Saigon Stays Saigon – Notes from Ho Chi Minh City After 29 Days in District 1

Originally shared on Facebook · February 2023 · After a 29-day stay in Saigon

I lived in Ho Chi Minh City for nearly a month at the start of 2023. Long enough to stop reading menus and start arguing with motorbike drivers. Short enough that I left still convinced of one thing I had said for years: if I could only pick one Vietnamese city, I would pick Hanoi. But Saigon stays Saigon – loud, hot, fast, generous – and after twenty years of moving around Asia I have a soft spot for cities that refuse to be quiet.

This is what 29 days in District 1, District 3, and the edges of Phu Nhuan taught me about the city most people fly into and out of in three days.

Hanoi vs Ho Chi Minh City: The Honest Comparison

I have written before that for food, I prefer Hanoi. That is still true. The northern food has more depth, more layered broths, more nuance – bun cha, cha ca, pho bac. The herbs are different. The pace of eating is different. Hanoi feels like a city that eats slowly because it has been eating the same way for a very long time.

Saigon food is the opposite. It is fast, sweet, southern, and it absorbs everything – French baguettes, Cantonese dim sum, Khmer curries, American beef. Banh mi was invented in this collision. Com tam (broken rice with grilled pork) is a working-class dish that became national. There is no precious tradition here. Saigon eats whatever is in front of it and gets to work.

Both cities are right. They are right about different things.

District 1 Is a Show, District 3 Is a Neighbourhood

District 1 is the postcard – Notre Dame Cathedral, the old Post Office, the Reunification Palace, the rooftop bars on top of the new towers. It works for a first visit. After a week it starts to feel like a film set: too many western tourists, too many overpriced cocktails, too much performance.

The real city, in my experience, lives a few blocks east in District 3 and across the canal in Phu Nhuan. Coffee shops on every corner. Family-run pho places at 6 a.m. Old French villas with broken-down gates and laundry on the second-floor balcony. The traffic is the same, the heat is the same, but you stop being a target for the tuk-tuk economy and start being just another person on the street. That is the version of Saigon I came to enjoy.

Cu Chi Tunnels and the War Remnants Museum

I have been to the Cu Chi Tunnels and the War Remnants Museum more than once across different trips. They are the two places I would still send any first-time visitor to Saigon. Not because they are easy – they are not – but because they explain more about modern Vietnam in an afternoon than any guidebook will.

The War Remnants Museum is uncomfortable in a way that is the point. The photographs of the consequences of chemical defoliants are not pleasant. The captured American hardware in the courtyard is not a souvenir. Vietnamese families walk through with their children and explain. Foreign visitors walk through quietly. You leave understanding why Vietnam built itself the way it did after 1975.

Cu Chi is the opposite kind of visit – outdoors, physical, slightly theatrical. You crawl into the tunnels. You see the booby traps. You see a country that fought a much larger one and did not lose. Both visits belong on the same itinerary.

A Cooking Class in Saigon

One of my best Saigon memories is a cooking class I took years ago – sixteen photos still on my Flickr – in a kitchen above a market in District 1. We started by buying fish and herbs at the market, came back, and learned three southern Vietnamese dishes from a woman who had been cooking for forty years and had no interest in pretending it was complicated. Fish sauce, lime, sugar, chili, herbs. Heat. Plate.

It is hard to overstate how much of Vietnamese cooking is technique that looks like simplicity. Cooking classes in Saigon are often touristic. The good ones still teach you something a recipe cannot.

The Coffee Culture Most People Underestimate

Vietnam is the second-largest coffee producer in the world and Saigon takes coffee seriously. Not in the third-wave Bangkok-Hipster way. In the everyday way. Phin filter, ice, condensed milk. A small plastic chair on the sidewalk. 25,000 dong (around 30 baht). You sit, you drink, you watch the street.

You can also find specialty places – egg coffee transplanted from Hanoi, single-origin roasters in District 2 – but the soul of Saigon coffee is the sidewalk, the chair, and the slow hour you spend not doing anything useful. After Bangkok prices, it feels almost suspicious.

When Saigon Wins

Saigon wins when you stop trying to make it Hanoi.

It is a city built for energy. The traffic is not chaos – it is choreography you eventually learn. The food is not refined – it is alive. The architecture is not preserved – it is layered, half-French, half-modern, half-falling-down. The bars on top of the towers are silly and fun and you should go to one once.

After a month, the version of Saigon I had quietly started to love was the version that exists between 6 and 9 a.m. – the markets, the pho stalls, the older women on plastic stools, the smell of charcoal, the heat already rising. That is the city. The rest is the show.

Practical Information: Visiting Ho Chi Minh City

• Best time to visit: December to March – dry season, cooler mornings, lower humidity
• Where to stay: District 1 for first-timers; District 3 or Phu Nhuan for a second or longer visit
• Must-do: War Remnants Museum, Cu Chi Tunnels, a cooking class, at least one early-morning street-food walk
• What to eat: Banh mi, com tam, hu tieu, banh xeo, cha gio (spring rolls), Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk
• Budget: Excellent. Street meals from 30,000 VND (~40 THB), good hotels from 700,000 VND (~900 THB)
• Stay length: 3 days for the highlights. 7+ days to find the real city. A month if you can.

Saigon does not need converts. It is going to keep doing what it does whether you visit or not. But if you give it more than three days, it stops being a checklist and becomes a place.

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Sébastien Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer, permanent resident of Thailand since 2014, and founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has lived in Thailand continuously since 2006 and writes about travel, culture, and life in Southeast Asia.