AF Reeves - @afreeves23

‘Tây Hồ? Don’t live there. Or do, I don’t care anymore. Perfect if you’re fresh off the plane and need mod cons, overpriced sourdough, and don’t mind hanging out in places where the only locals are staff.’

I wrote that in August 2025, in a not-so-serious guide to renting in Hà Nội. Fast-forward a year: a Tuk-Tuk loaded with everything I own pulled away from Văn Miếu and headed north. For the first few kilometres I let myself believe the driver had misheard me.

He hadn’t. Nearly a decade after arriving in Hà Nội, and a borderline embarrassing number of column inches spent mocking the place, I now live in a little house on Tứ Liên street. Tây Hồ. Really?

From playful jibes at newbies that driving to Sóc Sơn did not make them Tây Hồ’s answer to Francis Drake, to the more serious suggestion that a life contained within the district didn’t count as having lived in Việt Nam, I confess I may have been a little heavy-handed with my choice of words.

Now, possibly owing to how much I’m enjoying my house and its garden, I can see the appeal. Food from half the world reaches my door before it has time to go cold, which is a dangerous discovery for someone who should really be out eating it fresh from the kitchen.

When I do venture out, it’s more local than I’d assumed. There’s a meat market round the corner, a few tạp hoá (corner grocery shops) with all the essentials, and a bia hơi where, two months in, I’m yet to see another foreigner. The locals there are drinking, not just serving, and suitably unimpressed by me, which feels right.

For now, I’ll convince myself that the yoghurt-weaving caricature lives closer to the source. I still maintain that the energy shifts as you travel up Xuân Diệu towards the heart of ‘the vibe’. To my prejudiced eye, that stretch remains the spiritual home of the preachy yogi by day, degenerate by night: sun salutations at seven, decks set up by midnight. Thankfully I’m a bit past that scene these days and have no intention of confirming the stereotype or otherwise.

The cruel part is the timing. I arrived in Hà Nội a younger man with a misplaced arrogance about the ‘authentic’ experience of living abroad, and I’ve finally decided to get involved around here just as the lights seem to be coming up. I spent four years in my previous apartment. Given the pace of the city’s ‘modernisation’, I’ll be lucky to get two here. Large sections of the area have already been bulldozed, and since July 2025 Tây Hồ hasn’t even ‘technically’ existed as a district.

The people who built its reputation are thinning out too. Rule changes squeezing English teaching in state schools, which I covered recently, mean less of the work that has kept most foreigners on these shores. As the hours dry up and businesses disperse, plenty of the crowd I spent years teasing may have to head home, taking their ingenuity and community efforts with them.

So, an apology to Tây Hồ, a place I should have given more time, though I’ll admit I always gave it a little more credit than I let on.

Whatever comes next, I hope it’s a community I’ll enjoy being part of. I’d tell it all this in person, but on checking the paperwork I actually live in Hồng Hà ward anyway, alongside old Hoàn Kiếm’s Chương Dương and Phúc Tân. Which, if you squint, makes me practically an Old Quarter man. VNS