The honey-coloured Cha Tam Church in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 5. (Photo: The New York Times Style Magazine)New York (VNA) –“For a place with so much history – decades of wartime and occupation have lefttheir scars – Ho Chi Minh City feels surprisingly new,” the New York Times Style Magazine starts in a recently-published story about the “vibrant, stylish,youthful” city.
“Themetropolis is constantly reinventing itself,” the US-based magazine says, given that theU.S. trade embargo was lifted only 25 years ago and the majority of the city’spopulation is under 35 years old.
A short period of overwhelming foreign investment,plus rapid urbanization and a booming labor force, has established Vietnam asone of the fastest growing economies in the world, with Ho Chi Minh City – still often referred to as Saigon – at its forefront, it says.
“Whileincreasingly taller buildings continue to reshape the skyline, the city remainsfirmly in touch with tradition,” itdescribes, and visitorscan enjoy the best street-side bowl of pork vermicelli in the city at theintersection of Nguyen Trung Truc and Le Loi a few blocks away from a Louis Vuitton store.
“It’sthat dichotomy — between a 50-cent scooter ride and a 150-USD omakase, for example — that hasturned visitors into residents and residents into the new business owners whodiversify the city’s ever-evolving cultural landscape.”
Viet Kieu, the children and grandchildren of refugeeswho fled the country during the war, arereturning to their roots and inspiring contemporary perspectives on Saigonesefashion, food and art, it adds.
The magazinethen provides readers a guide of where to stay, eat, shop and what to see in Vietnam’s largest andmost exhilarating metropolis.
Anyone with even cursory knowledge of Vietnamesecuisine is aware of Pho and of how readily it can be found inVietnamese-American enclaves like San Jose, California and Houston, it says.
But Ho ChiMinh City offers some of the “funkier, more complex noodle soups of the region” - acrab-and-tomato broth cradling fresh snails and fried fish cake at Bun Rieu CuaOc (66 Nguyen Thai Binh); the pork rib and Vietnamese charcuterie in clearbroth punctuated with fermented shrimp paste at Bun Moc Thanh Mai (14 TruongDinh); or the dry noodles with wontons and lardons at Hu Tieu Mi Co Giang (176Bis Phuong Co Giang).
The storyalso introduces visitors to contemporary streetwear brands – The New Playground andMoi Dien – by “Viet Kieu” creative designers, and suggests they visit the Buddha-themed Suoi Tien amusement park and the Southern Women’s Museumwhere relics and photographs relating tothe history of Vietnamese women and their impact on the development andliberation of the country are on display./.
VNA
