I took this picture in the early part of our trip to Viet Nam while we were walking around Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. I was instantly drawn to it for some reason before I even realized that I had just taken a picture of a wheel barrel of trash. But it was beautiful to me, so I didn’t really think twice about it till now.

Looking back I think I was so drawn to this wheel barrel because I was just fascinated by the non la hat that was placed on top of the just picked flowers. For some reason that non la made me realize that we were really in Viet Nam. It wasn’t a baseball cap or cowboy hat….it was a non la. A Vietnamese non la. That Vietnamese people wore. It was just amazing to me to even think that we’d be buying our daughter her very own non la in just a matter of days.

The landscaping refuse also reminds me of the resourcefulness of the Vietnamese people that we witnessed. We didn’t see the waste that we are accustomed to here in the U.S. Take our hotel bathroom for instance; it was extremely well worn (to put it mildly). But that was part of its charm, and part of our whole experience. Back home most people would not choose to live with grungy grout, old plumbing fixtures, moldy shower curtains and the like. But being there and living there made me realize that there was really nothing wrong with those worn out items. They still had some life left in them, so they were going to be used until they absolutely no longer could be.

A picture of discarded flowers, I find beautiful and wanted to share with you. A picture of our hotel room bathroom…that I won’t post :)