The Butterfly House

Irrelevant but pretty photo of a fish. You're welcome.

Last year, I tried to raise butterflies. The completely average Pieris Brassicae, to be precise. I found caterpillars and a steady supply of their favorite food, I set up cute little jars with cute little mesh fabric wrapped around the top, and I went as far as to name one of the jars "Jar Of Success" (no really... I put a post-it on it) because it housed the fattest caterpillars of the bunch. It was a complete and utter disaster.

Fast forward a few days, I noticed the caterpillars were kind of... inactive. Fast forward a little more. There is no easy to say this. I started noticing tiny little things moving inside my precious caterpillars. Fast forward just a tiny bit, tiny bit more and they had eaten their way out and were building cocoons with the caterpillar's silk. Dear lord. I had nighmares about zombified caterpillars for two whole nights after that.

Turns out I'd been a victim of a parasitic wasp, the infamous Cotesia Glomerata. If you're interested in the mechanics of chemical warfare as employed by tiny little bugs, this is one great post on the subject - though the photos might be a bit graphic for those among us who are not particularly fond of crawling things that eat other crawling things from inside out. Around the end of the year, I had the opportunity to speak to a butterfly expert - who told me his caterpillars had met the same fate. I let out a sigh. Turns out it wasn't just me being completely inefficient after all.

But let's stop with the gloom and doom and talk about a place in Lisbon where people are actually doing this successfully! Aka the Borboletário, or The Butterfly House, of the National Museum Of Natural History. It opened to the public in 2006, and it's a small, enclosed garden of mediterranean host plants, where you can simply walk in and observe the different life stages of our most common butterflies, and their interaction with their environment. Sadly, I didn't see any new ones when I was there, but it's been a bad year for butterflies anyway. Maybe I'll go back once it's warmer.

Aaaaand... I'll leave you with pictures in the meantime.
















(Borboletário do Jardim Botânico de Lisboa - Rua da Escola Politécnica, Lisboa)

I thought it was beyond cute how these butterflies wouldn't fly away from me - I could have touched them, that's how friendly they were. I don't actually know whether butterflies can be social with humans. But if there's a good place to run that research, this is it. Do visit if you have the chance! Cheaper tickets if you pay for the museum and the botanical garden as a package!

Do as I say!
xx

Fancy Film Friday #2: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch, 2011 (USA)
A young girl is institutionalized by her abusive stepfather. Retreating to an alternative reality as a coping strategy, she envisions a plan which will help her escape.

When I first watched this movie, I was in a nearly-empty movie theatre. The opening sequence chilled me to the bone, and the very end had me struggling for a tissue. My first words after the movie were... wanna go again?

It blew me away. It's an uncomfortable movie, yes. It's uncomfortable, and thought-provoking. It's a movie about rape, about coping, about sexuality, about freedom, about oppression, and you're being manipulated through most of it. The dragons, the corsets, the brothel, the katana and the helicopter and the zeppelin... none of that is real. We see our main character's fantasies, her projections, her pantomimes played by a persona who shares little more than her looks and her desire to escape - not even her name. She's so detached from herself, so curled up in her own inner world, that she doesn't let us see what's actually happening to her, behind that flimsy curtain of deception that we're not allowed to pull open until her quest is finished. Is it sucessful? That depends. From my perspective, yes, it is. Not fully, but enough. You can't always win everything, or save everyone. And to me, it's more than enough that she fought back until she couldn't anymore.

xx

Cortejo

So. I graduate in a few months, did you know that? Now you do.

For the past four years, I've been studying Criminology, and for the past seven days, I've been figuring out the best way to edit these photos. The event depicted is... well, it's our yearly student parade. It's probably a bit hard to explain to the unitiated in Portuguese academic traditions, but let's put it simply. The university is composed of different faculties. Each faculty has its own color (or combination of colors). And so each year, for one day in May, the students march around the city (most of them in their uniforms), in one big colorful academic pride parade. The near-graduates get to wear top hats, there are songs and games, and generally it takes everyone around six hours to walk a distance that would usually take ten minutes. Too much noise and too many people, but I can proudly say I lasted a whole three hours before calling it quits. Slow walking, man. Most certainly not my thing.

I don't know what was happening here, but I swear we didn't look that gloomy the whole time.

In which I hold my DSLR like a point-and-shoot and lose around 100% of my style cred.

"It doesn't have to be easy, it has to be worth it."

And on that bombshell... *spins chair* ...back to work.
xx