Photo of the day: The campus at night

I live on a beautiful campus. 

Look at these lights on a rainy night;

the soft glow is warmth and beauty.

Spring flowers

It's spring! Which means that everything is blooming at once. So here are a gazillion pictures of pretty flowers that were taken in my city's week of spring sunshine. I'm always amazed by how many different flowers there are on campus! They are so bright and colorful.

Have you ever heard of the Bulgarian holiday Baba Marta, where red and white bracelets called Martenitsa are given out as a greeting to welcome the end of winter and beginning of spring? Well my TA for math is from there, and he brought this tradition along to the people who visited him in office hours. Technically the holiday is in March, so we were a bit late, but I still liked the sharing of his culture. Anyways, you are supposed to tie the bracelet around the first blooming plant you see. 

Well, on campus, everything bloomed at once! But I decided to choose a small bright bushy-eyed cherry tree on the edge of Red Square. I was a little afraid I would hurt the tree, so I tied is loosely around the tree, and as the tree grows, I'm planning to go back and cut it off so it doesn't restrict the branch. But it was kind of deliriously exciting to take my bracelet off and tie it on a tree. I'm not sure why, and I'm not going to analyze it, but anyways, here's photographic evidence! haha.

I really enjoy the one part in focus and the seeming zoomed in focal point to that spot. I particularly enjoy the pop of color. These are the brightest flowers I have seen. 

I also like the surprise of the yellow dots smattering the blue.

A lively strip of magenta to break up the monotony...

I wish I could have gotten that little piece of yellow out of the corner, but the wind was waving these flowers around like crazy. I'm actually quite happy with the crisp detail I managed to get; definitely using a fast shutter speed. I also liked the coloring. Yellow is expected, but this young flower is striped with green, which is fascinating to me.

I liked the smattering of colors given by the flower petals blown away in the wind. The bright colors don't overpower each other, which is nice.

The delicacy of dandelions is absurd. But their puffy seeds are so beautiful in the air.

I think this is wisteria. It is beautiful, isn't it? I like the way it catches the sunlight. The white seems to glow, withholding the light.

Enjoy the flowers around you, and the many more to come in summer.

The lovely weather outside

It is sunny outside! But as much as I love the sun, I don't love the heat. At all. The grass is always greener on the other side, huh. I'm also getting over a cold, so not many pictures, but I passed these lovely things along my way to class. And I only had my phone with me at the time, so these were all taken with my phone's camera. Enjoy the sun!

Someone planted all these pretty windmills (I actually don't know what they are properly called...) all along the grassy areas of campus. Aren't they so pretty? In the sunlight, they silver would reflect the sunlight, and the grass became a sea of stars.

The buttercups are blooming! I have a lot of good memories from elementary school of picking bouquets of buttercups. I liked how if you held them under your chin, the sunlight would reflect the shimmery yellow onto you.

These puffy flowers made me entirely too happy for no reason. But they look all plush and fuzzy! I hope you enjoy them as much as they made me happy inside, haha.

Sorry it's been awhile!

Hi all, sorry it has been so long since an update! In all honesty, I've been really busy and haven't had time to take anything off my camera. But I have been taking pictures! I swear! Also, The Boyfriend is currently possessing my camera to study for midterms (we share a textbook). But soon there will be more pictures!

Also, the previous post was honestly from about two or three weeks ago... I just never published it :/

Okay have a great Sunday, I've got studying to do!

Photos from the week

A few miscellaneous things I wanted to share:

                                     

I SAW AN OWL BETWEEN THE DORMS!!!!

I FOUND PURPLE THREE-LEAF CLOVERS!

AND FIRE-ORANGE-TURNING-RED PLANTS!

And some pretty cherry blossoms :)

Anyways, that is all. Have a good day!

The weather where I live. But I still love it.

This is the type of weather I live with. It is seriously worth documenting. You'll see why:

This was around noon. Cold, some puffy clouds, but still some blue.

This was at 5pm. The library closed, and I had to walk through this. It was pelting rain, plus some hail, and there was lightning and thunder.

15 minutes later....a complete hail storm.

And then finish off with some more rain.

Later that day, lightning struck the nearby electrical plant, and the entire University lost power for a few hours. I was waiting in line for dinner, and couldn't get food because everything was run on electricity. So what do I do? Call my parents and we picked up my brother for a family dinner! :)

Trip to the Greenhouse with The Boyfriend!

On a particularly bad day, The Boyfriend cheered me up by accompanying me to our school's greenhouse. I had been there many years ago--in middle school(!)--but he had never been before. It was a very fun experience, and we saw many beautiful and cool looking plants. Here is a tiny sample of them. Enjoy!

This cactus (I think) was outside the greenhouse. I like the contrast of the milky gray and the dark tips of the edges. I tried to avoid as much of the green grass in the background, but this is as best as I could get. The other picture was a little too zoomed in for my taste.

Fuzzy cactus! I have a special place in my heart for cacti. Maybe it's the thought that they are so poky yet so cute! Their little armor brings to mind the image of a little kid trying to brandish a weapon to protect himself. So little, and yet so hopeful.

But my goodness, these lily pads are freaky. They have SPIKES on the bottom! It's like those people you meet who you think are nice and innocent, and then they turn out to be all claws and biting. For some reason I only remember these lily pads from the previous time I visited those 8 years ago. It's probably because of the scary spikes...

I'm sure I've seen these fragile little flowers before on cacti. But what is interesting about this picture is the line of spikes hiding on the right. Such an unexpected image...

Isn't it interesting how some cacti have flowers that bloom in a ring around the top? I like this contrast between pink and white.

It looks like a pokemon!

This little guy was growing off the side of another cactus. I'm not sure why the cactus looks different though...

This was in the rain forest section of the greenhouse. What an interesting flower...

The rest of the pictures were form the tropical section.

I like the soft washed out color of this flower coupled with the water droplets. But the background washes it out a little, I think.

The flower of a lily pad. It looks a little creepy...But a beautiful color.

This reminds me of a caterpillar. They are tiny little flowers all bunched together. The Boyfriend thought they were cool looking.

The colors remind me of a more delicate poinsettia  But I find the shape of the right flowers intriguing. They look like origami balloons.

This pink little ball was really unexpected.