Coffee shops everywhere

Goodbye, coffee shops everywhere.


One thing I will sorely miss is the coffee shop culture of Ha Noi. There are seriously little coffee shops on every street in the city. You can suggest, "Hey, let's go for a coffee" anywhere at anytime of day and it will be immediately possible. There are a few chains, but most shops are family-run affairs. However, they somehow manage to be ridiculously uniform. You can pretty much count on the same menu, flavours, tables with pictures of movietars' faces on their tops, wicker chairs, fonts on the sign out front, and flimsy metal spoons wherever you go. Many of the shops don't even really have names; they just go by their street number. You can't see very clearly in the picture above, but it features Cafe 101, Cafe 99 and Cafe 97. Wow, so original...

But I think my initial nonplused reaction points to a really central and interesting value difference between Western and Vietnamese cultures--in the West, if you're not totally unique and innovative, you get scorned and left behind, while here, being original is... just not that important. This is evident in the way people dress and do their hair, the fact that half the motorbikes on the road are the same make, the repetitive style of houses and interior decoration, etc., etc. There is a margin for difference, but it's very small compared to what I'm used to in North America. It's so easy to pick out young Vietnamese people who have lived abroad of have ambition to... they just look different.

So it does seem ridiculous to my Westerner sensibilities that the coffee shops are almost all so generic and nondescript. However, they are almost all generically and nondescriptly delicious and satisfying. See, those English words hardly make sense in that sentence. We are not supposed to be impressed by anything less than "the one and only." But I am impressed by the coffee shops in Ha Noi. It's like having the quality assurance of a big chain, but without the corporate control. How does that happen? It's a wonderful mystery to my foreign little soul.

Coffee shops everywhere, thank you for being unoriginally wonderful. Always there and always refreshing. I appreciate you and will miss you very much.