Sitio Litre Orchid Garden

One of the places we visited in Puerto de la Cruz was The Orchid Garden in Sitio Litre. The entrance fee costs € 4,75/person. It's not such a huge garden, but it's the oldest surviving garden in Tenerife. It's been owned continuously by British families since 1730 (according to the brochure). Funny thing is that the information in the brochure is also translated in Finnish. In fact, there are many restaurant menus in Finnish as well. I think there have been lots and lots of Finnish tourists going there for years. They even speak a little Finnish at the hotel where we stayed at.

Anyway, there have been plenty of famous guests in the parties thrown in this particular garden, including William Wilde (father of Oscar Wilde) and Agatha Christie.

Here are some photos of the garden.

The entrance:

The Koi pond near the entrance where guests could sit down and sunbathe ha ha...

The cute souvenir shop (at that time it was still closed). It sells some seeds as well (plant/flower seeds) at €1/bag. It also sells paintings as well as other stuff. Funnily enough, I noticed some used books/novels sold there, as well he he he...

Other parts of the garden...they have a separate section for the orchids.

Here is my hand as comparison (I know my hand is small, but still the red flowers are HUGE!). 

Agatha Christie and a character in one of her novels:

Here are the orchid section:

And at the back of the garden there's this 600-year-old tree.

There's also this funny-looking bare tree near the tree above.

There's a small cafe at the back of the garden, but we continued our journey and we found this tree with a HUGE trunk on our way back to the front of the garden. Again I'm aware that I'm small (only 145 cm) but still that tree trunk is huge he he he...

I took a photo from below to capture the upper side of the tree.

And after walking further away, I managed to capture (almost) the entire tree:

Had fun on R2's expense before going out...don't the papayas look like a hat? HA HA HA...Papaya Hat LOL!!!

End of March Photos

Yep, not going to ramble about anything today...just wanna show you some photos I took last Saturday. Here they are... 

It was snowing heavily during the afternoon...but then the sun was really persistent. It was peeping in the background. Quite a sight, actually. To see all the snow and the vague sun. :-D

These two photos below were taken about 15-20 minutes later, after the snow stopped falling. :-D

Don't you think that from this angle, it resembles the tongue of a snake? :-D 

Realization

The other day I just suddenly realized something: how an incident impacted my life in certain ways, but I only understood how deep the impact was after moving to and living in Finland. When I still lived in Indo, I didn't even know the incident affected me that much. Sorry I'm being cryptic here, but I don't want to write about it in details. Suffice it to say that I LOVE enlightenment and I LOVE having moments when I understand even more things about myself, others, life in general. :-D

Today the temp. went down to -6'C after snowing so much on Saturday. Yesterday and the day before the daytime temperature was above 0'C, so much of the snow has melted and now it's rock hard, so I've gotta be really careful when I go to work later today.

Hubby, who went to work very early today for a business trip to another town, left me a message: "Honey, you're the BEST thing that ever happened to me. I love you. Be careful outside. It's slippery."

Waking up to THAT made me SO happy! :-D

Anyway, let me share some snowy pictures with you...taken on Saturday and Sunday...




The dead rose bush...I think it looks LOVELY, the contrast between the white snow, the black branches, and some red leaves.



Below you can even see some green leaves still! :-D



And here's my MIL's orchid, still going strong inside the apartment:


I'll blog-hop later tomorrow or the next day. We want to go to the cabin this weekend 'coz I don't have work at all on Saturday and Sunday, but we'll see about that. I hope the weather is good enough he he...