Botanical Gardens

A couple of days ago, I had some time to kill before I had to be anywhere. Spurred, I guess, by my enjoyment of Daan Park, I ventured to the Taipei Botanical Gardens, near Xiaonanmen.

The gardens are beautiful--and massive! Apparently the most famous part--the part where people really crowded around, taking photos--was the giant lotus pond in the middle of the garden. It's difficult to estimate the size of the pond, because it's nearly impossible to see where it ends. What looks like a sea of green leaves dotted with the occasional pink flower is actually, upon further inspection, a couple-feet-deep pool of standing water, from which lotus leaves and blossoms rise to impressive heights.

Sometimes the divisions within the botanical gardens are like ones we would see: a section might be labelled "flowering shrubs" or "woody plants." But some were far more interesting: there was a whole section, for example, devoted to plants that are significant in some way to Buddhist teachings. And another featuring plants that served some importance in ancient Chinese literature. This little dragon guy (chosen because we're currently in the year of the dragon--and I was born in a year of the dragon!) is one of the twelve similar cartoonish cutouts in a section entitled Plants of the Zodiac.

I had never seen many of the Chinese plants dotting all of the various exhibits. Even the animals could be a little strange: squirrels, much darker and rather larger than our American backyard variety, twitch away from sight whenever a person comes near. I watched an elderly Taiwanese couple put a bunch of peanuts in a row on a ledge, though, and then the squirrels came out to vie for them. Even more exciting, there are kitties everywhere! Cats roam the gardens freely. Some are skittish, and more than once I was surprised by a streak of orange or white disappearing into the crush of leaves. But some of the cats seem to like the attention that living in a tourist attraction can bring. Earlier in the afternoon, I caught this one purring contentedly as a couple of toddlers, under direct supervision from their mother, stroked its fur.

Mosquitoes are bad in Taiwan, and if I had any interest in healing from my many itchy spots, the botanical gardens was probably not the best bet. Even so, I'm glad that I went, and I'm glad that I went alone. It was relaxing, being in the midst of families and schoolkids and couples--hearing but not understanding their chatter, sitting in the gardens and petting my new kitty friends as all the people walk by.

LOL MORE PICTURES

(oh, my camera broke. It takes pictures sometimes, but maybe half the time it just says "turn off and on again!" and then does that consistently every time I try to take a picture for the next little while. Also the flash only works about 20% of the time. Also I can't use the zoom feature at all. Lame. So I didn't get lots of the pictures that I wanted.)