Recent long-distance calls from my mother have been livelier than ever. Just yesterday, my sister-in-law showed her how to send photos via Zalo, resulting in a morning filled with constant phone messages. As I opened them, I discovered that in my hometown, the preparations for Tet (Lunar New Year) have been going on for over a month.

This season is when herbs are high in medicine and bees make honey. People in the highland of A Luoi then start their hard and dangerous trips looking for vegetables, mushrooms, honey, creek fishes, and so on.

Going to the tailor shop at Dong Ba market, looking for the person who sewed the national flag in large quantities, I was introduced to Ms. Hanh's tailor shop. It was even more honorable when she was also the one who sewed the flags hung at Ky Dai Hue.

Visiting Bao La Bamboo and Rattan Cooperative (Quang Phu commune, Quang Dien district), I met artisans who are hard at work keeping their professions and looking for new directions through their product design improvement. Many of their fine and quality handicraft products have been present in the world market.

To be frank, that was the first time for a man in his sixties to see such a strange species of flower. The flower looked like the lotus, but its leaves were quite different.

A Luoi, a mountainous area in Thua Thien Hue, with its majestic landscape looks so peaceful, poetic, and impressive in the sketches by the artists.

A few days ago when I went to the market, I saw jellyfish on sale. The blue-footed jellyfish are wrapped in seawater by aunties at the market. The blue jellyfish and red chilli look so colorful.

"This (digitizing photos) helps the descendants not have to spend time imagining how their ancestors looked like," explained Trung. He said that digitizing photos could be roughly like photoshopping the photos after capturing them. The only difference is that users have to buy separated software and pay annually.

The rainy season in the highlands of A Luoi is quite melancholy. In the morning, as soon as I opened the window, the mountain wind came rushing in. Looking into the distance, the Truong Son mountain range is overlapped in the light rain.

Though not as bright and passionate as lotus flowers in the summer, lotus flowers in the autumn seem to be showing a gentle and romantic look.