May 6th, 2010
I knew I would like Ho Chi Minh City the minute I had my first cup of coffee. Any city where it’s normal to take a leisurely mid-morning coffee break is fine by me — especially when those coffee breaks take place with birdcages and newspapers in a public park.
Last year, I wrote about the coffee-on-demand service available in one Saigon park, but the city’s parks are home to more conventional cafés, too. One year ago, on a sunny morning in early February, I found myself sitting with two friends in Tao Dan Park, on the west side of the city’s colonial centre, where a concrete terrace is filled with low plastic chairs. We sat and ordered two iced milk coffees and one hot black coffee from a woman who wandered over from a small outdoor kitchen nearby. Around us, middle-aged and elderly men read newspapers or chatted as they slowly nursed their coffee. Some birdcages sat prominently in the middle of the terrace, reminding me of the old Hong Kong cafés I’d seen in films, where men bring their birds out for milk tea.
There’s something plainly civilized about park cafés — they help make public space comfortable, complete and less banal. So I was happy to hear yesterday that in Montreal, the Plateau Mont-Royal’s new Projet Montréal administration wants to introduce a café to Lafontaine Park. As long as the café is affordable and its revenues used to maintain the park around it, I can’t see many downsides to this idea. Maybe Montreal will end up with a bit of Tao Dan on the Plateau.
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July 4th, 2009
Another July 1st, another year I breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t have to move on Moving Day. I must be exceptionally lucky: I’ve never had to move on the same day as more than 100,000 other Montrealers. Instead, I have been able to wander the streets and watch, with voyeuristic glee, as the curtain that normally hangs between us and our neighbours is ripped away.
That’s exactly what I told a journalist from La Presse when she called to ask what I thought of the odd way that Montrealers spend Canada’s national holiday. (Unfortunately, she somehow misspelled my name, adding a “v” and an “e” where they really shouldn’t exist.) As perplexing as it is to have most residential leases end on the same day, it’s also one of those charmingly illogical things that make Montreal such an admirably eccentric city.
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April 25th, 2009
2:30pm in a restaurant on the outskirts of Saigon’s District 1
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March 29th, 2009
Saigon owes its existence to the Saigon River, but its languid current and fetid waters aren’t quite as impressive as one might expect. The city’s real river can be found in its streets, where a roaring current of motorcycles, buses, trucks and cars rushes unceasingly for all but a few hours of the day. Although some form of official order is imposed—there are one-way streets, some road signs and the occasional traffic light—most rules of the road are flouted in favour of a more natural order of things. The guiding philosophy of traffic in Saigon is to do everything you can to get ahead without getting hit.
March 23rd, 2009
“Nobody walks in Los Angeles,” people often say, which is of course completely untrue. There are plenty of places to stroll around, even if LA is a vast, sprawling, auto-oriented city. But in Saigon? Really, nobody walks. You’ll come across tourists wandering around the city’s historic centre, or some people ambling from one shop to another, but the reality is that sidewalks are more often used for parking scooters and sitting in plastic chairs than they are for walking. In this city, the motorcycle rules, and streetlife exists on two wheels.
February 17th, 2009
I’ve always had a thing for overhead wires. People tend to complain about their unsightliness, especially in cities where they are abundant, like Toronto. But they add a gritty, functional dimension to the streetscape. If roads are the city’s veins, wires are the nerves, carrying the electrical currents, telephone signals and other bits of power and information that make urban life possible.
Even Toronto’s mess of hydro lines, telephone cables and streetcar wires can’t compare to the overhead wires of Saigon, where they are so numerous, so thick and so tangled they sometimes come close to blotting out the sky. It can often be a bit nerve-wracking to walk underneath them; if you aren’t worrying about a wire snapping loose and hitting you in the head, you’re dodging cables that have already snapped loose and are hanging dangerously close to the ground.
To be fair, this phenomenon is not unique to Saigon. It’s common in the cities of other developing countries, which don’t have the resources or will to effectively regulate the installation of utility lines. (Manila, another city famous for its abundance of overhead wires, has recently made an effort to bring some order to the chaos.) I have a hard time imagining Saigon without the wires, though — it would be as strange and empty as if it had no motorcycles, another defining aspect of the city.
February 7th, 2009
Coffee is a big part of the social life of Saigon, a city that somehow manages to be both languid and relentlessly energetic in nearly equal measure. Hundreds of cafés and coffee stands dot the city: relaxed neighbourhood hangouts with a few plastic seats out front to watch the city go by; leafy park cafés where middle-aged women chat and men bring birdcages; multistoried cafés with elaborate fountains and gardens, oases hidden in unremarkable lanes. But even when there isn’t a café, it’s still easy to get coffee.
On a warm afternoon earlier this week, a few friends and I found ourselves in a small park in District 1, just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Basilica and Saigon’s tourist hub. Not long after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked us if we wanted any coffee. We ordered three cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) and one black iced coffee. About five minutes later, a man on a motorbike arrived with the coffees in a wire tray and the woman brought them to us. We paid 26,000 dong (about $1.80) for the four drinks.
Somehow, the fact that the coffee woman was wearing a Parasuco t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Montréal, Québec, Canada” made the candy-sweet coffee even more delicious.
