Summer in Taipei: Lotuses and Birds
Let's visit the Taipei Botanical Garden for a relaxing summer day.
Halfway through 2022, we are now entering the hottest months of the year. This weekend I went to the Taipei Botanical Garden, feeling refreshed by the sweet lotuses and the lively birds, and the photos are shared below.
About the game lottery last time, the serial numbers for redeeming the games have been sent directly to the winners via e-mail. Thanks for your participation! Enjoy the games :)
I was happy to talk about Taipei People last Saturday in our reading club. Thanks all the friends who joined us! Our next online meeting will be held at 10:00 am (Taipei Time) on August 20 for City Of The Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong by Shih Shu-Ching. If you are interested, feel free to leave a comment, reply to this e-mail message or write to me at transcreation@substack.com to register.
《翻譯寫作的文字風景》是中英文雙語電子報。如果只想收到中文版，請到網站右上角的「My Account」內進行操作，也可以直接回覆這封E-mail或寫信到transcreation@substack.com，由我幫忙更改設定。再次感謝你的訂閱支持！
這篇文章的中文版在這裡。
I used to visit the botanical garden every summer. Probably because the start of the summer vacation coincided with the season of lotus blossom, Mom always took my brother and me to see the lotuses. Next to the botanical garden is our most frequented museum: the National Museum of History. Compared with the National Palace Museum, which always seemed distanced literally and figuratively, the National Museum of History was located in the city center with extremely cheap admission fee (only NTD 10 for child tickets years ago! I don’t remember if the price has increased in recent years, but it is still very cheap). As such, it was the most accessible museum for me, welcoming my visit anytime.1
After watching the exhibits, we would go to the tea house on the second floor for a pot of hot earl grey milk tea, looking at the lotus pond below, which was almost the part I anticipated most in our visit. We used to visit the museum almost once every month or two, and there were so many interesting exhibits. I still remember vividly certain details of an exhibit about the Mesopotamian civilizations. As an elementary school student at that time, I did not even know that Mesopotamia was a place name or where it was, but I still remember seeing a tiny cylinder seal. I was also impressed by an exhibit about the Fontainebleau and Barbizon school paintings: I looked at Camille Corot’s paintings so attentively. Perhaps I was impressed partly by the exotic place names? Anyway, I was so fond of the history museum that I even dreamed of working in museums as a curator (but now my dream is to sleep to my heart’s content every day without having to work).
The National Museum of History is under renovation until the end of 2023. I look forward to its reopening.
Thinking that I have not visited the lotus pond for years, I went to the botanical garden this weekend expressly to see the flowers. The thunder shower in the afternoon added a sense of coolness to the day, and the breezes carried the fragrance of lotus that penetrated even a mask.
The lotuses have been blooming since June, but there are still numerous buds, and there should be flowers to be appreciated even by mid-July. The website of the Botanical Garden shows pictures of the lotus pond every day.
The vast greenness offered by the botanical garden undoubtedly serves as an oasis in the city — and where there are trees, there are birds. In summer, what we see is mainly resident birds, and now is the season for nesting and breeding. We stood by the pond and admired the lotus, and were amused to see light-vented bulbuls flying around on lotus leaves and seedpods.
Noticing us roaming with binoculars, a friendly ojisan who comes to the botanical garden almost every day for nature photographing offered to take us to the nests of a Taiwan blue-magpie (Urocissa caerulea) and a black-naped monarch (Hypothymis azurea). Though I have always known that there are black-naped monarchs nesting in the botanical garden, it is almost impossible to locate the nest without someone guiding us. The Taiwan blue-magpie’s nest was on a low branch, which was quite an unusual sight; the black-naped monarch’s nest was so well-hidden that it took us a long time to finally see it — but lucky to see the male monarch guarding the nest. Thus we were able to see many more species in addition to the most common light-vented bulbuls, Swinhoe’s white-eyes, and Euroasian tree sparrows — a wonderful trip full of lotuses and birds.
Let’s take a walk in the botanical garden in the late afternoon or after a thunder shower when it is not so hot. It is nice to enjoy the greenness and gentle breeze in summertime, and admire the lively birds hopping and flying around. And let’s certainly go bird watching together!
About the Reading Club
Thank Huifen Huang for attending the last meeting of our reading club, bringing new vibes to the discussion. Huifen is my friend and colleague, and I resonated with her final remarks that Taipei People is really a classic which “provokes different thoughts every time one reads it.” I was particularly impressed by the frustrated love in the stories, and the author’s sympathetic depictions of characters with implicit criticisms portrayed that era in a very realistic way.
Next time we will read Shih Shu-Ching’s City Of The Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong at 10:00 am (Taipei Time) on August 20. Welcome to join our online reading club! Feel free to leave a comment, reply to this e-mail message or write to me at transcreation@substack.com to register!
National Museum of History, located next to the Taipei Botanical Garden and currently closed for renovation, is a different museum from the National Taiwan Museum next to 228 Peace Park and the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan.