You go explore the Kew Gardens one weekend with a friend.
It’s refreshing to get away from the city, the pavement, the smoke.
All around you is green. Trees, flowers, sky.
Total peace and quiet.
It’s a beautiful day. Not too hot and not too cold.
Strolling among the grassy fields you nibble at a fresh pastry you bought from a local market.
You can’t believe it took you this long to come out here. Had you known how beautiful it was, you’d have come here at least a few more times during your stay.
You find an old cottage. A plaque outside tells you of the original owner’s sweet romance.
Farther into the gardens you find a pagoda, out of place in England, but somehow fitting in this royal retreat.
A peacock crosses your path like a vision. All the colors in its feathers glistening in the sunlight.
You enter a giant greenhouse and are suddenly transported home. The humidity forces you to shed layers as you walk amongst the palm trees and artificial springs. It’s a jungle, but you feel like your back in Florida.
The next room is misty. Orchids line the glass walls, dripping with sweet dew. They make you think of your father, carefully tending his own collection.
Next door you find yourself in a desert. Hot, dry, and so different than what you just came from. Cacti soar up towards the glass ceiling. Was that a tumble weed?
You favorite room is at the center of the greenhouse. Grass carpets the square space, a small weeping willow in the corner. In the middle, a pond covered with lily pads make you feel like you’re in a Monet.
You’ve seen this painting a million times at the National Gallery, but it’s different being here.
It’s magical.
//
This semester’s blog project has been interesting and enjoyable to do. By using a blog as the medium, I was able to write about a big, long, single experience, but break it up into several smaller stories that could be read individually and can stand alone. When these smaller stories are put together, you can see the bigger story of an experience traveling and living abroad. Because it was a blog, I was able to incorporate pictures into the text which helped break up the stories and help place each story in a setting. By linking to the other blogs, I was also able to connect to the other student’s blogs. I only interacted with 4 other blogs, but because these blogs were interacting with 4 blogs, and those 4 blogs were interacting with 4 more blogs, and so on, all the class blogs are connected in some way. These short blog posts come together to form blogs, and these individual blogs come together to create an even larger text that combines them all. Because the assignments made us connect to the other blogs not only through links but also through themes, the overall themes of the bigger text is coherent in a way. It’s definitely not a traditional text, it’s nonlinear, created by many people, and can be read from many different starting points and in many different ways, but it’s all linked together in a way that makes it a singular text. It’s really interesting how this was created and linked, and it probably wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t using the medium of a blog. And because we chose to write the blogs anonymously, it’s less divided by author than it would have if all the authors had been identified from the beginning and throughout the project.
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