April 2026
What was supposed to be a simple, breezy week-long border run to Phnom Penh has turned into a bureaucratic existential crisis. But hey, at least the coffee is keeping me going. Here is how my week tasted:
1. ENSO Cafe
The Vibe: I woke up way earlier than most sensible cafes care to open. After a morning stroll to the Independence Monument, I stumbled on this spot. I’m sitting outside under a roof with a nice breeze, learning a little Khmer: Some cafe trojeak moo-oy (an iced coffee, please).
The Damage: 12,300 Riels (about $3).
The Brew: It’s not even 7:30 AM yet and the heat from the sun is already intense. The cold brew is absolute perfection.
Socials: IG: @ensocafe
Language practice: Good Morning = Arun Suostei. Thank you = Orkūn.
2. 1987 Pang + Café
The Brew: I ordered an Iced Coconut Coffee. It’s notably less sweet than the ones you get across the border in Vietnam—and honestly, that’s probably a good thing.
The Vibe: The staff here were polite enough to actually ask, “Normal sweet or extra sweet?” In Vietnam, they don’t ask; they just drop the sugar bomb. I respect both approaches, but I told them, “Normal. The way you do it in Cambodia!” Et voilà, here we are.
Soundtrack of the moment: Charles Mingus – Myself When I’m Real 🎶
Socials: IG: @1987_pangcafe / TT: @1987.pang.and.cafe
3. Misterbrew Coffee (Norodom)
The Vibe: Upon walking in, the staff strategically deployed their most capable English speaker—a young, quaking guy whom I unintentionally accosted with a barrage of investigative questions about what I should order. Bless him, he walked me through an impressive explanation of three different specialty coffees. Together, we decided I should try the Café Samai Derm (the original/traditional style). Side note: Samai means “era” or “generation”.
The Brew: I got it because the barista told me it was his personal favorite and that he drinks it every single day. He wasn’t lying. It’s good. I’m happy.
Socials: IG: @misterbrew_kh / TT: @misterbrewcoffee
4. Brown Coffee
The Brew: Iced Americano.
The Reality Check: To be totally honest, I didn’t even finish it, and I was hardly conscious of what it tasted like. It was definitely good and strong, but my head was entirely somewhere else.
The Visa Intermission (Where things go sideways)
I am currently having serious visa issues. I thought this was going to be an easy run: leave Vietnam on a bus at 9:45 AM on Monday, June 1st, cross the border, apply for a new 90-day visa online, and just hang out and enjoy Phnom Penh for a week. I’d get my approved visa, be happy, and board a return bus on Sunday, June 7th.
The universe—or rather, the Vietnam Embassy in Hanoi—had completely different plans.
On Tuesday, they replied: “You must leave VN before applying for a visa.” But I did leave! I received that same exact automated message again on Thursday, and again on Friday. I have been frantically trying to send them proof, namely a clear photo of the VN exit stamp in my passport dated June 1st. I thought all they needed to see was that my IP address was in Cambodia, but apparently not.
So now, here I sit on Friday, June 5th. I took a speeding tuk-tuk to the VN Embassy here in Phnom Penh this morning to literally plead for help. Then, I had to take another frantic return tuk-tuk ride in the afternoon after getting ANOTHER “please leave VN” email from Hanoi. We took yet another photo of my exit stamp and blasted it off to them.
The Phnom Penh Embassy finally told me that if Hanoi refuses me again, I need to come back to them with my physical passport and $80, and they will expedite it. Because of this mess, I’ve already had to extend my hotel stay through Thursday and haven’t even booked a return bus yet. I can’t. I have no idea how long I’ll be here. Riding in the tuk-tuk today, watching the city blur past, I seriously questioned myself: “Why am I doing this? What’s the point? Should I just stop?”
5. Slope Coffee
The Brew: Back on the horse. Iced Americano.
The Damage: 6,000 Riels (an incredibly reasonable $1.50).
Socials: IG: @theslope_coffee / TT: @theslopecoffee
The coffee is cheap, the cafes are beautiful, but please, Hanoi… just approve my stamp so I can get back to Nam.
June 2026
2april26
This week in coffee felt less like hunting for caffeine and more like wandering into tiny human moments scattered around Saigon before the city fully wakes up.
Before 6am one morning, I found a coffee lady tucked into a little hem off Lê Thị Riêng. She was the only one operating for blocks.
A nice dark iced milk coffee. I love that first violent hit of iced milk coffee. 😆 But after days of it, I started craving the cleaner intensity of cà phê đen đá — straight black Vietnamese coffee over ice. There’s a focused kind of energy in it that feels almost medicinal. Sharp. Motivated. Slightly concerning. Probably unhealthy in quantities I’m currently exploring.
One morning I walked out with no destination at all. Just the intention of letting coffee find me. After wandering through streets I’m fairly certain I was never meant to be on, under brutal heat, I ended up at another completely unassuming stand on Bùi Viện.
I ordered in Vietnamese and her entire expression changed. Suddenly there was smiling, correcting my pronunciation of “Bùi Viện” while I filmed, asking if I wanted the coffee in a glass mug instead of takeaway plastic. Yes. Absolutely yes. That tiny gesture somehow said everything. Respect given, respect returned. I love a glass mug!
What struck me this week was how quickly attitudes soften when people realize you are trying — even badly — to meet their culture where it lives instead of demanding it come to you.
I never see any foreigners sitting at these tiny sidewalk coffee stands. They stay inside cafes with air conditioning and playlists curated in Stockholm or Melbourne. Meanwhile, the real pulse of Saigon is sitting six inches above the pavement on a blue plastic chair while scooters scream past your knees.
And honestly? That is the only way I want to experience this city.
Straight Black Coffee
One stand gave me the exact opposite of what I ordered — black coffee arrived sweetened with sugar and no ice. Did I complain? Of course not. I know I’m lucky to even be sitting on a sidewalk in Saigon drinking coffee in the first place.
May 2026
You won’t find these in a guidebook. No walking tours stop here. No pin on any travel blogger’s Google Map.
But if you want to understand how Thailand actually works, look at the shophouses. I personally can’t take my eyes off of them.
The Thai shophouse, or tuk taew (ตึกแถว), is everywhere. Concrete rows, three or four stories tall, narrow frontages, deep footprints. Ground floor is a business. Upper floors are where people sleep. They line every major road in Nonthaburi and most of greater Bangkok, built fast during the economic boom decades of the 1970s through the 1990s, when this country was expanding so quickly that nobody had time to make things pretty. They just needed them to stand up.
The design comes from Chinese immigrant shophouse traditions, adapted through Thai urban planning and poured in concrete. The narrow frontage is intentional. Property taxes and lot prices were historically based on how much street frontage you occupied, so builders went deep instead of wide. Maximum space, minimum tax exposure. Every unit shares a wall with the next. A whole city built on a tax strategy.
I have been living in Nonthaburi for the past few months. I walk these streets every day. And what I keep stopping to photograph is not the temples or the river or the night markets. It is these rows. Because they tell the real story.
Four buildings. Four stages of the same life.
One block got a fresh coat of paint. Green, yellow, red, bright enough to stop traffic. A Korean restaurant on the ground floor. Somebody decided this row still had a future and put money into it. It works. The color is bold and unapologetic against the haze and the power lines and the taxi rolling past. This is a shophouse that got a second act.
A few streets over, a long cream-colored row stretches down the block. Classic mid-boom construction. Still functioning. Shops open on the ground floor, laundry hanging from upper balconies. But the concrete is starting to show its years. Nobody is investing in a facelift here. It is doing its job, and that is enough.
Then there is the block where the old and the new share a wall. On one end, dark water stains running down the facade, tangled wires, a faded sign for a business that probably closed years ago. On the other end, a Cafe Amazon franchise with clean glass and warm lighting. Coral and cream paint, fresh enough to look like a different building entirely. But it is not a different building. It is the same row. One owner gave up and another one moved in. That is how these streets regenerate. Not by tearing down. By filling in.
And then the last stage. Peeling blue trim. Green tarps stretched across openings where awnings used to be. Shuttered shops at street level, metal gates pulled down for good. But look closer. One air conditioning unit is still running on an upper floor. Somebody still lives there. The building is fading, but it is not empty. In Thailand, things do not get abandoned the way they do in other countries. They just get quieter.
I have spent over twenty years documenting street art and urban landscapes in more than forty countries. The thing that always draws me in is not the architecture itself. It is what happens to it over time. The layers. The patching. The moment someone decides to paint their four units bright red while the neighbor keeps theirs bare concrete. That is where the story is.
Thai shophouses were never designed to be looked at. They were designed to be used. But decades of weather, economics, migration, and individual decisions turned them into something worth paying attention to. The arched windows popular in 1980s builds. The balcony railings rusting at different rates depending on which floor gets the most rain. The signs in Thai, Chinese, Korean, sometimes English, stacked on top of each other like geological layers of who did business here and when.
Nonthaburi is not on anybody’s architecture tour. But it should be. Not for the buildings themselves, but for what they show you about how a city actually lives. Not the postcard version. The real one. Concrete, wire, weather, commerce, and time doing what they do.
These are the buildings nobody photographs. So I do.
JAN-MAR2026
A cà phê sữa đá on a busy median.
Traffic whizzing by, but somehow, sitting on a tiny red stool with sweet coffee in my hand became the only thing I noticed. The coffee lady looked lonely out there in the middle of the chaos — cars, trucks, motorbikes rushing past with no pause, her little cart full of drinks waiting for customers. So I stayed a while. Maybe made her day a little less lonely. Maybe she did the same for me.
On Monday mornings, I wake up before the church bells, before the roosters, and certainly before any coffee ladies. So, on those mornings, I have a canned coffee waiting in the wings of my arsenal (you may call it a mini fridge.)
This brand happens to be deeply tied to the “First Lady of Coffee” in Vietnam, Le Hoang Diep Thao.
To understand King Coffee, you have to look back at Trung Nguyen, the powerhouse brand founded in 1996 by Le Hoang Diep Thao and her then-husband, Dang Le Nguyen Vu.
• TNI Label: Notice the “TNI” logo at the top, which stands for Trung Nguyen International—the entity Thao managed.
• The Flavor Profile: It is designed to mimic the “Vietnamese Bold Style,” which typically uses Robusta beans for a high caffeine content and a distinct, smoky bitterness. Hello!
• Cultural Iconography: The design featuring a woman in an Áo dài and a Nón lá (conical hat) is a deliberate choice to brand the coffee as an authentic cultural export of Vietnam. 🇻🇳
One of this week’s specialty coffees was at Café Linh, tucked around Trương Định and Phạm Hồng Thái. Coffee with lime zest — sharp, bitter, refreshing all at once. Vietnam never runs out of ways to reinvent coffee without ruining it! Holla!
Another stop was a mild but tasty cà phê sữa đá on Đỗ Quang Đẩu Street. The young staff guy there had the kind of genuine smile that makes decisions for me. The café next door wanted my business more aggressively, but this place earned it quietly. 😊
The flavor logic is straightforward. Mint cools. Vietnamese coffee is dark, bitter, and heavy. The mint lifts it, adds a cold brightness that hits your nose before it hits your tongue. 😛
One of my favorite moments this week came before 8am on Đỗ Quang Đẩu. Sitting with a ca Phe den đá, watching the city wake itself up in real time. Motorbikes flowing toward school drop-offs and office jobs. Street vendors emerging from narrow hẻms, deciding where to set up for the day. Women carrying boards of sunglasses and lighters trying to sell me shades while I’m already wearing prescription Ray-Bans. You have to respect the hustle.
Between about 7:00 and 7:40 there’s this brief window where Saigon feels almost gentle. A little breeze moving through the streets before the sun fully takes over. The more pleasant the weather, the longer I sit and read. Currently reading “A Naked Singularity” by Sergio De La Pava.
But eventually the heat wins.
That’s usually when I go searching for my breakfast bánh mì from my favorite lady — the one who adds tomatoes without charging extra, then refuses to accept the extra 5,000 đồng tip I want to give her because I appreciate the gesture. It’s become our daily little battle. One I eventually win. 😊
Vietnam keeps giving. And I keep receiving with gratitude. 🙏
May 2026
The first time you come to Thailand, you notice them everywhere.
Tiny temples at the edge of sidewalks. In front of banks. Outside 7-Elevens. Guarding construction sites. Sitting confidently in front of corporate headquarters as if they were always part of the blueprint.
They are called ศาลพระภูมิ, spirit houses.
They are homes.
Long before Buddhism took root here, animist beliefs shaped daily life. The land had spirits. The trees had spirits. The ground itself was inhabited. When you build on land, you displace something. The solution is not to ignore it. The solution is to provide a new residence.
So, you build a house. Elevated. Facing an auspicious direction. Installed with ceremony. Blessed by monks or Brahmin priests. Carefully placed according to astrology.
Inside you will see incense, marigold garlands, fruit, rice, jasmine water, and often bottles of bright red Fanta. Offerings for the guardian spirit of that land. A gesture of respect. A request for protection. A quiet negotiation between the visible and the unseen.
What moves me is not the shrine itself. It is the coexistence.
A glass tower in Bangkok will still have a spirit house at its entrance. A multinational corporation with quarterly earnings reports and biometric scanners still pauses to light incense in the morning. A luxury condo will cast a shadow over a tiny gilded house that stands firmly in front of it.
Modernity here does not erase belief. It builds around it.
February 2026
Today I walked Bond Street in Nonthaburi again. Half-built towers. Stairwells open. Electrical lines hanging. The kind of buildings that are in-between; not abandoned, not alive yet.
And the graffiti.
The walls are getting hit while they’re still unfinished. Tags on bare cement. Quick spray jobs on columns that will absolutely be painted over in a few months. It’s not elaborate murals; more like presence. “I was here before this became something else.”
Here’s what I’ve noticed living in Thailand: space here isn’t neutral. It’s conscious. There are spirit houses outside condos, outside 7-Elevens, outside office parks. Offerings. Incense. Garlands. Even construction sites sometimes have their own small shrine tucked near the entrance. There’s an awareness that buildings aren’t just structures — they’re inhabited, protected, watched over.
So I have this theory — and I’ll say clearly, this is my observation, not a hard fact.
Writers hit buildings in progress because they know it’s temporary. The wall is unfinished. The paint isn’t final. The tag will disappear. It’s almost like tagging a draft version of the city. No one has spiritually claimed it yet. No tenants. No shrine out front. No blessing ceremony completed. It’s still in limbo.
But once a building is finished? Once it’s open, occupied, lit up at night? The graffiti drops off dramatically. Especially on places that visibly have shrines or offerings outside. That feels like a boundary. Not just legal — cultural. Spiritual.
I’ve also heard — again, this is just what people have told me — that some writers avoid certain abandoned hotels or houses that have gone into disrepair. Not because they respect the property owner. But because you don’t know what’s lingering there. Did someone die there? Is the space “heavy”? In Thailand, that question isn’t abstract. It’s real enough to influence behavior.
Whether that’s universally true or not, I don’t know. But walking these sites today, it felt clear: construction zones are fair game because they’re unfinished, and therefore unclaimed. Once the building settles into its role — once the spirits are invited in and the people move in — it becomes something else.
And personally? I’m drawn to this stage. I like the graffiti on raw concrete. It feels honest. Temporary city language on temporary surfaces. It’s the only moment the structure shows its bones and its interruptions at the same time.
A few months from now, the paint will cover it. The lobby will shine. The shrine will stand outside with fresh marigolds.
And the tags will be gone.
But for now, the building is still listening.
February 2026
The last week of April, melting into the first week of May (today, as I write this, it is 89•F, feeling like 98•F with a warning of “excessive heat” *31•C, 37•C) felt like it should—hot, loud, imperfect, and somehow full of small moments that mattered.
In the middle of a bustling, chaotic market, I sat down and drank my first cà phê sữa đá of the week. Not in paper, not takeaway, but in a proper glass—the way I prefer it. There’s something about that glass that says we both understand the arrangement. I’m not rushing anywhere. I’m going to sit here, right at your cart, and drink this coffee the way it was meant to be drunk.
Street coffee in Saigon isn’t about convenience. It’s about presence.
One of my favorite stops this week was for yoghurt coffee—cà phê sữa chua—down Phạm Ngũ Lão alley. That one always carries nostalgia for me because I spent so much time in that alley over twenty years ago at the Bread and Butter Bar. Walking back there now feels like stepping into an older version of myself.
Yoghurt coffee feels very Saigon to me—practical and inventive. Someone looked at coffee and thought, “Yes, but what if we made it colder, creamier, sharper?” And somehow it works. The bitterness of strong Vietnamese coffee against the cool tang of yoghurt—it shouldn’t, but it absolutely does. It tastes like adaptation. Like a city constantly reinventing itself without losing its center. I still prefer Coconut Coffee as my specialty coffee here.
In that same alley, the following day, I had my first negative vibe of my entire tenure so far.
I was sitting, drinking, taking a few exterior photos of the space around me—not bothering anyone—and the coffee lady gave me that unmistakable energy. You know the one. Suspicion mixed with disapproval, served without words. She didn’t approve of my picture-taking, not understanding that it was nothing intrusive, just exterior. If she only understood the series I’ve been doing, 😆.
She proceeded to stand in front of me and overtly take a photo of me, as though my mugshot would go up on her wall.
My first reaction was internal: Be zen. Don’t let her strange behavior affect your day.
And honestly, it became a beautiful little meditation. I reminded myself: “you are healthy, you are fortunate enough to be sitting in an alley in Saigon drinking coffee—let it go.” So I did. I even found myself grateful to her for the lesson. 🙇♀️
As for having my photo taken? I don’t mind at all. Daily life gets photographed here constantly. We are all part of someone else’s background story. Just a weird experience.
Met a lovely married couple sitting next to me today and ended up being gifted something I’d never tried before — Bánh Tráng Kẹo Mạch Nha 🥥🍯
A light rice cake topped with coconut shavings and a sticky, sweet malt syrup drizzle… simple and absolutely delicious.
They told me it was their childhood snack, something they hadn’t had in a long time, so today was a little treat for them, too.
Their phone translator helped us talk, and somehow that made it even better — strangers sharing stories, laughter, and food across languages.
For me, travel isn’t about the big sights. It’s a sidewalk table, kind people, and a sweet little rice cake I’ll never forget.
Saigon keeps giving me these moments. ❤️ Forever grateful.
Another reminder came at a corner draped in shade, protecting me from the intense heat already rising, near the intersection of Lê Lai and…honestly, I forgot the cross street, but I’ll find it again because the coffee lady there deserves remembering.
She got a kick out of my Vietnamese. 😆
I’ve realized something: if I begin with one or two practiced phrases—just enough to show respect—they’ll happily continue speaking Vietnamese the entire time I sit there. I nod, smile, and understand maybe twenty percent. They think I understand more than I do, but somehow that’s enough.
And maybe that’s the point.
Connection first. Perfect language later.
She doesn’t talk much, which I like. Coffee ladies understand the assignment. They give you space to sit quietly, to read, to write, to simply be. Sometimes she brings an extra cup of tea without a word. That kind of kindness says more than conversation.
Reunification Day brought me to TABAC on Phạm Ngũ Lão for a straight black cà phê đen đá and some quiet writing. Saigon during holidays has its own rhythm—reflective, but still moving.
Saigon moves in its own way. I’m learning to be comfortable moving in my own way. The daily lessons from the coffee help…
April 2026
