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Vietnam: Saigon

In contrast to Hanoi, we started our Saigon trip off slow. Margot was sick (and me by spiritual link), so we spent the first two days sort of just caving in at our AirBnb, watching TV, doing laundry, resting up. We had a very cute space lined up but there was some incident with a fight and a shower and blood, and we couldn’t tell if we were being AirBnB catfished or what but at the end of the day it was all okay. As long as there's a washer, a television, wifi, and air conditioning, the living space can't fail! I was also excited about our rooftop pool but we didn’t use it once… Oh the downstairs lobby of this fancy building did have an automatic fresh orange juice machine, which was an attraction with a delicious output.

During our many hours sitting in front of the TV, we consumed some episodes of Ugly Delicious and Somebody Feed Phil (both grating for various reasons, aka both hosts kind of suck) and discovered Nikki Tran, who has a streetside restaurant in Saigon specializing in her "Viejun" food. We stopped by Cau Ba Quan the day before we left, as our must-eat meal and it was absolutely amazing. Even though the place looked like it was closed for the afternoon, the chefs stopped their clean up and pulled up a table for us to sit outside and then rocked our world with some incredible food. I even sacrificed a smoking glove to dig into the crab, that’s how valuable this experience was.

Food wise I actually didn’t get into that much in Saigon, aside from a smattering of street noodles, a couple of local restaurants, and some downright awful spots that were ill advised. Overall though, the food didn’t disappoint and most importantly, there was an area of town that I now refer to as “boba block,” which was just an entire area of boba shops.

There were at least fifteen to twenty boba shops, way more than I’ve seen even in Taiwan, and most of them were brands I’d never heard of. Many of the shops prominently advertised “milk tea from Taiwan” or an association with Taiwan, which was kind of nice to see. The first shop I stopped at was One Zo, which featured hand crafted boba in flavors like sesame, caramel, cactus, matcha, beetroot, mango, and mulberry. Given the time I would have tried every single boba shop and from now on I will refer to Ngo Duc Ke Street as “boba heaven."

And right nearby this boba paradise — can we jam in a David Brooks reference here? — are Cafe Apartments, which is a tall residential building that has (smartly) made all the front-facing apartments into individual cafes. You take the elevator to the very top and then wind down nine floors of cafes and shops. Each one is decorated with its own theme and while it got a little repetitive after awhile, Cafe Apartments was definitely a fun afternoon diversion, especially when you needed photo-worthy backgrounds for podcast, Tinder, and general profile photos.

Actually we kind of jammed everything in the day before last, visiting Cau Ba Quan, Cafe Apartments, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, a movie, Quan Bui Garden for dinner (delicious!), and an expat-y bar to end the night. Saigon is broken down into seven numbered districts and a handful more named districts but I didn’t actually get any sense of the city at all due to our short time there. I would definitely go back though, as the energy was very lively and Saigon seemed great -- and overall very Taipei-like, albeit without the subway system.

Oh, a note about the movie we watched, Tháng Năm Rực Rỡ (Go-Go Sisters), which was a remake of Korea’s Sunny about a high school girl gang. Localized remakes of 2011’s Sunny are coming to every country near you but I can’t imagine one will be better than the Vietnamese one. I mean, “high school girl gang movie” is already right up my alley but this remake also had terrific casting and incredible music sequences. I almost cried, I wanted to cry!

And speaking of music, new friend and Vietnamese culture scholar T introduced us to his favorite Vietnamese music: the war time ballads of Khánh Ly and Thanh Lan. He’s developing a ballet work around this type of music and explained to us how filtering Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” through the voice of someone actually experiencing a war — Thanh Lan’s version, "Khi Xưa Ta Bé” — has much more depth and emotion.

I’ve conveniently compiled the tracks T played for us in the Uber on the way to The Factory here: as a Youtube playlist. Also, T recommended to always put “trước 75,” which means “before 1975," in the search box to find the real non-synthesized stuff. Classic!

And throughout our trip I was trying to dive back into Viet Thanh Nguyen's Refugees but kept finding it unengaging. The mistake I made was not starting with The Sympathizer, which I only cracked open on the plane back from Saigon. Newly reinforced with a little more Vietnamese history and context, I really loved Sympathizer. Okay Viet, you deserve the Pulitzer, I gueeeesss. Also, I wrapped up Last Days in Vietnam, a 2014 documentary made by Rory Kennedy (Bobby’s daughter!), after some stops-and-starts and while it was a little over aggrandizing, it was an interesting watch. I also tried to rewatch some Tigerland prior to our Vietnam trip but really, watching any Vietnam War film is a waste of time pre-trip as they are all so Hollywood and American.
Last thing, while we were doing all this eating and rating foods, K was tagging her Insta posts with #yumdogmillionaire. So in the spirit of official rankings, we came up with the Desi Yum Scale, which is now ready for definitive use across all social media. My contribution was "The Yumsake," which as you'll note, got the lowly one star.

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