The 7 Coolest Cafes in Tan Dinh, District 1, HCMC

Cafe Time is Life. You know I speak the truth.

I moved into my new place October of 2019 here in Tan Dinh ward, District 1, and I really couldn't be happier with the location. It's full of street life, services, good food, and great places to explore.

Fortunately, there are also a bunch of great cafes to while away the hours with a book or your laptop and remote work. If you're anything like me, you love to find a good new cafe, especially one that lets you linger for a little while and take your time soaking up the leisurely pace of life that permeates Southern Vietnam.

Here are some of my close-to-home favorites...

He's Come Undone (33rd-Year Edition)

I can't articulate WHY... but this speaks to me.

Real talk.

For a while in 2016, it indeed looked like I'd come undone. A better metaphor is that it was like being unmoored and lost at sea.

Unmooring a vessel means to lift up the anchor and release ties to the dock, releasing it to the weather, the sea, and the skill of the crew. It's always the start of any journey, and no ship leaves dock without a destination. I unmoored myself from Chicago when I left to travel abroad. The thing about journeys is that, when you have a stated end goal, your journey will end in either success or failure.

In other words, becoming unmoored is the first step to achieving your dreams. However, being unmoored is also the first step in getting truly lost.

This year, I ran into some headwinds at sea.

I had a series of jobs that I didn't like. I felt like my real talents were going to waste, but wasn't always able to articulate those talents in a way that made sense, to myself or employers. I attempted to start a few businesses, and was marginally successful in one of them. I got a job I loved, and then got fired from when I demanded a contract (oof, disheartening - she operated in America, FYI). I followed a lot of irrational hope, in hindsight.

In the meantime, all my internal plans were in disarray.

13 Haikus For the Elderly Woman Next Door

There's something about a stoic, silent figure that inspires the poetic in me. What is their mission? My neighbor is usually on her tiny balcony, watching over the alley. Unfortunately, I know little more than that. Here are some haikus I've constructed to help myself make sense of you, elderly Vietnamese neighbor grandma. A year and a half of enjoying you enjoying your little balcony has finally produced something.

Also, I'd been struggling to find a way to incorporate some modern and traditional art in my blog - taking pictures of art museums is pretty passe - and this presented an opportunity for me. Vietnamese art is the product of complex forces within Vietnamese culture and society, and these are a few of my favorites! There are a few galleries in Vietnam that deal art to international clients, which is where I've gotten most of these pictures of the works. Sadly, most are privately owned and my pictures of the art museum were pretty much crap.

And thank you for not calling the cops on our awesome stereo setup on the terrace, neighbor. (And that goes for anyone living in our vicinity who may be reading this, thank you!)

Xin cam on ba.

Dare to Fail Gloriously: What Happens When No One Reacts to Your Work?

It's usually about this time that I just put the laptop away and start
surfing reddit and imgur.

I'm pretty lucky in the fact that there are usually at least a couple dozen people who check out each post, and oftentimes more (maybe as many as 4 DOZEN! or MORE - like 5 dozen. So crazy). But not always.

Sometimes it gets me down. I've read a fair amount about blogging. The ins and outs, and the way you need to divide your time among many different tasks, the hard work of building, engaging, and maintaining an audience, etc etc etc... it's actually a ton of work, and a lot of it is promotion stuff that I, frankly, am not very good at.

One of the pieces of advice I see repeated regularly is that the ratio of content creation to promotion is much more lopsided than I previously assumed. In my incredibly naive brain, it went something like "IF YOU WRITE IT... THEY WILL COME."

Humph. Not good enough, apparently. There's this thing called 'social media' of which blogging is an intrinsic part, and you simply can't do one without the other. In fact, many self-described blogging 'experts' say the actual ratio of your workload should be about 20% content creation, and 80 DAMN PERCENT promotion. I hate self-promotion (although one of my new year's resolutions is to tackle it head on this year).

So every so often I'll see that I've been particularly prolific, turning out what I consider to be a series of high-quality posts that address a wide variety of subjects, but they get no views. In fact, several of the pieces that I feel are my best, thematically, content-wise, and in structure and form, get very few views.

Trip to Bummertown? Maybe a temporary layover...

Three Vital Skills I Learned from Acting Classes, and One I'm Still Working On

I don't always use memes, but when I do, I use five of them.

I've always valued the training I received in theatre school. It was a really rough time for me mentally, but as I've grown older ('matured'?) I am able to look back and be amazed by just how many wide-ranging situations I've navigated by dint of my training.

I am continually surprised at how these various skills (and, my god, what a bizarre, heady, useful range of skills they turned out to be!) have come in handy here in this brave new world of traveling abroad. As I get to know myself better, and fall back in love with who I am, I wanted to take a moment to detail here how they've helped me on my worldwide, and inner, journeys.

I graduated with a degree in Technical Theatre. Practically speaking, I was a carpenter, designer, stage manager, stitcher, props designer, and periodically unemployed person before deciding that my career in theatre was unappetizing and way too uneven, to say the least. I wanted out, but I had no idea what to do, where to go, or how to get there. It was like coming to the end of a road and discovering that the last bridge I crossed had been struck by meteors (that I helped direct there) and the road up ahead goes off a cliff into a ravine, like the train tracks in Back to the Future 3.

For years I thought I didn't have a hoverboard or means of escape... but I was wrong*.

I bemoaned my theatre degree for years. I made terrible mistakes. I bemoaned my life choices. I lathered, rinsed, and repeated... and instead of being an agent of change in my life, I became one who reacted, instead of acted. I was a passive, unhappy meatbag of a person.

I bemoaned a whole lotta things, and never really got objective enough to rise above the bleak, depressed person I was and achieve something brighter, something that my Self always knew I was capable of, but never let myself achieve.

But then I made a choice.

To me, this choice was to build a new dream, something with long-term value and interest for myself. (which are evolving every day). I want to get into sustainable landscape urbanism, with a strong eye toward regional environmental balance. We are social animals, and we should live within our environments, in balance... and in cities.

To survive in a foreign culture, I think that you have to be willing to embrace a certain amount of flexibility. This was definitely NOT in my personal vocabulary when I came, or at least not in my immediate brain. My animal brain knew what was up, though, and kicked into gear. And while Flexibility is certainly a skill that theatre helped hone (along with creative problem-solving and keeping a cool head), there were several skills that I discovered came from the most unlikely of places...

No one was more surprised than I to find that these skills originated in acting classes.

Resolution Check-in: Mistakes and How to Make Them

Wow, well in retrospect, I probably never needed to put this on my resolution list again. Because I'm SUPER, SUPER GOOD at making mistakes!

Here's the text of my resolution:

5. Make more mistakes... and learn from them 

The time for trepidation is over. I've got to be bold and confident. This extends past learning and communicating in the language, but it's a good place to start. I'm a fairly strong introvert, but being here has exercised my extrovert skills. Every day presents me with magical, unique opportunities and I'm here to say Yes to them, even if I'd rather putter around with my plants or write some postcards by myself. I will go new places and make new mistakes there.

Now, let's be clear... I was not talking about the same KIND of mistakes. I've learned that variety is the spice of life, and that - deities help me - extends to mistakes of all kinds, stripes, colors, and pearly, iridescent hues.

Also, double clear... my stipulation was that I had to LEARN FROM THEM. I guess that's what (spoilers?) I'm still working on. To be fair, though, I assume that'll be a rather permanent resolution for the rest of my life.

Oh, ok. So there's where we start to go off the rails. But it's good to have a jumping off point, even if that point goes right over a shark into a boiling vat of turkey gravy.

Never Say Goodbye

The only Goodbye I'm down with. Still... it's the first track.

I feel like I should admit this: I don't really do goodbyes.

Well, honestly, I don't FEEL like I should admit it, because I'm obviously objectively bad at them, but I feel like YOU might want me to feel that way, so there's that.

I do. I hate goodbyes. They are pointless. If we were randomly charged particles, we wouldn't say goodbye, would we? Of course not. We might see each other again. We might never. We'd never know. If we were randomly charged particles, we could never notice, or care.

But we're not. We've got purpose, direction (even if they change... even if they're random), and, most importantly, the internet.

Thank the gods for the internet!

Traveling as an Introvert

Should the title of this blog
have been AnIntrovertAbroad?

Going away for the first time, I was pretty concerned about traveling as an introvert.

I recharge my batteries by being alone in a rich inner world. In an environment where I would have only new acquaintances, this was worrying to me. Would I have to explain? Would I be able to adapt? Would I be alone in a sea of extroverted youths? I secretly doubted my abilities... yet hoped that I would find reserves of "strength" I didn't know I possessed.

My nature is the big excuse I let stand between me and traveling abroad for so, so many years. I kept telling myself later, later, when the time is right. Later: you've got attachments, jobs, friends, and family. Later: you love Chicago. And could you really leave your cat?? How would you survive in a world dominated by short-term acquaintances? A place where you have to see and be seen in order to have any kind of social life? I both feared what I would find and was privately jealous of what I viewed as a "strength."

Well, here I am, almost one year into my first adventure. I stepped off the cliff of my comfort zone, landed in the deepest end of the forest, and found lions and tigers and bears... and beauty and wonders and friends. It seems like a good time for some introspection... although, when would I not say that?

Preparing Holiday Cards

2012's design, hand-stitched with painted buttons.

For several years now I have produced my own Christmas Cards for my family and friends. I've had successes, and some missteps, but few things excited me more before I left America than the idea of sending a new, original christmas card to my family and friends from the opposite side of the world.

This process always starts with my list of addresses from the previous year - I usually have between 60-80 cards to make. I have a few more this year because of new friends, which is both awesome and a little exhausting to think about.

When I envisioned this task while in America, I thought that I would have already started to practically learn more about Vietnamese artistic traditions by this point. That hasn't really happened, but I decided I still wanted something that would be iconic, festive, and really, really Vietnamese. I put my thinking cap on and got to work.

Mexican Food, First Attempt

I couldn't resist that bite - I had to know!

My absolute favorite breakfast is Mexican chorizo and onions, scrambled with eggs, with sautéed peppers and cheese on a hot tortilla. So you can imagine the ideas that sprang to mind one recent Friday as I was grocery shopping and found CHORIZO.

This was my attempt to make my favorite Mexican breakfast, including my own homemade tortillas with chorizo, onions, peppers, eggs, and
cheese.

See how I fared at my first-ever attempt at tortilla making after the jump!

Why Travel Now?

Why Travel Now?

After receiving many questions about my motives for traveling, and Vietnam in particular, I wanted to share with you how I got to where I am, and where I want to go. At least, how I decided to go NOW, and not in a year, or 6 months, or 5 years.

I'll continue about Why Vietnam? in a second, related post. :)

I should also add that, while these are my goals now... I'll be course correcting as I go along!

Once Upon a Time, in the late summer of 2012, I was riding my bike home from my volunteering gig at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. It's a 7.25 mile trek back to Albany Park, about half of it along Chicago's unparalleled lakefront trail - surely one of the most pleasant, easy urban rides in the United States. I was thinking about how nice it was to have access to such a strong network of biking trails in Chicago and how lucky I was as a citizen to be able to use them to get sunshine, exercise, and peace of mind, as well as using them for cheap, practical transport. 

And here I found myself thinking, How did this happen? Who did this? I wondered if there were some way that I could get in on this city-improving action.

The idea stuck, and I was soon concocting plans.

From Safety Blanket to Storybook

Last month I abruptly stopped writing in this blog. I knew I'd be back, but I didn't know when. This is me saying, Good Morning (well... afternoon), again, from Vietnam!

I was stressed and I wasn't acclimating to Vietnam very well. The Gout thing happened, and I discovered that if I kept 'talking' to my friends and family back home every morning (literally, since I was posting at 6am, you were always the first thing I thought of, and the last thing I thought of before going to sleep) I was never going to be able to let go and plunge in feet first. I was finding myself obsessing over stats and page views, wondering who'd read it and who hadn't, and generally getting stupid anxious and taking myself out of the Vietnam-experience along the way. So, like a smoker going cold turkey, I cut myself off (without an explanation, which was dodgy, but I honestly didn't know what I was doing, only that I needed it. Sorry!).

Psycho Asian Comfort Food, The Beginninging: Veggie Scrambled Egg Baguette

It's attractive open-face, but, like any good relationship,
you have to seal it up nice and tight to prevent the cheese
and juices from leaking out. ...Eww. I'm... I'm so sorry.

Hey there! Back again? Good! Glad I haven't alienated you with my absence. I've been taking a drug for My Gout (I have started to think about it this way) and it's been making me super sick, nauseous, and basically made me need to be less than 10 feet from a bathroom at all times. It's finally starting to wear off (and my foot feels better, too). I thought I'd share what I'm up to in my very own kitchen (I have to take the damn med with a meal... shudder. I mean, what's the point??).

Recently, I've been sticking to trying to emulate street food in my home, which is basically a no-win proposal (well, a win-win for me, but it's definitely not up to par with what I can get for cheaper and better on the streets... but then I wouldn't be cooking, would I?).

Tonight, before starting in on some VN flashcards, I decided to branch out a little and try something new. I will call this new series of posts "Comfort Food" but it's only because being in the kitchen and playing with food relaxes me. It's a form of artist play, I feel. And, since I can finally keep any of it down, it's basically like eating for the first time after a week of ginger ale and unsalted saltines.

It turned out pretty good, so I'll share. Feel free to suggest new and even more interesting ideas in the comments... you better believe I've got my ears peeled.

RECIPE:
Veggie Scrambled Egg Baguette

Ho Chi Mix City: July 2013 & Mix Tape Creation

July has been a great transition month for me as I get used to my new house/city/country/culture, new neighborhood, my lessons, and anticipate moving into my job teaching English in the public schools in the coming weeks. A lot of my time has spent walking, exploring, and thinking. In the US I'd be listening to my iPod almost constantly - here? Nope.

Surprisingly, there was not a lot of music in my life in June, and since I've gotten out of the habit of making these for myself (instead preferring to spend my time making them for friends in recent years) I thought I'd kill a few birds with one stone and musically document my months here, treating myself to some musical therapy and sharing them with YOU.

This week I've been working on a mix that describes my Transition-y, Explore-y July. It's a work in progress, but I'd like to share it with you today. I put it on youtube just for you:

My Bedroom is Like a Third-World Ocean Fairytale

[UPDATE: The walls are white! There are posters hung! A new homemade light fixture! And... no more finding nemo shades! We feel positively grownup about it all.]

In all the ways that my bedroom is like living in a deep sea children's insane-asylum - the pink coral-colored walls, the Finding Nemo windowshade, the charming children's sheets on the charmingly-sized twin bed made of plywood - the LED lights are by far the oddest feature (yeah, let's stick with 'feature'):

The Noiseless City

By Anh Dinh (http://www.flickr.com/photos/neovn/3146123732/)
[CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

My friend Erin used to say that there was really nowhere more noiseless than a city where you don't speak the language. I'm learning what that means now.

Obviously, she didn't mean "noiseless" as in, an absence of noise. Rather, she meant "comprehensible noise"-less. I didn't really understand that until yesterday afternoon.

Let's get one thing pretty clear: if I'm not in my room or a common area of the house, I'm basically constantly surrounded by people, and half of them are trying to sell me something in Vietnamese. As recently as last year, this would have FREAKED ME OUT. I'm a dude that needs his alone time, after all! I had always used that time to do much-needed Thinking. I like Thinking, and I need to be alone to do it. It seemed like a simple equation: being alone/quiet time = Thinking. That equation has become more flexible than I ever thought it could.

The True All-Purpose Bathroom

This post about my
shower/bathroom is for Ally.

I haven't had a hot shower since I got here. That's almost four weeks, if you're counting. I had a lukewarm one around 5pm one day a week ago, but that was as close as I've gotten to hot.*

In a way, this is ok. If I get up in the middle of the night and turn the AC off, I'm sweaty enough by the time I get up at 5:30am that the shower feels pretty good. And in the afternoon? Oof, you want it as cold as it can get! But there's something undeniably nice about being ABLE to control the temperature. Or maybe it's undeniably First World. Either way... I long for an apartment with hot water. (p.s. It looks like I've found it, too!)

Not that it matters much - I don't spend much time in there, honestly. I get it and get out. One reason is that it's cold, sure, but another reason is that I don't like getting all my stuff wet, or moving it out and back in. The first time I took a shower I forgot to remove all the toilet paper and it was partially ruined. Oops!

Wait, what? Ruined TP? In the shower?

The Worst Way to Connect with Western Culture

That's right, I reviewed HP INK and BUBBLE WRAP.
It's time to re-evaluate my recent life decisions.

This was my project this morning. It just occurred to me how stupid it was. Dumb homesickness.

It is not the first completely pointless project I've undertaken on days when I don't feel like leaving my room and confronting the alien culture outside my door, but it's by far the one that screams "GET OUTSIDE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU NEED VITAMIN D AND FRESH WATER, STUPID" the loudest.

What AM I doing, you ask? I'm reviewing and rating all my past purchases on Amazon.com. If that's not a completely pointless activity, I don't know what is. Maybe something like waterproofing desert hiking gear, or trying to improve the cheeseburger. Pointless. Time-passing. Life-wasting.

What other pointless things have I done to stay inside the English Bubble? Oh, let's see...

An Expert's Guide to Getting Lost in Saigon

As you can see, I didn't get too lost on the way
there, except at the end. Still, not bad.

Seriously, this is how you do it. Take notes.

Thank god my birthday is right around the corner, because I'm going to give myself the best present ever: a phone with maps. ELECTRONIC MAPS, PEOPLE. GPS. HOW DID WE LIVE WITHOUT THEM. I DON'T KNOW.

Let me tell you the story about the time I went to meet a new friend and ended up walking around Ho Chi Minh City for 3.5 hours trying to get home, including not one, not two, but three separate xe om (motorbike taxi) rides.

How did this travesty happen? I'm supposed to be the one that's good with directions, for gods sake!

I went to meet this new friend at a bar called the Spotted Cow in District 1. It was fun. I had caramel flan and a beer (bad combo). The owner, Mike, gave us 10% off cards for chatting with him. 

Nightlife!

(We also had a really interesting discussion about ladyboys and ladyboy culture, which became hugely, personally relevant about 4.5 hours later. Unfortunately. No, shut up, let me tell it.)

As an aside, I also got lost on the way there, but not as badly as I originally thought. This is the route I took - it was about 3 miles. No biggie. I only got lost at the end and was 30 minutes late, got there on a taxi bike (XE OM RIDE #1). My friend was ordering spring rolls and I think was a little mad, but I've only been here two weeks, give a boy a break!

ScienceNews: Vietnam Develops Invisible Forcefield, Flabby Foreigner Flummoxed

It's true, my friends. It was shocking how effective it was.

Let me tell you the embarrassing tale.

This was my goal: The front door to the big outside world.
Or rather, the door that leads to the alley that leads to the
big outside world.

After getting up early (about 3am) I was feeling pretty good. I'd had a good excursion Saturday, and added a number of things to my todo list that I felt were important. I felt confident in my first experiences with street vendors and xe om (motorbike taxis - so damn pushy!) and gotten a lot of water for my hotel room.

I got up and got ready for the day, showering in my crazy shower-room, and even whistled a little bit (I haven't been singing much since I got here... weird). I dressed, looked in the mirror, told my reflection how nice he looked (he needs some encouragement sometimes) and popped open the todo list. My first 20 minutes was spent reorganizing and prioritizing, followed by a quick 'n dirty flurry of internet activity that took 5 or 6 things off that list. It felt good. I felt good. It was time to go foraging for food and more water. Maybe I could find some more banh mi!

(Aside: Because most meals are cooked from fresh ingredients on the spot, I'm assuming this hunter-gatherer behavior will continue for awhile, until I can find an American grocery store that sells frozen burritos, ha ha. Protip: unattainable fantasy alert.)