It’s been really nice to hear from home, through the emails that have been sent, about the taufest, melting snow, and spring flood. Sorry for not replying to your emails, but I try to get things done on this journal first, so emails are often left out. That doesn’t mean you have to stop writing, I download them and take them home to read on the laptop. This post has many pictures, if you’re just reading a printed version you might not get too much out of it, the online version is better. I started writing this post to give everybody an idea of what it is like to live here. However, it got very incoherent, so I decided to split up the posts into categories. This post is all about flowers, so if you don’t do flowers, you might just want to skip this one!
We only have to open our eyes and look around us, to see the many beautiful things here in Africa. We have to be careful not to drop any ripe bananas, because as soon as they hit the ground, they start growing so fast that you will find yourself 10ft in the air on top of a fully grown banana tree! (Ok, Ok, dus is a pisela schtrekt!) This place is a living paradise! With bananas, pineapples, mangoes, papaya, avocados, guava, plantain, and whatever tropical fruit you can think of. Oh! We can’t forget the delicious hot peppers! (That last line was Talitha’s. I don’t think delicious and hot peppers go together in the same sentence.) Everything grows so quickly; a freshly plowed field looks lush and green in no time. There are plants, insects and animals here, that one only reads about in books. Talitha and I are going to get them on camera, so that we can at least share them with you in that way. So it’s picture time, whatever it takes, even if it means getting wet while trying to get the job done! Take this small, white flower for example. Everyone of them has a splash of purple on the bottom petal; maybe God had a bit of extra purple paint around that he had to use up. This five petaled purple/pink flower is grown a lot in the gardens around Palmgrove, it looks a lot like our ‘zuckerbamble’ back home. The butterflies seem to enjoy them, but these little flutterbies are a bit harder to get on camera, because they have no patience when it comes to sitting and posing for the camera man! Can you spot the preying mantis, hidden amongst the flowers? Hopefully, I’ll get some better shots of him. He has a really cute heart shaped head, with beady eyes. Unfortunately, he decided he wasn’t made for the camera either! This flower here, is what I would call undescribable. I don’t know how, or where to start, it doesn’t even look like a flower! Talitha said, that this is where the idea of ‘kruschelle’ must have come from! Look at the picture and you’ll see exactly what she means. We found this purple flower, growing on long straight stems that were swaying gently in the breeze. The opening is quite big, and the flower deep, so the insects that visit these flowers crawl all the way inside to get at the nectar. Here is a yellow flower that is even bigger than the purple one, it has a sweet gentle smell and it grows on a tall shrub that is completely covered with these yellow beauties. It may be called Okra, but for now we have no way of knowing for sure. These tiny, white flower are so small that we almost missed them completely. They grow in a delicate cluster in the center of the plant. This tree is completely covered with pink blossoms. They form huge clusters of pink, with the odd yellow flower mixed in. They almost look ‘out of proportion’ big. Let’s not forget this small clump of plastic looking flowers, they look man made but of course they’re not! The next two pictures are from two separate trees. They look exactly alike, except one is yellow and the other has red mixed in, that makes it look like life giving veins. I see we have too many flower pictures already to describe, so we?ll save them for later posts. Maybe we’ll add an extra picture folder on the side just for that. If anybody is ambitions enough to find out what some of these are called, it would be a great help, just post the name of the flower in the comments. Thanks! Anyway, I have to get going, it’s late and our water system quit working on us. We’ll have to figure out how to take a shower without running water for today, should be interesting.
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