Ho Chi Minh City

With its crowded streets, savory grub, and bustling trade, Saigon is a city pulsing with energy. Besides the appeal of year-round sun and a famously friendly vibe, people flock to Saigon for a variety of reasons, ranging from its status as one of the world’s fastest growing markets to its burgeoning art scene, swinging nightlife, and mouthwatering street food. Whatever the incentives, the pattern is clear: people fall in love with Saigon—and they fall hard.

For centuries, Saigon has attracted Vietnamese and foreigners seeking business and life adventures in an emerging market. Saigon’s magnetism lives on in what's left behind by the droves drawn there over the years, in times of both peace and war. The older elements of the city’s history appear in vestiges such as district five Chinatown (Chợ Lớn) or the French taste that is infused throughout architecture, linguistics, and cuisine. Fresher cultural transplants and hybrids take the form of cinemas chocked with Hollywood films, the appropriation of global youth culture (from blogging to flash mobs), and the increasing visibility of transnational business conglomerates (most recently, Starbucks).

As the longstanding gateway between Vietnamese and foreign societies, Saigon today is as it has been for centuries: alive, vibrant, and waiting for the world's adventurers.