💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~jmq › news › 2014-12-22-botanical-gardens.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 04:15:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jet lag is almost behind me, if the solid sleep until 4:45 this morning is any indication. Papa, however, continues to suffer from a sore throat and other flu-like symptoms, for which he has scheduled a visit to the university health center this morning.
Mom and I followed Papa's path shortly after he left, but we continued through campus and entered the subway system at Kent Ridge. A quick ride on the circle line brought us to the Botanical Gardens.
From the MRT station we made our way through the park, stopping occasionally to take pictures. The glare from direct sunlight on the iPhone screen made it difficult to navigate the options of the picture-taking app, yet another illustration of the trade-offs that are made for the sake of packing more functionality into smaller devices. Dedicated knobs and buttons, at least, would help our fingers acquire muscle memory for those times when vision is compromised.
One part of the gardens where glare was not an issue nevertheless presented little in the way of photogenic material. The evolution garden, as it was called, offered instead an educational tour of the history of life on Earth, demonstrated by the different species of plants that thrived in various geological eras. Having seen the entire history of our living planet compressed into a walk spanning just a few hundred square meters, we bought ourselves a counterargument to the charge of having missed out on any particular highlight of the park.
Exiting the Botanical Gardens onto Napier Road, we walked to the Ion shopping center on Orchard Road. We found two bike helmets in white and silver, whose bulky packaging made for an unwieldy trek to the food court in the basement of the mall. There we ate beef noodle soup, and I collapsed one of the cardboard boxes in which the bike helmets were packed. With this slightly less bulky load, we made our way to Kinokuniya for more Christmas shopping.
From Orchard Road station we took the MRT to Clementi. Rather than catch the bus back to Kent Vale I insisted on being shown the walking route, which afforded us the chance to pick up some groceries and cold drinks from Sheng Siong.
Two games of squash followed by a cold shower got me cleaned up enough to start making a spinach and split pea curry. Mom and I each washed down the spicy dinner with an ice cream bar, but Papa wisely refrained so as not to further compromise his immune system.