Ho Chi Minh City

• My first solo trip, anywhere. Five days in Saigon in late September 2025, flown in from Hong Kong, standing in line at immigration wondering what I'd just signed up for.
• I stayed in an apartment right on the river, between Districts 1 and 3. My aunt is from Vietnam — not through blood, but through family — so I came in with second-hand stories and a version of the country already sketched in my head. Walking out of the airport at night shredded most of it. The city was further along than I'd expected. Cleaner. Sharper. More alive.
• Most days looked the same. Coffee in the morning — Vietnamese coffee is its own fuel source — then hours of walking. I covered most of the central districts on foot, ducked into the pho spots everyone writes about, jumped in a Grab when my legs gave out, then kept going. I don't think there's a better way to read a city than to just walk it until your feet hurt.
• The motorbikes are their own character. I didn't ride them here — the traffic is too much the first time you see it — but I sat on a corner one afternoon and watched the tide of them flow through the intersection for close to an hour. There's a rhythm to it that only works because everyone inside it agrees on the rules.
• The moment that rearranged me came at 1am, walking back to my apartment. Two kids asleep on the sidewalk outside the building — a girl around five, a boy around nine. I stopped, looked at them, and walked them into the nearest convenience store. Through Google Translate I told them to get whatever they wanted. They hesitated. They kept apologizing, telling me it was too much, that they didn't want to spend my money. I told them please. Please get it all.
• They walked out with snacks, drinks, food, the kind of small luxuries that should be nothing to anyone. I walked back to my place and felt, genuinely, the best I have ever felt in my life. It wasn't about the money. It was about the fact that for a few minutes two kids got to be kids.
• On a separate day I took a boat out into the Mekong Delta and ended up eating rat and drinking cobra wine — which goes on the short list of things I didn't plan to do and won't forget.
• What most tourists miss is the walking. The temples and the bars and the rooftop views are all there, but the city is most itself in the gaps — side streets, alley markets, families eating dinner on the sidewalk in plastic chairs. You have to move slow to see it.
• I left Saigon understanding what Anthony Bourdain meant. You can read his words for years and still not feel what he was pointing at until a place like this does the work for you. After that trip, I couldn't see money or success the same way. They're not the point. They're a tool to make more moments like the one at the convenience store possible.

At 1am, a boy and a girl — nine and five — sleeping alone outside my building. I took them into the nearest store and told them to get whatever they wanted. Through Google Translate they kept apologizing for the cost. I told them please, get it all. I've never felt better in my life.