 |
This beautiful structure is the rear view of the main entrance to the Fiarchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTBG.) Established in 1938, this beautiful 83-acre garden is my favorite place for the weekends. Many of the structures here are built with Florida's limestone just like what is seen here on the ornate staircase to the meeting rooms on the first floor. The ground floor serves as the gift shop where visitors to the garden buy souvenirs of their trip.
This is how a car is being prepared before work begins at one of many body shops in South Miami's Commerce Lane. The cars are marked with yellow chalk marks and I really do not understand what is being done here because I do not see any dents on this car. If it were mine, it wouldn't be here.
There are more than 600 species of oak in the world, more than 80 in North America and 19 different species of oak trees in Florida alone. Here is the trunk and telltale bark of a Quercus alba, the white oak, which is one of the preeminent hardwoods of eastern North America. It is a long-lived oak of the Fagaceae family, native to Eastern North America. Oak trees in Miami are everywhere and they serve as hosts to all sorts of plants and animals alike. They grow very large and tall and live a long, long time (hundreds of years.)
In Norse mythology, the oak was sacred to the thunder god, Thor. It is often speculated that the reason for this is that the oak – the largest tree in northern Europe – was the one most often struck by lightning. That, I can attest to. My oak tree was struck by lightning once but it survived. I love the beautiful flowering vine that lives on this oak tree. Can you see the green lizard?
Here is a window peek at a very elite shop, the Hip.e Boutique for upscale ladies. To let you feel being pampered when you shop, you will be offered champagne and coffee and your boy friend who dared to take you in here can calm himself down while waiting in his own haven. The chandelier you see is the very nice red Murano chandelier. I like their "Rich & Skinny" jeans, and the "Young Fabulous & Broke" ready to wear but not so much their Diane Von Furstenberg swimwear. I like the Brazilian tongs better.
The lychee (Litchi chinensis) is the sole member of the genus Litchi in the soapberry family, Sapindaceae. I have seen many lychee trees in Miami, but these three are by far the biggest and tallest of them all. Lychee trees normally are less than about 30 feet, but these are at least 45 feet or taller. Lychee fruits are well sought after. The fruits, when ripe, are beautiful on the trees and they are delicious to eat. Do you know that it was the favorite fruit of Emperor Li Longji (Xuanzong)'s favored concubine Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei?) The emperor spared no expense and had special courier service with fast horses to bring the fresh fruit from Guangdong where the trees grew wild. It's good to be a favored concubine of a big shot, don't you think? All the lychee you can eat!
In traditional Chinese medicine, lychee is known for being a fruit with "hot" properties, meaning if you eat too many, you will have high fever, thirst, concentrated urine, red face, red tongue, yellow tongue fur, rapid pulse among other nasties. May be that's why the emperor did not mind getting his favorite concubine these fruits. Hot is good!
But I digress... I am looking at the flowers on these trees and am trying to figure out how I can get the fruits come this summer. Time to befriend the people of the fire department with trucks equipped with tall ladders.
This is the time that the lotus are actively growing. Here is another incubator in full Miami sun. New leaves arrive quite fast and I would like to know how a leaf would decide to push itself away from staying on the surface of the water. The new leaf on the right seems to do that. Life is full of mystery.
Here, at 8:10pm, Miami is seen in its twilight zones: Civil twilight has ended, but nautical and astronomical twilight are still in effect before dusk will set in soon. The sun has set at 7:34pm and it is already below the horizon and this is what you see looking due West. Beautiful Venus is atop the crescent moon and Jupiter is to its left. There is still enough scattered sun light to paint streaks of clouds in pretty pink. This is Miami at its best.
Well, this is not quite Rooney Mara, not even close. I am not even sure if this is a dragon tattoo. But she does look formidable on this motorcycle. Riding with guys like this, she can have any tattoo she likes. If you look real close, the license on the motorcycle on the right says "Live To Ride." Sir, Yes sir!
In Miami, you regularly encounter people with many tattoos on their bodies. Here is a prime example.
Today is a beautiful day in Miami and everyone I talked to agreed. You should know the name of this tree by now. They flower like this in March every year.
Reflection of the blue Miami sky over a single young Egyptian Pink lotus pad. This is the time that new lives emerge from hardened lotus seeds to blossom into beautiful blooms in the summer. Did you ever experience lotus scent? Intoxicating is what it does to me.
Another automobile accident on a clear day under beautiful weather.As usual, traffic is tied up. This seems to be quite involved and the woman driver is being tended to on the other side of her car by the rescue team. A fire truck was called and it arrived a few minutes later. Looking at the positions of the cars, I can't even guess what may have happened. Can you?
In March of every year, Miami is painted yellow by its numerous Tabebuia chrysantha trees. The flowers do not stay very long on the trees, and here they create a nice golden carpet. Even the carpets are gone after a day or two. So long... see you again next year.
It's March, and it's Miami Youth Fair's time. This is an annual event that many small business owners and vendors depend on for a recurring yearly reliable source of income. But the crowd tonight is much thinner than that of previous years. The rides are quite expensive and riders are very sparse. Rides cost an average of US $5.00, food is $8.00 and drink is $4.00, not counting admission cost of $10.00 If you have more than one kid, you can go broke quite quickly here.
It's St. Patrick's day again and tradition in Coral Gables makes it a green night street party. Blocks of streets in downtown Coral Gables, the City Beautiful, are closed to traffic for everything green to blossom. Every year, I come to help selling beer, US $8.00 for each plastic cup of quite hefty size, and they are selling like hot cakes.
I can guarantee you that one can get drunk just from the beer's vapor coming from the beer pourers on the side of huge trucks full of beer. Ice cold Harp, Guiness, Smithwick's, Half and Half, Black and Tan made me gaga tonight and I can't blog straight!
A happy event of late yesterday/last night trumped all of my other wonderful ideas for today's blog. The photo I took for it is really lousy, but all you need is to trust my narration. I do have a very good digital camera with superb macro, but I am too lazy to dig it out from under my clutter, so I am using my trusted iPhone 4 camera that is the worst to take macro photos. But I am ecstatic. So ecstatic that I am lacking words to describe my happiness. Therefore, I looked up Thesaurus.com to tell you that I am:
very happy, blissful, athrill, beatific, crazy, delirious, dreamy, elated, enraptured, enthusiastic, entranced, euphoric, fervent, floating, flying high, frenzied, gone*, high*, in exaltation, in seventh heaven, joyful, joyous, mad, on cloud nine, out, overjoyed, pleased as punch, rapturous, ravished, rhapsodic, sent, sunny, thrilled, tickled pink, tickled to death, transported, turned on, upbeat, wild... and more...and why is that?
At the end of February, I got about a handful of seeds from the two mature Alstonia scholaris, the object of my intense search for many years. I immediately planted them according to expert recommendations, expecting some assured germination in about three weeks. That happened and I counted five baby plants so far. To see them, you should click on the photo and enlarge it to original size. In a few days, I expect many more will come out from the soil and technically I can grow a small forest of A. scholaris. What a journey! I will get at least one to grow into a mature tree. That will happen, is there any doubt? None!
Smack in the middle of the city of Miami Lakes you can find a swath of land where cows graze in peaceful surroundings. Actually, there is a lot of controversy about the existence of this dairy farming business here. The owner of this land where cows are herded for milk clash with neighboring residents who complain that the cows' smell of uncleanliness ruin their homestead.
Dairy cow (Bos taurus) herds in the United States range in size from small farms of a dozen animals to large herds of more than 15,000. You are looking at a small dairy farm in the middle of a thriving Miami urban area.
These cows all have number tags attached to their ears for identification... and they just enjoy a beautiful day in Miami. Knowing that to maintain high milk production, a dairy cow must be bred and produce calves, cow number 2438 was very busy with several attempts to interrupt a "leave me alone, please" grazing miss cow. She obviously was more interested in her dinner and did not want to be disturbed. This is the second failed declaration of love. I had to leave the scene so I can't tell you whether this hot love call ended in success or failure.
I am not talking about the color "green" per se. I am sure you are all aware that there are the so-called green organizations worldwide whose purpose in life is to go all out to protect the environment, preserve earth's natural resources and living naturally. Today is one of such days designated to be "green" aware. Many groups are giving presentations of why bottled water is harmful to both you and the environment, how to grow "green" products that you consume etc... But this is a first, a green blender.
What you see is a cycle-powered blender machine. It has not been perfected so it takes two persons to operate it. By sheer leg muscle power, the young (she's green, what do you think) lady powering the bicycle is having the time of her life turning the blades of the blender that is held by the young green lady assistant. The blender does turn furiously and it did blend whatever they put in it to puree. The irony of this is that after expending the energy (which is good) to blend the smoothie, she may need a refreshment and gain back many times the calorie over. If it were up to me? I would have put in the blender: 1 cup of vanilla ice cream, a half cup of whole milk, 1/8 cup of half and half milk, one and a half table spoon of sugar, a dash of vanilla extract. Then I would do my best to huff and puff and blend all of that together into a thousand calorie vanilla shake... Oh so good! Let's go green!
I rarely venture into the Northwest section of Miami. Today is a rare exception because that's where I got to go for dinner. This restaurant is also a first for me: Ruby Tuesday. This is a franchise restaurant business that started in 1997 and this restaurant is on 67th Avenue... all the way at 152 street in the Northwest of Miami, in Miami Gardens. Their Asian Glazed Salmon was not bad, not excellent... OK for a Tuesday.
Remember my blog about the Coco de Mer? More than 7 months have elapsed. I returned to the planting site and this is what I saw. Nothing happened! This double nuts looks exactly like it was in July last year. You may have noticed that a humidity gauge was added to monitor the health of this nut. It's nut! This is worse than watching grass grow, because if you waited a few days, you would have seen some movements. This is also worse than watching paint dry because it does dry in a few days. This is really taxing one's patience. I am lucky I have plenty of it, so I'll come back next year. I have the feeling that nothing would happen then either. I understand that this nut starts to germinate (if it ever will decide to do so) and grow downward into the ground for a while before curving back up to break the ground and emerge into civilization. That's all right... I'll wait.
