Author: Ms. R.

The Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden (RSBG)  is unusual for many reasons, including its unassuming address. Federal Way is a suburb nestled between Seattle and Tacoma, best known for its strip malls and horrific traffic. It’s not somewhere you’d expect to find a botanical garden—let alone a sprawling, 22-acre oasis teeming with rare plants.  In the 1970s, the Rhododendron Species Foundation was allotted a plot of land on the 400-acre wooded campus where a large logging company maintained its headquarters. What……

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In the garden behind a Victorian brick house, a sculpture of an inquisitive Alice, caught between two realms, extends two stony hands through the glass in front of her. The place she eternally guards—or at least the one we can see—is known as The Chestnuts. Here, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll, spent his final days.  The late author was no stranger to multiple realities, himself…….

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Of the five outdoor swimming pools in Vancouver, many would say that Kitsilano Pool is the cream of the crop. Situated directly on the water in the city’s trendy Kitsilano neighborhood, the pool—known as Kits Pool to locals—is a popular summer gathering place. At 137 meters (450 feet), it is the longest salt water swimming pool in North America; almost three times the length of an Olympic pool. Its waters are replenished by the changing of the tide. Kits Pool……

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Each year, the Hungarian government sends a delegation to the Old Darjeeling Cemetery to honor Alexander Csoma (or more properly in Hungarian, Sándor Csoma de Kőrös) whose pioneering linguistic studies helped open Central Asia to the West. Csoma died of malaria in Darjeeling in 1844, but the effects of his scholarly contributions continue to be felt nearly 2 centuries later. Born in Transylvania (which was then under the Hungarian crown) in around 1784, Csoma was initially interested in finding……

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The word “dollar” derives from the former German currency thaler, which in turn comes from Joachimsthaler, a large silver coin from the 16th century. It was originally minted in the Bohemian town of Joachimsthal, known today as Jáchymov. Located in an ore-rich area in the mountains, the town of Jáchymov was founded in 1516, the same year its silver mines opened. The silver coins were first minted two years later. The property purchased to establish the mint stood adjacent to……

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Last month, as children in China started returning to school after COVID-19 closures, an ancient hat from the Song Dynasty came back into fashion. At a primary school in Hangzhou, pupils donned handmade headgear that they fashioned out of paper, balloons, and other crafts, with protruding arms that spanned one meter. These eccentric hats were intended to help them adjust to social distancing measures, the South China Morning Post reported, and they were modeled after hats once worn by……

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On March 15, the day before South Africans were plunged into a lockdown which prohibited sales of alcohol, cigarettes, and takeout food, lines outside liquor stores spilled into the streets. One bottle store owner told me he did a month’s trade in a day. Three weeks later, when President Cyril Ramaphosa made it clear the booze ban wouldn’t be lifted anytime soon, South Africans started to get desperate. Bottle store break-ins and drone-assisted drink deliveries made the news across……

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From Polé to Xaman-Há, Maya settlements on the Caribbean coast of modern-day Mexico were often dedicated to assisting pilgrims on their way to the temples of fertility goddess Ixchel, often established on nearby islands. One island was so full of female idols that the Spanish named it Isla Mujeres, or Island of Women, while in Cozumel, several temples dedicated to the goddess were well-known pilgrimage sites. The Cozumel site now known as San Gervasio was not part of a……

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