Bonsai exhibition in Girona

While being on a Flower Festival in Girona we've come across a beautiful bonsai exhibition held on the terrace of the local historical museum. Everything was decorated in Japanese style and all those tiny trees and small plants were absolutely gorgeous. Here is little photo mosaic to show you the ones I liked the most.

And one more portion.

Hope you enjoyed this wonderful greens. Posts about Barcelona are coming soon. See you!

Flower Festival in Girona

Hello everyone! I'm back to tell you about our recent vacation in Spain, share some pictures and impressions. I like travelling in spring, especially in late spring, when the nature has already woken up after winter, flowers and trees are blooming and the grass and leaves are of that fresh bright green color that is specific for spring.
So our visit begun in a small Catalonian town of Girona, that is located not far from Barcelona (about 100 kilometers). Before the trip I was searching for any special events, that could be held here at this time of the year. And I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Girona is a place where Flower Festival is annually held since 1955.

The festival is held on the third week of May. This is a period when all the town is full of different flower expositions and crowds of tourists who want to see all this beauty. Some narrow medieval streets were really crowdy, that actually explains the busyness of the hotels at this period of time.

Overall the town is very nice with a huge gorgeous cathedrals, old stone buildings, a lot of flowers, nice street cafes and yummy Catalonian food and wine.
We had a pleasant dinner at one of the ancient squares surrounded with the old houses. We ordered traditional tapas and a bottle of Catalonian wine and had a relaxing cozy evening in the heart of Catalonia.
Next day we enjoyed a Flower Festival, walked trough the town and viewed various flower displays and exhibitions.

Some of the displays were really impressive. For example this one with burned wooden boxes that haven't yet stopped fuming and contrasting white letters and white tree on them. As far as I understood that was and appeal against smoking.

Beautiful flowers were almost everywhere. Here are a few more pictures from the Flower Festival.

We loved Girona, a nice cozy peaceful town and we'll be happy to visit it again.

After a good portion of flower art we continued our journey moving to Barcelona - the capital of Catalonia. I'm going to tell you this story in the next posts.
Have a great end of the day!

Family gathering

Past week was a bit busy and full of events. On Saturday we were visiting my grandparents to celebrate granddad's birthday. It was a fabulous weekend spent with family in the shadowy garden near their lovely house. They live in a small town near Kiev. There are a few small ponds there with a beautiful nature around. The blue building at the opposite side of the pond is an old wooden local church. I like visiting this place, it's always pleasant and relaxing.

Grandma's garden is full of flowers as usual.

She planted a few room flowers for me.

So I have a new blue blooming violet in my little violet collection and a few more flowers, one of them is going to bloom soon.

My grandma grows a lot of useful stuff in her small garden. My favorite are herbs. She provides the whole family with herbs. I love to make different herbal teas and most of all I like to use homegrown herbs for them. Lavender, mint, sage, lemon balm, jasmine - all this comes from grandma's garden. The tea taste is especially good if herbs are prepared by yourself or by kind grandma's hands and it's a great pleasure to drink it during long winter evenings or on breakfast - it gives a lot of energy and good mood.

I am a great fan of spices as well. My favorite one is basil. It is the best seasoning for meat, but I love it so much, that I can add it to any other dishes, except desserts of course. Fortunately, you can also find basil in my grandma's garden. As well as cumin, coriander, parsley, dill, rucola and so on.

The main dish of the day was grilled salmon cooked on a mangal. We prefer meat when the weather is colder and fish is a good choice for summer.

Here is a picture of the previous family gathering, when we cooked meat - Shashlik. Looks smoky and yummy. My father cooks the best meat I've ever tried.

This week was extremely hot and we are all looking forward for divine rain or at least wind.

Hope you are having a great weekend! Will be back soon with more news. See ya.

Chestnut city - Kiev

Hello and thank you for stopping by. Today I'm going to show how beautiful the capital of Ukraine is during this warm May days. And the reason is blooming chestnut trees. They are everywhere. It doesn't matter on what street in Kiev you will appear, you'll definitely see at least one chestnut tree. It is very easy to distinguish it from any other tree because of plenty of white/pink pyramids on it.

There are few stories about how did chestnut trees appear in Kiev.

Due to one of them all main streets of Kiev were planted with chestnut trees just before the visit of Russian emperor Nicholas I in 1842. They were brought from Balkans. But maybe the emperor didn't like them or something else happened and all the trees were cut down. Emperor's favourite poplars were planted instead on that places. But people liked chestnut trees, took cutted branches and planted them on the backyards near their houses and everywhere they could. That's how Chestnut tree became the most numerous tree in Kiev.

According to another story first chestnut trees were planted in Kiev Pechersk Lavra in 1825 and they spread through the city from here by Kiev people, because the trees have a lot of advantages: they are very unpretentious, grow quickly, bloom in young age, can grow everywhere, even on clay, frost, shadowy and extraordinarily beautiful.

There are about 2 millions of chestnut trees in Kiev. About twenty of them are more than 150 years old. Among them we have 350 years old Peter Mohyla's chestnut tree (25 meters high and 1.1 meter in diameter) and 200 years old chestnut tree near St. Sophia Cathedral (24 meters high, 1.15 meters in diameter). [source]

Chestnut tree is the symbol of Kiev. Chestnut leaf and bloom were on the official coat of arms of Ukraine during soviet period.

This symbol is often used on emblems by Kiev organizations, companies, etc.

We have few types of chestnut tree in Kiev: horse chestnut, Ohio buckeye and red horse chestnut. They all are not edible. Also there are white and pink colors of chestnut blossom.

Remember, I showed you few photos of the chestnut tree in front of my window in my April post. Well, it changed a lot. Have a look.

Here are some photos of chestnut trees from different parts of Kiev.

Chestnut trees near the main building of National Technical University of Ukraine 'Kiev Polytechnic Institute' (where I'm about to graduate).

Chestnut trees near the red building of Taras Shevchenko's National University.

Chestnut trees on the main street of Kiev - Khreshchatyk street.

Chestnut trees on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square).

Hope you enjoyed my little excursion. Have a great day!

9th of May

Today is the 9th of May and Ukraine as long as other post-soviet countries is celebrating a Victory Day, that marks the capitulation of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union in the Second World War. It is the 66th anniversary this year, but we still have some veterans alive. This day is an official national holiday. I've spent this day in my small home town Pryluky and we've got a little parade with orchestra here. Also there was a small exhibition of retro cars.

It was a nice sunny day, so I had an opportunity to take few nice photos of flowers I found during our after-parade walking.

Some blue flowers.

Apple blossom.

Dandelion and a bee.

We were walking in the historical area of our town, there are few old churches here. I'm going to make a small excursion for you later.

Yesterday we've got a mini sushi party. Just salmon-cucumber sushi.

Also I caught some sky in my purple tea cup while drinking tea with purple wrapped chocolates :).

After all that we had a family crochet time. My mom was working on her patchwork blanket.

And I've created a new amigurumi family member!

Kiev Botanic Garden

Today I've visited Kiev Botanic Garden, also known as State Botanical Garden or the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. We visit it every year usually on the 9-10th of May, cuz that's the time when lilac (there is a huge collection of it here) is blooming and, believe me, that's worth seeing... and smelling. This year we're going to visit our Botanic Garden as usual, but we decided to make one more visit today and see the magnolias blooming. And that was unbelievable! Magnolias were gorgeous - white, pink, dark pink. The ground was covered with their petals like with the snow. Well, I won't explain better then the photos will do. Just have a look. Aren't they beautiful?

Of course, we've found not only magnolias. Next set of photos is especially for tulip lovers.

A little bit more of yellow...

A little bit of white...

The next one is not actually white. It is of a special and very interesting pale pink color. There wasn't anything green on that tree. Even the leaves were a little pinky. Very nice tree.

Some more orange/pink...

Some blue...

And my favorite. Guess what? Purple, of course. Oh, what a color! What the flowers... Our nature is fabulous, definitely.

And a little bit of views. The sky was very strange today.

As you see, I've got a great portion of flower/nature/colour therapy today, it gave me a lot of positive energy and pleasure, that I'm sending to you through this photos. Have a great day! I'll show you more photos from the Garden when lilacs will bloom.