From Cho Lon to Ben Thanh Market, streetcars were once a common sight on Saigon's main thoroughfares.
While their tracks have long disappeared, their memory lives on in old photographs like the one above.
Before motorized transportation was the norm in Saigon, horse-drawn carts were used to move both goods and people.
The Saigon Opera House (aka the Municipal Theatre) is one of Saigon’s oldest buildings and one of the city’s best examples of classical French architecture. Constructed at the turn of the 20th century...
Before 1975, large advertisements were commonplace in Saigon. But after the American War and the fall of capitalism in the South, ads were considered a vestige of the old order and were heavily regula...
Art deco is by far our favorite architectural style, one which luckily, Saigon has in spades. However, with each passing day, these buildings are being torn down to make way for modern structures whic...
Though cars have been present in the country since the turn of the 20th century, decades of war (1941 – 1975) and an economic stagnation (1975 – 1986) drastically reduced the number of automobiles in ...
We often look to old buildings in order reconnect with the past since they are clear and static reference points. Though useful, another important window into the past is the day-to-day lives of peopl...
Despite being the world’s second-largest coffee exporter with cafes and vendors filling its streets, Vietnam is rarely recognized for the quality of its coffee. But anyone who has strolled around Saig...
From a small restaurant with only one oven in the basement of Syktyvkar in Russia's far north, Dodo has become the fastest-growing pizza chain in the world. It now has its sights set on Vietnam.
Unripe mangosteen chicken salad has been all over Vietnamese social media during the past few weeks, though we didn’t expect to find it at an upscale hotel dinner buffet. But across from the sushi and...
“When you learn a language, you don’t just learn the language, you learn new attitudes, ways of thinking, culture and history,” explains Aline Nguyen, the Principal of La Petite Ecole Ho Chi M...
The greatest source of stress for foreigners living in Vietnam is often obtaining a work permit. Complicated and frequently changing regulations coupled with long wait times and burdensome paperwork m...
The amount of international schools available in Ho Chi Minh City seems to be outnumbered only by the many acronyms prospective families must memorize to make sense of the differences in curriculum an...
