No cherry blossoms, no problem

-
Val and I are in Washington, D.C. for a week. Val is attending a training course in the city and I am on vacation mode, fresh from boot camp. 

---

Val's workshop in D.C. is well-timed because it falls smack on the first week of the cherry blossom festival. So what was I to do, right? I trooped to the Tidal Basin, prepared to take photos of the cherry blossoms gifted by Yukio Ozaki, Tokyo's mayor in 1912. The traces of pink on the other bank of the Tidal Basin made me hopeful that I'd see cherry blossoms.


But as I got closer, I realised that I was actually staring at the buds of cherry blossoms... I arrived way too early!


The iconic view of the Thomas Jefferson memorial with the cherry blossoms in the foreground was not what I saw. Instead, I saw trees that still had to wake up from their winter hibernation. Yes, there were trees with green leaves already but there was still a lot of trees that were still to bloom.


That doesn't mean that all trees were not flowering yet. There were some cherry trees with flowers already.




Near the Martin Luther King memorial, yellow flowers were already greeting visitors.




At the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial, red flowers were drooping towards tourists.


Of course, orchids cultivated inside the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History were blooming healthily.




Daffodils along the National Mall brightened up the gardens.


As well as the purple flowers at the Enid Haupt garden.



But the most stunning among all the flowers I found in D.C. was the saucer magnolia. From afar, because I'm such a novice, I thought that these were cherry blossoms... giant cherry blossoms! But thanks to the Enid Haupt garden's tree labels, I learned that these beautiful flowers are actually hybrids designated as Magnolia x soulangeana.


With all the flowers I've seen, I had no reason to complain. I've seen cherry blossoms before anyway. My failure to see the Washington blooms just mean one thing: I shall return!

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for dropping by!

Before moving on, please share your thoughts or comments about the post. :)

Thanks again!

Popular posts from this blog

Skyflakes

-
One of the more famous Philippine exports is Skyflakes , a wheat-based, salty cracker. It is one of my emergency food items: I typically have some stocked at home and in my handbag in case I become hungry (like in traffic jams). When there's no electricity and it's impractical to cook rice (because the leftover would spoil), I'd open a pack of Skyflakes and generously coat each cracker with Cheez Whiz... if I had a bottle of it within reach. Anyway, each time I spent more than two weeks outside the Philippines, I'd be elated to see boxes of Skyflakes inside Asian stores (particularly when in I was Australia and in the USA). Back then, I took it as a sign of homesickness. When I moved to California, I didn't miss Skyflakes because Mommy made sure that there's a steady supply in the house. Skyflakes is embedded in Filipino gastronomy as a snack, a panawid-gutom , that anyone who reacts positively upon seeing Skyflakes outside the Philippines must have spe...
Read more

10 things I learned while driving on Marcos Highway to Baguio City

-
I went on a day trip to the City of Pines, which was around a 700-km drive from my house. I drove  going up there and then from the city to Victoria, Tarlac. After that, my dad took over the driving duties. It was day trip with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing with us. Anyway, this trip was my first time to go to Baguio City with me behind the wheel. As everyone who drives up knows, there are three main routes to Baguio from the lowlands: Kennon Road, which ascends from Rosario, La Union. It was out of my options because it's too dangerous to use that road in the rainy season. The second route is via Naguilian Road, which makes my trip a lot longer because the beginning of the ascent is in Bauang, La Union (further north). The last route, and the one I took, was the Marcos Highway, now known as the Aspiras-Palispis Highway. This 47-km road starts from Agoo, La Union and is touted as the safest route among the three.  As I drove up and then down (on the same day; we were in...
Read more

Surat Mangyan

-
Image
In high school, part of the Filipino curriculum was learning about one of the country's ancient native scripts called Baybayin . I learned back then that this script was eventually abandoned because the Spanish, and eventually the Americans, encouraged the use of the Latin script for written communications. But that's in the lowlands; the rules were different up in the mountains. In the lush mountains of Mindoro, groups of indigenous people called Mangyans  live largely in isolation away from the Christianised Filipinos. This isolation has led to the continuous development of the Mangyans' old script, Surat Mangyan . As I walked inside the Ayala Museum , I saw this bamboo tube (I'm not sure if it's an instrument) with Mangyan script written all over it. I suppose that this was equivalent to a book or a song. But I haven't figured out what's written yet, despite the translation guide provided. What I can do, however, is write my name in Ma...
Read more