Peter Bergdahl's Personal Blog

A lesson I learned and would like to convey in this post is to trust your first instinct.

Me and my friend Stefan were in Hoi An in central Vietnam a few days ago and we passed a small ponds with some flowers. The flowers and the pond looked ordinary so I walked past the pond and the flowers. Something nagged me however so I walked back to the pond and quickly snapped a couple of close up images of one of the flowers. At first it looked like the image was over exposed when i looked in the LCD screen but I didn’t care, i just walked up to Stefan who waited for me.

Once i was back home in Hanoi I opened up the image in Photoshop CS and i was amazed by the colors. I’m no flower expert but i think it’s a water lily or a lotus flower.

Water Lily or Lotus Flower

So something that looked ordinary turned out to be so beautiful. I really love the colors that almost look like painted.

Close up of water lily or lotus flower

In this close up the colors are even more amazing and can you see the small fly in the image?

Is it a Water Lily or a Lotus Flower?

Hanoi can be messy and especially the traffic is terrible but Hanoi is also a very beautiful and romantic city with many lakes.

I’m blessed with a fantastic view over Hanoi where i can see both Truc Bach and Tay Ho (west lake) from my balcony. The sunsets are just amazing and I can see it almost every day.

This image is smoking fresh, just taken minutes ago from my balcony. I can still almost see this sunset by looking out from my window

Sunset over Truc Bach and Tay Ho

I stitched together two images into a panorama.

What do you think? Please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Walking around the lakes in Hanoi is an amazing experience, it’s so full of life. People are eating, drinking, walking, running and doing all kinds of exercises. Fitness is big business around the lakes in Hanoi.

I live around Truc Bach lake so i walked about 30 seconds from my home, sat down on a wobbly plastic chair at one of the local cafes lining up around the lakefront and ordered a fresh lemon juice.

One hour and two lemon juice later i had taken 86 images on people doing all kinds of exercises, plus a cock fight going on just a couple of feet from my wobbly plastic chair.

I’ll get back to the cock fight in a later post so in this post I’ll focus on fitness in Hanoi.

The first image is of a guy stretching while he looks out over Truch Bach.

Man stretching and looking out over the beautiful Truc Bach lake

Next image is of man doing bench press with weight of concrete.

Man doing bench press with weights of concrete

And finally an image of some guys trying to improve their fitness by doing push-ups on a bar.

Two guys doing push ups on a bar

In the next few days I’ll come back to the cock fight that pretty much took place in my knees. Pretty dramatic actually.