A strange red-paneled building by the wharf. Saigon cosplaying modernism. Surely some kind of government building.
NgĂąn hĂ ng NhĂ nÆ°á»c Viá»t Nam â Chi nhĂĄnh TP.HCM
đ Address: 8 VĂ” VÄn Kiá»t, District 1
Ho Chi Minh City branch of Vietnamâs central bank (the equivalent of:
the Federal Reserve in the U.S. dates back to the late French colonial period, most likely the 1930s. Original era (French Indochina â ~1930s)
The structure was built during the colonial period as part of the financial administration network tied to Banque de lâIndochine.
That bank wasnât just any bankâit effectively acted as:
the central bank of French Indochina
A classic mid-century Vietnamese apartment / mixed-use block, probably dating from the 1960sâ1970s. possibly originally built for civil servants, workers, or urban middle-class residents during the late South Vietnam eraThis is the LIM Tower 3, a modern office tower in District 1. Classic modern Saigon development: steel-and-glass office tower wrapped in neo-classical styling
Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange â usually called HOSE.
Vietnamâs main stock exchange:
the financial heart of the countryâs stock market
where many of Vietnamâs largest companies are listed
effectively the Vietnamese equivalent of:
the NYSE in New York
or the London Stock Exchange
Tube Houses and Shophouses
Historically, because buildings were taxed according to street frontage rather than total area, many shophouses are long and narrow in shape, similar to the vernacular âtube house.â
The earliest surviving shophouses in Saigon date to the 1860s. The most common design is the two-storey type, featuring a shop and storage on the ground floor and residential spaces above.
Vietnamese cats are mostly lean, short-haired, and look like theyâve seen things. Theyâre not the fluffy pampered indoor cats of Western Instagram. Theyâre street cats and shop cats and alley cats and temple cats. They eat rice and fish scraps and whatever falls off the table and they do fine. Theyâve been doing fine for centuries.
In Vietnamese culture, cats are considered lucky. MĂšo (cat) sounds like a word associated with prosperity in some dialects. In the Vietnamese zodiac, the Cat replaces the Rabbit (which is used in the Chinese zodiac). So while the rest of Asia had the Year of the Rabbit, Vietnam had the Year of the Cat. This makes Vietnam one of the only cultures in the world that gives the cat its own zodiac year. The most recent one was 2023.
Charles Bukowski: âHaving a bunch of cats around is good. If youâre feeling bad, just look at the cats, youâll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.â
Mirror An abandoned area in Pham Ngu Lao Park. This was a mural on an old Cigar Lounge WallThe iconic conical hat (NĂłn lĂĄ) on the head of this graff pieceInteresting scrawl on an electric âĄïž box in Pham Ngu Lao Park
The West may come here and see âpoverty,â but Saigon is far from poor.
People pass a woman in a conical hat, wearing pyjamas, balancing her day on two shouldersâselling 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 thereâarranging 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 streetâpeople 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 ânoâ a hundred times a day. Sometimes with kindness, often without it. Yet the constant rejection doesnât 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 streetsâa 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 nĂłn lĂĄ and offers you a lighter at a street corner.
Saigon teaches this lesson quietly: resilience is not loud.
It doesnât 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.
These men work brutal hours in brutal heat for money that would make a Westerner cry. But the sleep itself is not sad. The sleep is the one moment in the day that belongs to them. Nobody is paying for it. Nobody is timing it. Nobody is asking them to deliver something or drive somewhere or fix something. For ten minutes or an hour, the man and the motorbike are still, and the city flows around them.Built: ~1955â1965 (most likely around early 1960s) đ LĂœ Tá»± Trá»ng Street, was heavily developed during the 1950sâ60s as Saigon expanded into a modern capital. After reunification in 1975, this building was eventually used by the hĂĄt bá»i troupe (established 1977). HĂĄt bá»i is Vietnamâs traditional opera: painted faces, symbolic acting, historical drama, and big moral storytelling.
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 didnât realize Iâd 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 âSaigonâ 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 didnât exist before is everywhere now. The 7-Eleven that wasnât here is struggling on the corner. The kids skating Dong Khoi werenât 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. Iâm not the person who was here in 2010, either. Iâve lived in countries that didnât exist on my radar back then. Iâve written books that werenât even ideas. Iâve lost people and found people and become someone the 2010 version of me wouldnât entirely recognize. I changed too. I just didnât notice because I was inside the change.
Thatâs the trap of nostalgia. Itâs not that you miss a place. Itâs 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 donât owe you the version you left behind. They donât preserve themselves for your return. They keep building, keep painting, keep tearing down and starting over, because thatâs what living things do. The Saigon I remembered doesnât exist. But the Saigon that does exist is louder, messier, more complicated, and more alive than anything my memory could hold.
I didnât lose the old city. I just finally showed up for the new one.
Before I got here, the Cafe Apartment building at 42 Nguyen Hue was at the top of my list. A 1960s apartment block with 50 cafes stacked nine stories high. Iâd seen the photos a hundred times. I finally went. Stood outside. Took this photo. 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 doesnât have an Instagram account. The best food is served on a plate you didnât choose from a menu you canât read. The best views are at eye level, not from a balcony. Saigon doesnât get better the higher you go. It gets better the closer you sit to the ground.Kids skating Dong Khoi today. The same street where French officers took evening walks, where war correspondents filed stories from the Continental, where tanks rolled in on April 30, 1975. Now itâs a skate spot. Vietnamâs youth keep finding ways to claim public space that nobody offered them. Fifty years from revolution to kickflip. Uncle Ho didnât plan for this but I think the street is better for it.There are writers getting up high here.
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: Itâs 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 = Orkƫn.
The Brew: I ordered an Iced Coconut Coffee. It’s notably less sweet than the ones you get across the border in Vietnamâand honestly, thatâs 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 voilĂ , here we are.
Soundtrack of the moment: Charles Mingus â Myself When I’m Real đ¶
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. Itâs good. Iâm happy.
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 universeâor rather, the Vietnam Embassy in Hanoiâhad 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, Iâve 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).
