May 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: LUCKY CHARMS
May 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: SIMPLE GESTURES
This week began the way most of my best days in Vietnam begin: with no real plan.
I wandered down a small alley off Nguyễn Đình Chiểu because something—a mural, curiosity, instinct, who knows—pulled me in. I thought I was headed to a café, but instead I found a woman selling coffee on the street. She smiled with the kind of warmth that makes you stop walking.
I actually walked past her.
Then that smile reached me a second time.
I turned around.
Good decision.
She poured me a cà phê sữa đá into a real glass mug because I was staying to drink it there. Somehow that simple gesture changed the coffee. Glass just feels right. The coffee stayed colder, the flavors lingered, and for a few minutes the alley became my favorite café in Saigon.
Flat White on Lý Tự Trọng.
I ordered a cà phê đen đá—straight black, no sugar, no milk. The menu mentioned it usually comes with a little sugar, but they happily left it out.
The barista looked me straight in the eye.
“It’s strong.”
As though he was warning me.
Me.
I laughed.
“It better be. How else do you make coffee?”
He laughed too.
End scene.
The Bagel Brothers served another dependable cà phê sữa đá, while Polka Brew surprised me with their “Vietnam Almond Coffee.” Condensed milk, almond syrup, and two shots of espresso sounded like they might be trying a little too hard.
They weren’t.
It somehow stayed balanced and tasted like someone had translated Vietnamese coffee into another dialect instead of another language.
Then there was The Scorpio.
An empty chair waited outside as if someone had reserved it for me. I settled in with my coffee and a few pages of American Pastoral. The weather hinted at rain, and for a while everything was perfect.
Until the sidewalk sales parade began.
Every few minutes someone appeared offering sunglasses, phone accessories, shoe shines, or a tour of the Củ Chi Tunnels.
No, thank you.
No, really.
I just wanted to sit quietly with my coffee and my book.
Sometimes finding peace in a busy city means politely saying “no” twenty times.
Katinat delivered another solid espresso with milk over ice, while Dú Ký Café offered something completely different: a slow-dripped black Vietnamese coffee. Around me, groups of men gathered to watch a World Cup match, arguing and cheering between sips. Coffee isn’t just a drink here. It’s a reason to linger. To debate. To watch time pass.
Cà Phê Pha Máy on Bùi Viện rounded out another stop with yet another excellent cà phê sữa đá.
I’m beginning to suspect it’s impossible for me to walk more than a few blocks in Vietnam without finding another cup worth remembering.
My final stop was the trendy 2D Sketch Café.
The illusion is clever. Everything looks hand-drawn, like you’ve stepped into a comic book. It’s worth seeing once.
But here’s the thing.
The coffee on the sidewalks of Saigon costs less than half as much, tastes better, and comes with real life instead of painted walls.
I’d choose the sidewalk every time.
The best coffee isn’t always about beans or brewing methods. It’s about the smile that makes you turn around. The barista who jokingly warns you about the strength. The conversations you accidentally become part of. The old men watching football. The pages read between interruptions. The feeling that, for an hour, a tiny plastic stool or a simple glass mug is exactly where you’re supposed to be.
Vietnam keeps reminding me that coffee isn’t something you rush.
July 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: DIVINE HUMAN CONNECTION
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: THE MAN BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE
“I have dedicated my whole life to the struggle of my people. That is all I can say.” – Ho Chi Minh
The irony of Uncle Ho is that his words are everywhere in Vietnam, on every wall, in every school, on every piece of currency, quoted by a government that controls everything he said he was fighting against. He wrote about freedom and the party built a surveillance state. He wrote about the people and the party built a one-party system. He asked people to write the truth and the press is ranked 174th out of 180 countries for freedom.
But the Vietnamese love him anyway. Not the ideology. Him. The man who lived simply, wore sandals, never married, and beat both the French and the Americans. The words on the walls belong to the state. The man belongs to the people. They know the difference even if they can’t say it out loud.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: The Quiet Strength of Saigon’s Street Sellers
The West may come here and see “poverty,” but Saigon is far from poor.
People pass a woman in a conical hat, wearing pyjamas, balancing her day on two shoulders—selling sunglasses, lighters, cigarettes, lottery tickets, fruit, or iced coffee under the heat of a city that never seems to slow down. Some tourists see struggle. I see strength.
What I truly see is a woman with the resilience of ten men.
She wakes before the city fully opens its eyes. Before the office workers rush for coffee, before motorbikes flood the streets, she is already there—arranging her goods, preparing herself for another long day of bargaining, smiling, surviving.
She has likely raised children. Maybe now she helps raise grandchildren. She has known humiliation, rejection, and the thousand small dismissals that come with selling on the street—people waving her away, ignoring her existence, reducing her to background scenery.
But she remains.
There is a kind of inner fortitude there that cannot be taught in therapy sessions or self-help books. It is forged through necessity. Through hunger. Through family. Through knowing that whether she feels tired or not, the day still demands something from her.
And still, she shows up.
She hears “no” a hundred times a day. Sometimes with kindness, often without it. Yet the constant rejection doesn’t hollow her out. It sharpens her. She adjusts, adapts, keeps moving. She survives.
Together, these women are impenetrable.
There is an invisible sisterhood on these streets—a quiet understanding between vendors, mothers, grandmothers, and workers who have built lives out of persistence. They know how to endure. They know how to stretch one good day across three bad ones. They know how to laugh in the middle of hardship.
That is wealth.
Not the kind measured in bank accounts or luxury hotels, but the kind measured in endurance, dignity, and the refusal to collapse.
She is Vietnamese.
And just as this country endured war, occupation, division, and reinvention, she wins her own daily battles with the same stubborn grace. History lives in ordinary people more than monuments. Sometimes it wears a nón lá and offers you a lighter at a street corner.
Saigon teaches this lesson quietly: resilience is not loud.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It sits on a plastic stool by the roadside.
It pours coffee.
It sells fruit.
It smiles anyway.
And if you pay attention, you realize you are not looking at poverty.
You are looking at power.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 FOOD: BAGEL’ED AGAIN! The Month of June 2026
June 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM: MAYBE DESTINY DOESN’T ARRIVE ALL AT ONCE
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’m living my life.
I wake up when I want to. I do my tai chi, stretch, squat, lunge—just enough to remind my body that it’s still carrying me through this strange and beautiful life. Then I step outside and head in whichever direction feels right that morning.
No strict plan. No rigid schedule. Just walking toward a new coffee stand I haven’t tried yet.
The funny thing is, I could probably do this for the next twenty years and still never visit every little street-side coffee place in Saigon. That thought makes me smile. It means there is always something left to discover.
The streets are getting ready for Reunification Day, April 30 – Flags cover the city
I’m beginning to accept that every day can feel like both a Sunday and a Friday.
I don’t live by the old rhythm of the seven-day week anymore. I don’t wake up groaning, “I hate Mondays,” or dragging myself through Wednesday thinking, “Just two more days until the weekend.”
No.
Every day holds the slowness and beauty of a Sunday, and at the same time, the anticipatory joy of a Friday. There’s freedom in that. There’s peace in that.
And honestly, I’m still learning how to accept it without guilt.
There’s that old voice sometimes—the one that whispers I should have a more “regular” job, that I should be making more money, that I should be following some standard path that everyone else seems to understand.
But lately, I’ve been trying to replace that voice with gratitude.
Instead of focusing on what I could be making, I think about the abundance I already have. Time. Freedom. Movement. Quiet mornings. Conversations with strangers over coffee. The ability to sit outside at 8 a.m., 4 p.m., or 10 p.m. and simply exist.
The universe has given me this life for a reason.
And today, I feel ready to accept it.
No fear. No guilt. No shame.
Just acknowledgment.
Just gratitude.
Just the understanding that my life is this way for a reason, and maybe my job is not to fight it, but to live it fully—to step into it wholeheartedly and trust that it is leading somewhere meaningful.
In the same way, every hour feels like happy hour.
Whether it’s 8 in the morning or 10 at night, my life allows me the freedom to enjoy a chilled beer if the moment feels right. And whenever I see a Trappist ale sitting quietly outside the country where it was brewed, my heart skips a beat a little.
Because sometimes happiness is big and dramatic.
And sometimes it’s just finding the right coffee stand, taking the long way home, and realizing that the life I thought looked unconventional is actually the one that fits me best.
Maybe destiny doesn’t arrive all at once.
Maybe it looks like a slow walk through the city, a plastic stool on the sidewalk, strong Vietnamese coffee, and the quiet realization that I am already exactly where I need to be.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: PROUD TO BE VIETNAMESE
This façade strongly suggests it was built in the late French colonial period, probably around the 1930s to early 1940s, during the height of Saigon’s Art Deco boom.
This style was heavily influenced by Paris, Shanghai, and American theater architecture of the era.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: SLEEP
📍 Lý Tự Trọng Street, was heavily developed during the 1950s–60s as Saigon expanded into a modern capital.
After reunification in 1975, this building was eventually used by the hát bội troupe (established 1977).
Hát bội is Vietnam’s traditional opera:
painted faces, symbolic acting, historical drama, and big moral storytelling.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 FOOD: BáNH Mì HUỳNH HOA
Bánh Mì Huỳnh Hoa. The most famous banh mi in Saigon. Possibly in all of Vietnam.
📍26 Le Thi Rieng, District 1.
🥖 I got one with the homemade salted butter. I’m not a fan of the paté, so I got a really basic one. But, it was still delicious. The one that everyone stands in line for is heavy and includes 13 ingredients.
Been open 35+ years. Founded by Mrs. Le Kim Hoa, whose father ran a street stall near the Phu Dong roundabout selling bread.
Every single day, there are lines of locals and tourists stretching out onto the road.
“Every banh mi has 13 ingredients: pate, sausage, Vietnamese sausages, butter, ham, pork floss, char siu, herbs, pickled carrot and radish, cucumber, chili, mayo, and bread that’s crusty outside and pillowy inside. It’s the heaviest banh mi you’ll ever hold.“
April 2026