught from the start. If innocence is the story institutions tell themselves, this wall replies with reality: what’s labeled pure is already treated like waste. Bangkok doesn’t dress critique up. It hands it back to you exactly as it was given— crude, public, unavoidable. 🔴 Red text อนุบาล Translation: Kindergarten This word is very clear and standard Thai. It refers specifically to pre-school / early childhood education. ⸻ 🔵 Blue text ขี้ ขี้ Translation: Poop, poop (or more naturally: “pooping” / “shit”, repeated for emphasis)
At a café on Phạm Ngũ Lão, the experiment of the week. Mango and coffee may sound like a bad decision until the first sip proves otherwise.
Sweet fruit cream against the dark bitterness of robusta, tropical and strange and somehow perfect for Saigon. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Like most things here.
This week tasted like crushed ice, condensed milk, and slow mornings under cloudy skies.
It started with the neighborhood coffee lady. No grand introduction, just small gestures, quiet smiles. In Saigon, coffee often begins not with the drink, but with the person handing it to you.
Then came the can of Nescafé Café Việt, coffee in its simplest grab-and-go form. Not romantic, maybe, but honest. Sweet, strong, practical. Feeling nostalgic for Japanese vending machines at times like these.
The darkest cà phê sữa đá of the week was on Nguyễn Trãi. Poured almost backwards—thick black coffee settling first, and then the condensed milk was poured on top.
The coffee lady taught me to do the two-handed shake to force the condensed milk to filter throughout the cup. A “hit” like no other!
Near Bến Thành Market, under a cloudy sky, the city moved in its usual way: scooters weaving, vendors calling, tourists pausing for photos, and somewhere in the middle of it all, another red plastic table and stool waiting for another coffee.
Back in my neighborhood, hẻm coffee reminded me why street coffee always wins. Crushed ice, quiet workers eating breakfast before the day really begins. Just the soft clatter of spoons against glasses and the hum of a city waking up.
This week in coffee was about noticing more rituals around it—the lady who questions my passion until she sees me grab a red stool with no intention of getting my coffee to go, the men and women eating their pre-work breakfasts in silence, the cafés hidden in alleys, the cloudy mornings near markets, and the accidental brilliance of mango and espresso.
I know I say some version of this every week, but it’s true. In Saigon, coffee is never just coffee.
It is routine. It is geography. It is conversation. It is the city itself.
Bangkok reminding me—again—that endings are just another form of beginning. Sunset in Nonthaburi.
Today I went to immigration to get a one-month visa extension.
Not because I love paperwork.
Not because I’ve made a careful plan.
Because I don’t know where I’m going next.
People like to imagine nomadism as motion—airports, train windows, stamps filling up passports. But the truth is that a lot of this life is waiting rooms. Plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights. A number printed on a slip of paper that tells me when it’s my turn to explain myself.
A one-month extension is a pause button.
A delay tactic.
A small bureaucratic way of saying: I’m not done yet, but I don’t know what comes after.
I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the pattern. When I’m certain, I don’t hesitate. I buy the ticket. I leave. When I’m not, I stall. I buy time. I let the city keep speaking to me while I listen harder.
This isn’t fear. It’s not indecision in the way people mean it. It’s attentiveness.
I’ve learned—sometimes the hard way—that leaving too early is just as reckless as staying too long. Cities don’t always announce when they’re finished with me. Sometimes they taper off. Sometimes they stop showing me anything new and start showing me myself instead.
That’s usually the sign.
Right now, I’m in between. Between chapters. Between exits. Between the version of myself that arrived and the one that hasn’t decided where to land next.
The immigration office doesn’t care about any of this, of course. They care about copies. Signatures. Fees. Dates that line up neatly in boxes.
So I paid for thirty more days.
Thirty days to walk without mapping routes.
Thirty days to notice walls, not landmarks.
Thirty days to keep photographing things that won’t make sense until much later.
People sometimes ask if this life gets tiring. It does—but not in the way they think. The exhaustion isn’t from movement. It’s from choosing. Every extension quietly closes other doors.
But I’ve also learned this: rushing clarity never works. The next place doesn’t reveal itself under pressure. It shows up when you’re paying attention to where you already are.
So this month isn’t about planning.
It’s about listening.
To the streets.
To the art that’s already peeling.
To the parts of myself that surface only when I stop asking, What’s next?
