philosophie.

New York, the many faces

An American friend, Mindy, who works in Minnesota came to visit New York just this past weekend for her high school union. I hadn’t seen her in about ten years. She is one of my FIRST foreign friends – we met in Beijing while I was ten years old, and she was working for China Radio International at the time. If I were to talk about how we met, I’d have to sit here for another hour. But we met, even though she is of the age of my parents, she has such a flamboyant and larger than life personality that I felt – though slightly intimidated because I spoke practically no English back in Beijing at that young age, but also closer to her because I felt she was one of us, the children.

Ten years has past, I am now living in New York and able to communicate freely in English, meeting her again feels not only like meeting an old friend, but also gaining a new one. The loud, happy laughters and exaggerated emotional outbursts are still there, but I am realizing that she has so many stories to tell and so much intellectual insights to offer. Time sculpts us into such interesting pieces.

Mindy was born in Washington Heights, and she loves that area dearly. Today I went there, discovering it for the first time in my life, this peaceful beauty on the Manhattan island.

my flowers

The orchid is a gift from my mother when I graduated a few weeks ago. They were beautifully in bloom, with robust buds ready to pop the wonder of nature any minute. But I guess it is time for even these little dainties to fall, as summer is approaching (I’m talking about the official date of course; the temperature in New York has reached 36C already! not that I’m complaining, since the last few days of August in Beijing when I was there last year kept roaming in the 40′s)

I may have mentioned that I have also acquired a pot of gardenia jasminoides with booming green leaves, so green that they look like they are coated with oil.  I read that they are Ms.High Maintenances, for that reason I misted my pot every day, few times a day, taking care of its water level, making sure I plucked the dying leaves etc.. – only to realize that they have attracted little white spiders! So again I went online in search for organic treatment, and found that spraying pepper water would kill those little unwanted pests. One spritz, before anything, I started coughing ceaselessly while chocking my face red – but to my joy, those little spiders are gone for good! Now there are some more buds coming out of the jasminoides, hopefully they will bloom soon!

I have also mentioned a while ago that I purchased some ranunculus bulbs directly shipped from Holland. I got them in the mail (didn’t have to wait long for shipping), they indeed looked like dried bunch of little bananas. I planted them in the soil about three weeks ago, watering almost every day, and this is what I’m looking at everyday:

The growth of my little sprouts! There are two more little ones that just saw the sun and the world, there is so much joy seeing these little things poking their little heads out.