April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: BOOK 📕 FOREST
April 2026
Tag: nomad
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: LOTUS 🪷 PROPAGANDA
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: NGUYEN VAN HAO BUILDING
Nguyen Van Hao Building, sometimes called Saigon’s Art Deco Flatiron. It’s one of the most important pre-war commercial buildings still standing in the city.
The story: Nguyen Van Hao was born in 1890 in Tra Vinh Province, came to Saigon poor, started as an apprentice at his stepbrother’s auto parts shop. He saved money, opened his own automobile accessory store at 19-21 Boulevard Gallieni (now Tran Hung Dao), and became one of the wealthiest businessmen in Saigon by the 1920s and 30s. He made his fortune off the growing demand for cars and long-distance travel across the Mekong Delta.
He commissioned this building in the late 1920s. Construction finished in 1937. It was both his family residence and his business offices. The building became known as the “Nguyen Van Hao Garage” because he displayed famous automobile brands there. He also built a petrol station nearby and financed the Nguyen Van Hao Theater on the corner of Tran Hung Dao and De Tham (now the HCMC Drama Theater), which became one of Saigon’s most important performance venues. In 1945, that theater was where the public meeting was held that launched the August Revolution.
The building itself sits at the triangular junction of Tran Hung Dao, Ky Con, and Yersin streets, right across from Ben Thanh Market. It’s a wedge-shaped Art Deco flatiron, about 100 years old now, with beautiful curved lines.
Hao left Saigon in 1966 after his wife died, returned to Tra Vinh, and left the building to his son. It’s been decaying for decades. There have been reports of renovation efforts, and some Airbnb apartments have operated inside it.
April2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: ⭐️
“Vietnam. It grabs you and doesn’t let you go. Once you love it, you love it forever.”
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: THE TRAP OF NOSTALGIA
I carried Saigon in my head for sixteen years like a photograph I never updated. The motorbikes were there. The heat was there. The French buildings and the coffee and the chaos were all there, perfectly preserved in the version of the city I left in 2010. I didn’t realize I’d been treating a living place like a souvenir.
When you leave somewhere, it stops. For you. The clock freezes on the last thing you saw, the last corner you turned, the last bowl of pho you ate before you got on the plane. And your brain files it away under “Saigon” and closes the drawer and every time you think about it, you open the same drawer and find the same city, unchanged, waiting.
I came back expecting reunion. What I got was introduction. This is not the city I left. This is a city that kept going after I stopped watching. The graffiti that didn’t exist before is everywhere now. The 7-Eleven that wasn’t here is struggling on the corner. The kids skating Dong Khoi weren’t born when I was last here. Notre Dame is wrapped in scaffolding. The backpacker street got louder and the alleys got tagged and the skyline got taller.
And the thing is, I did the same thing. I’m not the person who was here in 2010, either. I’ve lived in countries that didn’t exist on my radar back then. I’ve written books that weren’t even ideas. I’ve lost people and found people and become someone the 2010 version of me wouldn’t entirely recognize. I changed too. I just didn’t notice because I was inside the change.
That’s the trap of nostalgia. It’s not that you miss a place. It’s that you miss the version of yourself that was in it. You go back expecting to find both, and instead you find a stranger standing in a city full of strangers, all of whom have been busy living while you were busy remembering.
I get it now. Places are not museums. They don’t owe you the version you left behind. They don’t preserve themselves for your return. They keep building, keep painting, keep tearing down and starting over, because that’s what living things do. The Saigon I remembered doesn’t exist. But the Saigon that does exist is louder, messier, more complicated, and more alive than anything my memory could hold.
I didn’t lose the old city. I just finally showed up for the new one.
April 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: VÌ MỘT MÔI TRƯỜNG XANH
Vietnamese community propaganda, or tranh cổ động.
*While the word “propaganda” often carries a heavy political weight in the West, in Vietnam, it is frequently used by local wards (phường) for social mobilization and civic education.
“VÌ MỘT MÔI TRƯỜNG XANH”
(For a Green Environment)
😆 The wonderful irony: a mural pleading for a green environment serves as a shelf for a plastic takeaway cup of trà tắc (kumquat tea).
9april26
Saigon, Vietnam 🇻🇳
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: BLUE DRAGON 🐉
4april2026
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA 🇰🇭 FOOD: BAGEL ME THIS
When you haven’t had a bagel in a minute…
June 2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳 STREET ART: CONICAL HAT & LANTERNS
3april2026
SAIGON, VIETNAM 🇻🇳: BEFORE I GOT HERE…
And realized everything I wanted was down there.
The best coffee in this city costs 15,000 dong on a plastic stool from a woman who doesn’t have an Instagram account. The best food is served on a plate you didn’t choose from a menu you can’t read. The best views are at eye level, not from a balcony. Saigon doesn’t get better the higher you go. It gets better the closer you sit to the ground.
April 2026