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Every newly published Saigoneer article, ordered from newest to oldest across all sections and series.
13174 articles
Environment
As the Iran war crunches global energy supplies and disrupts prices, Southeast Asian leaders may need to diversify oil and gas supplies in order to protect ordinary people.
Travel
After decades of watching Doraemon and his close friend groups adventure to all sorts of strange lands from the deepest trenches on Earth to fantastical planets, fans of the beloved cat robot in Vietnam will finally see our country in the cartoon series.
Resorts
Summer often evokes images of journeys to distant locales far removed from familiar routines so as to rediscover the feeling of true rest. Yet amid peak travel seasons, rising transportation costs, and increasingly exhausting journeys, more families are embracing the idea of retreats closer to the city.
Hanoi Ngõ Nooks
In only three places have I enjoyed truly sumptuous bowls of bún bò giò heo : in its hometown of Huế, in Hội An and at Bún Bò Huế Thu Thùy in Hanoi .
Vietnam
Walking through Saigon nowadays, you will notice that ice is so omnipresent, it’s part of the scenery. From trà đá, cà phê sữa đá to sinh tố, every drink is consumed with ice in order to combat the intense heat. Before the French brought ice factories to Vietnam, in hot, tropical cities like Saigon, you wouldn’t expect to find ice. Controlling the cold chain is now an important part of our logistics, be it for healthcare or food storage, opening the door for any cuisine to expand with new ingredients. A few centuries ago, however, it was once a thriving business catering to French colonists.
Environment
Nước mắm — that ruby-hued elixir; that salty, fish-flesh-sweet open secret in your favorite recipe; that indispensable icon of Vietnamese culture and, by extension, identity — owes itself to Commerson’s anchovies. That’s right, if your fish sauce comes from the central region, where it was first developed, the fish pressed with salt to produce it are Stolephorus commersonnii, a species named in 1801 after Philibert Commerson, a white Frenchman. Picture all the hardscrabble village homes suffering under the yoke of colonialism, where one of the day’s few pleasures was a humble meal made delicious by a carefully rationed dash of fish sauce and an ingredient whose name pays homage to their colonizers.
Vietnam
What is the Tower of Hanoi? While this official name might sound mysterious, if you’re an avid consumer of adventure media and role-playing games or just simply a curious former child, it’s likely that you’ve seen or even played this game without knowing what it’s called.
Environment
Have you ever walked past a plant and wondered "Hey, I wonder what that could do?"
Eat & Drink
It happened when a young chef explained where he learned discipline, and when a kitchen manager recalled his first serious mentor. It happened again and again. Over the years, reporting on Saigon’s restaurant scene, Chef Sakal Phoeung’s name kept coming up. After finally sitting down with Sakal and learning more about his time in Vietnam and his approach to building teams and restaurants, I now understand why.
Saigon
To me, my trip to Cư xá Thanh Đa in summer 1982 was a serendipitous encounter. It was Saigon’s largest-scale residential complex in the first half of the 1970s, with nearly 4,000 separate units housing about 50,000 inhabitants. Cư xá refers to a residential quarter reserved for gainfully employed citizens, with a vision to establish a model community with a high quality of life. Here, in their three-bedroom apartments, civil servants, professors, doctors, and military leaders ranked major or higher lived in pride of being a part of a cư xá like that.
Entertainment
On May 10, silk, spirits, and sound filled Le Méridien Saigon on the occasion of the Saigon Áo Dài Cocktail Festival 2026, courtesy of Saigon bartenders, designers and musicians.
![Exploring Vietnam’s Dynamic, Diverse Artist Residencies [Part Three: Hanoi]](https://media.urbanistnetwork.com/saigoneer/xplr-images/premium-content/2026-05-BC3/b1x.webp)
Arts & Culture
When you mention puppets to someone in Vietnam, they will immediately think of water puppets. And if not this traditional art form, frequently relegated to tourism activities, then they will think of children’s entertainment. But Vietnam is in fact home to a small but devoted group of people involved in contemporary puppetry and object theatre because, as TồLô Puppet Theatre Company puts it, the genre holds “magical, unexpected, and sometimes grotesque possibilities.”
Education Partner
For many years, choosing an international curriculum was widely seen as the “optimal answer” for families seeking a global future for their children. However, as university expectations continue to evolve — requiring not only strong academic knowledge, but also independent thinking, research capabilities, adaptability, and a clear sense of personal identity — the key question is no longer “Which Program should we choose?”, but “Which learning pathway is truly right for the student?”
Saigon Hẻm Gems
In the memory-scape of children growing up in the countryside like me, there always exists the familiar sight of old wet markets and the mornings we spent there, toddling behind our moms on the hunt for snacks, CDs, and lollipops. In the afternoons, I often tagged along with my grandma to buy meat and veggies, sneaking a toy or two inside her basket. Sometimes, if I was particularly sweet, she would allow us to have lunch there instead of at home.
Vietnam
The preference for light skin is widespread in Vietnam. It is discernible from the mere sight of Saigon’s streets during the day, when the majority of riders are covered up — in hoodies, jackets, jeans, pants, and masks — for protection against UV radiation, but also to prevent tanning under the blistering sun. Especially more so for women, light skin is often associated with beauty and social status, so protection against the sun has become more than a health concern.
In Plain Sight
It’s too cold for chò nâu to grow where I’m from, but we still gave it an English name: dipterocarp.
Music & Arts
Silk is an inherently finicky, demanding medium. Yet from the very first encounter, Quế Hương had chose to embrace its temperament and has devoted herself to it for nearly a decade.
![Exploring Vietnam’s Dynamic, Diverse Artist Residencies [Part Two: Huế, Hội An and Đà Nẵng]](https://media.urbanistnetwork.com/saigoneer/xplr-images/premium-content/2026-04-BC2/zz1x.webp)
Arts & Culture
A subtle shimmer inherent to the seashells encrusted around its eyes makes Lân Sư Hồ shiver with life and appear as if it will leap out of the warehouse and prance into the ocean where its coral skin once grew.
Development
Municipal authorities in Hồ Chí Minh City are moving forward with a number of infrastructure projects that will majorly transform the peninsula in the future.
Entertainment
Featuring live music and DJ sets, fashion runway showcases, free mixology masterclasses, and games, Saigon Áo Dài Cocktail Festival 2026 presented by Saigon Outcast on May 10, aims to bring together disparate art, culture, and nightlife communities for an evening that celebrates the energetic hours between sundown and midnight.
Eat & Drink
Separated by a vast ocean and home to an unrelated language, culture, and history, Japan would seemingly have minimal interaction with Peru. But a close relationship between the two nations goes back centuries.
Education
“Like adding new branches to the same tree,” Mary Malifarges, the Pedagogical Advisor at La Petite Ecole Ho Chi Minh City, describes the opening of a new campus at 22/1 Lê Văn Miến Street, An Khánh Ward (formerly Thảo Điền) and the introduction of two new pedagogical offerings.
Saigon
The Saigon Hospital at 125 Lê Lợi was originally built in the late 1930s as the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie. The French named it after French doctor Théodose Déjean de la Bâtie, who devoted his life to treating members of the Vietnamese community.
Food Culture
I still remember vividly the anticipation running through my veins, when I saw a waiter bringing me a glass of sữa đậu nành, every time my family took me to one of the many Vietnamese restaurants of the 13 th arrondissement of Paris, the city’s renowned Chinatown. It was a neighborhood I was bound to get dragged to as a French kid with a Vietnamese parent, whether I wanted to or not. For me, this glass represented the quintessence of typical Vietnamese drinks during a good meal: one of the rare glimpses into the daily customs of my ancestors’ culture.
