The iconic combination of the conical hat, plastic chair and table, and iced coffee in a plastic cup. Bonus: Graffiti scrawled on the weather- beaten wall.Often referred to as the Catinat Building or the 26 Ly Tu Trong Old Apartment, it perfectly captures Saigon’s layers of time—stretching from French colonial elegance to wartime intelligence. The French Colonial Era (Late 1920s) 🇻🇳 Built around 1926–1927 by the French, it was originally named the Catinat Building (as Đồng Khởi street was then called Rue Catinat). It was designed as a luxury Art Deco/Early Modernist mixed-use complex. 🇻🇳 The ground floor housed high-end commercial businesses, including the famous Société Indochinoise de Transports (SIT). 🇻🇳 The upper floors were designed as upscale residential apartments for wealthy French officials, expatriates, and the elite class of Indochina.Just one of many “alley gangs.” To say they’re photogenic, is an understatement. National PrideAn eclectic group of smiling individuals at a fave neighborhood café. Tao Florist / Tao Café. 📍 28C Ton That TungCom Tam Suon (grilled pork and rice): The breakfast, lunch, and dinner, of champions.239 De Tham: An extreme and fascinating example of a Vietnamese “super-thin tube house” (nhà siêu mỏng).Beautiful ominous clouds almost on the daily during rainy season.
There are weeks when coffee is mostly about the coffee.
And then there are weeks when coffee becomes a way of measuring a life.
This was one of those weeks.
Nine coffees. A little over 347,000 Vietnamese đồng. A ridiculous range of prices, places, textures and moods. Everything from a 13,000₫ cà phê đen đá in a District 3 hẻm to an 89,000₫ coconut coffee at a retro bar. And somewhere in between, I had one of those small realizations that seem insignificant until you realize they aren’t.
But let’s start with the coffee.
My week began with a cà phê sữa with salted foam from Mê Trà on Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai – 25,000₫. Silky, thick foam. Sweet, creamy, indulgent. The kind of coffee that makes you stop pretending coffee is merely a beverage and admit that sometimes it’s dessert wearing a caffeine costume.
Then there was a 20,000₫ cà phê đen đá from YO Coffee, served from a little cart on Nguyễn Văn Tráng. Sitting outside, watching the street do what Saigon streets do, I was reminded again that some of my favorite coffees here cost less than a bottle of water in plenty of places.
I found another little street stand in a District 3 hẻm and had a 13,000₫ cà phê đen đá. Later, near Lê Thị Riêng, a graffiti-covered backdrop provided the setting for a 20,000₫ cà phê sữa đá.
And that’s one of the things I love about drinking coffee in Saigon.
The setting doesn’t have to be impressive.
Sometimes the setting is the point.
A plastic chair. A metal table. A wall covered in graffiti. A narrow hẻm. Motorbikes passing a few feet away. Someone sweeping the sidewalk. Someone else arguing cheerfully over something that sounds very important.
And suddenly you’re sitting in the middle of somebody else’s ordinary Tuesday. And it feels extraordinary.
Then came the hazelnut latte.
The day before, I had walked past an advertisement for a beautiful hazelnut latte. I remember thinking, I’ll be trying that soon.
And the next day, I did.
This may sound like a ridiculously minor thing. But lately I’ve been thinking about how much freedom is contained in that little sentence: I’ll try that.
And then actually doing it.
So there I was at Cheese Coffee on Lê Thị Riêng, drinking a 75,000₫ bạc xỉu hazelnut coffee, enjoying the hell out of it.
It was really good.
And I realized that I’m increasingly grateful for the freedom. And the means to build a life out of these little things.
Not the big things.
The little things.
A coffee because I saw an advertisement and became curious.
A book because I happened to have it with me.
A shady sidewalk because the breeze feels good.
A neighborhood because I wandered into it.
A conversation because somebody happened to sit nearby.
A day that doesn’t have to justify itself.
That particular afternoon was especially good. I was sitting in the shade with a light breeze, reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and thinking that I could probably have stayed there all day.
Honestly, I could have.
There are worse ways to spend a life.
The next coffee took me to Phuong’s Retro Bar on Lý Tự Trọng, where I tried a coconut coffee for 89,000₫. Then another coconut coffee at Bò Cà Phê, a 60,000₫ phin dừa.
Because apparently this was the week I decided that coconut and coffee needed to become a major theme in my life.
I’m not complaining.
Sunday brought one of my favorite rituals: my neighborhood coffee.
I had started teaching online early, and afterward I wandered over to my usual spot. The guy who knows my order – or at least knows the general direction my order is headed, asked if I wanted more condensed milk.
“Yes.”
And on this particular Sunday morning, that was exactly right.
Rich. Sweet. Just the little kick in the ass I needed to start the day.
Monday morning, however, called for something different.
A 25,000₫ coffee at Passio on Bùi Thị Xuân, which I described in my notes as a “detox of sorts.”
After a week that included salted foam, hazelnut, coconut, condensed milk and enough sweetness to qualify as a minor health event, Monday’s coffee felt almost virtuous.
Almost.
Looking back at the week’s list, what strikes me isn’t really the coffee.
It’s the accumulation of small choices.
I can walk past a picture of a hazelnut latte and decide I want one.
I can sit in a hẻm for a 13,000₫ coffee.
I can spend 89,000₫ on something ridiculous and delicious.
I can take a book into the shade and disappear into it for an afternoon.
I can teach online in the morning and be sitting on a plastic chair drinking coffee in a neighborhood a few minutes later.
I can wander.
I can stop.
I can try things.
I can change my mind.
And I can build a life out of all those little things that, taken individually, don’t seem particularly important.
But that’s the trick.
The little things are the big things.
A life doesn’t have to be spectacular to be a good one.
Maybe it just has to contain enough moments when you look up from your coffee, feel the breeze, realize you’re exactly where you want to be, and think:
Starts with organizing with Henry at 303 Pham Ngu Lao and then our bus left right on time at 9:45am.
Immediately, the staff on the bus begins handing out the two cards (duplicates) that we need to fill out for Cambodian immigration. Then he takes our passports. That’s it. He organizes everything. It takes about 3 hours to get to the border (Moc Bai.) One ten-minute bathroom stop on the way. At the border, he carries everyone’s passports and has us follow him.
We had no lines, so literally, in like 2 mins, he handed me my passport to walk outside and get back on our bus that has crossed over to Cambodia, essentially. (In the same parking lot.) Once everyone is back on, they drive us about 5 mins to a sparkling clean Duty Free Plaza, where everyone eats lunch. (About 30 mins)
Then I think 🤔 after that, we follow him into the Cambodian immigration and then get back in the bus. I can’t remember which was first. Either way, we then had 4 more hours to get to Phnom Penh. 2 1/2 hours into that, there’s another bathroom break.
Then, about one more hour and a half, we’re in Phnom Penh. I hopped out and found a tuk tuk 🛺 to drive me to my hotel. 🏨 The End. 😊
The bus is clean, spacious, excellent WiFi and A/C. They provide water and some kind of bread roll. $36 usd for the trip. Well worth it.
Some weeks are about discovering cafés. Others are about discovering me.
This week was a little of both.
I wandered through the hems of Saigon, coffees in hand, notebook in my pocket, following no real itinerary except curiosity. One street coffee became another. Twenty thousand đồng here. Forty thousand there. A modern café tucked inside an alley. An old apartment converted into an espresso bar. A coffee cart shaded by buildings instead of umbrellas. Each stop became less about the drink and more about the pause.
Latte Lounge
At FARO Café on Cao Thắng, the presentation was almost too beautiful to disturb. It was polished, contemporary, and elegant. Proof that Vietnamese coffee culture can be as refined as any specialty café in the world while still feeling unmistakably local.
Another day I found myself back where I often feel most at home: sitting on a tiny plastic stool in a hem, drinking a 20,000 đồng cà phê sữa đá while life flowed around me. Motorbikes squeezed past. Someone watered plants. Someone else swept the alley as if it were an extension of their living room.
It’s amazing how quickly an alley can begin to feel familiar.
One stop this week carried a different kind of weight.
I bought a street coffee on Lý Tự Trọng, just below the rooftop of the Pittman Apartments-the building that is forever linked to one of the defining images of the end of the Vietnam War. From the street, it’s an ordinary city building. People walk past without looking up. Laundry dries from balconies. Coffee is poured into plastic cups. Yet, above it sits the rooftop where, on April 29, 1975, a helicopter landed during Operation Frequent Wind to evacuate CIA personnel and a number of South Vietnamese civilians.
(Hubert van Es/Corbis)
History has a strange way of becoming ordinary. Especially in Ho Chi Minh City.
Sitting there with coffee in my hand, it struck me that places don’t remain frozen in time. They keep living. People move in. Cafés open. The extraordinary quietly becomes part of the everyday.
Maybe grief works that way too.
This was also the first full week after sharing the news of my dad’s passing with a much wider circle of friends, colleagues, and former students around the world. I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer number of messages, comments, and little “grief” emojis that would appear. Hundreds of people took a moment to reach out.
I’ve found myself reading many of them more than once.
There’s something comforting about knowing your sadness is being witnessed by people spread across continents. Not because it makes the loss smaller. It doesn’t. But because it reminds you that kindness travels remarkably well.
As Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet, we carry entire inner worlds that rarely become visible. This week reminded me that, sometimes, they do.
The coffee continued.
An apartment café on Nguyen Van Trang celebrating vintage Saigon.
Three mildly indifferent cats at Nhà Chung who tolerated my presence just enough to make me smile.
Trạm on Công Quỳnh
More hidden alley coffees off Bùi Thị Xuân and Đề Thám, where weathered wooden doors and peeling paint somehow make the coffee taste even better.
The best cafés aren’t the expensive ones.
They’re the places that let me sit quietly for 20-30 minutes and let my thoughts catch up with my footsteps. They let me read the current novel I’m obsessed with. They let me write my field notes.
This week, the coffee was excellent.
The conversations were brief.
The streets continued to be endlessly interesting.
And somewhere between history, grief, and another glass of cà phê sữa đá, Saigon reminded me that healing rarely arrives all at once.
More often, it comes one cup at a time. One breath at a time.
Walking out of my homestay quite early, the sky was hanging low over Saigon, dark enough to promise rain sooner rather than later.
I knew immediately the weather would decide where I drank my first coffee.
Not me.
The first heavy drops fell just as I ducked beneath the umbrella of a tiny street stand. Twenty thousand đồng. Less than a dollar. A cup of cà phê sữa đá and another reminder that some of life’s best decisions are made by the weather.
“All I need is gratitude and coffee in my hand.”A hidden gem in a narrow hem
A woman abandoned her broom to serve me because everyone in the alley looks after one another’s customers. She laughed in disbelief when I ordered black coffee without sugar, repeating không đường over and over as though I couldn’t possibly mean it. But. I did.
Took the Metro 🚇 for the first time! From Ben Thanh to Thao Dien and had a coffee on Xuan Thuy Street
Before dawn on Thursday morning, my phone vibrated.
A message from my former stepmother.
They had been divorced for decades.
“Sorry to tell you like this…”
My father had died.
I stared at the screen without moving.
No racing heartbeat.
No tears.
Only the strange stillness that sometimes arrives before emotion catches up with fact.
I closed my eyes, hoping sleep might return.
Instead, memories arrived.
I remember his laugh.
The glint in his blue eyes.
The laugh I inherited.
He laughed easily. Loudly. Sometimes until tears formed in the corners of his eyes.
I know I was responsible for many of those laughs and I’ll gladly own that for the rest of my time on earth.
For all the complicated years that followed—for the distance, the absences, the estrangement—that is not how I’m going to remember him.
I’m going to remember the beautiful laughing boy he once was.
The seventeen-year-old who had no idea what life would ask of him. The father I adored.
The young soldier who would find himself stationed in Germany and Korea.
The father who loved olives enough that I ate them too, despite not liking them.
The young man who sat beside me with a jar of Marshmallow Fluff and we’d eat spoonfuls as we watched tv, while my mom was out.
Memory is generous that way.
It edits.
Not by deceiving, but by deciding which moments deserve to survive.
Mine chose his mischievous smile.
R. I. P. Dad
Sitting across from Ben Thanh Market with straight black iced coffee as I read “Once There Were Wolves” by Charlotte McConaghy
