Spice garden tour in Spring valley, Keralam!

There are multiple spice gardens along the Spring Valley region in Kerala, and they more or less follow the same blueprint: a family-owned estate with an optional tour of the medicinal herbs, followed by a detailed exhibition of the products extracted from the garden. These can range from raw products such as cardamom pods to more refined oils for skincare or back pain relief, which their in-house pharmacy would be happy to prescribe.

During this garden tour, we enjoyed discovering just how many varieties of the same plant exist in the wild. In the case of peppers and bananas especially, we realized how differently these plants fruit compared to the versions we are used to seeing on commercial farms. It is admittedly quite an interactive and engaging experience, so as long as you can avoid purchasing medicines you do not really need, this informative tour is definitely a must-do for nature enthusiasts!

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Kabuki's sushi train in Brussels : )

If I only showed you the outside of this building, would you be able to guess where I am taking you inside? Well, if you've read the title by now, this video is shot at one of my favourite food spots in Brussels called Kabuki, and as long as you come with an open appetite and curious tastebuds, you will certainly appreciate the gifts of this menu. Which include, among many delicious plates, service by miniature trains at your table—I mean, how cool is that! I am already satisfied by the freshness of the sushi and fried foods being served, but when a train comes in with all these options, it is so difficult to choose which one to begin with. If you're here, I recommend keeping a bowl of soy sauce and pickled ginger at your table so that you refresh your palate whenever needed. There are sweet options among sushi as well, including fruit and mango-salmon pairings, which are surprisingly an amazing play of textures. At the centre of all the train tracks, you can feast your eyes ...

How to take care of a rose bouquet : )

If you also succumb to your whims and pick up a bouquet of flowers for your fiancé, join the club. I found this brilliant bundle of orange and decided to set up a vase at home because you can never have enough plant troubles in the world to evade getting more plants. My tips for successful longevity for any flower bouquet is to immediately chop off the bottom section of the stems which was exposed to the previous bucket of water. This allows the flowers to delay any potential decay as a healthier section of the stem is now open for work. As my vase has a thinner neck, I decided to also pluck away any additional leaves around the bottom half of the stems to allow them easy access into the vase. This also prevents the leaves from being exposed to the water and potentially rotting sooner. I put a cup worth of clean filtered water along with a few pinches of flower fertilizer. This is optional, and I have had success without it too, but since it is available to me, I do want to take ...

An ode to cherry blossoms in Belgium : )

Early in April, you begin to see something really wonderful in Belgium. Many neighborhoods, especially around Brussels, transform into a shared canopy of bright pink under the heat of a summer sun, and you begin to appreciate many of those otherwise non-conspicuous empty trees on the roadside. These were initially brought to Belgium by the Japanese embassy and have now successfully taken over as ornamental patchwork of trees in multiple cities. What I find even more interesting is that many of these tree varieties do not produce any real cherry fruit, so the one way they are propagated is by using stem grafting. This can lead to some pretty interesting shapes and colors in the ultimate tree. We have a wide range from white to white-pink and pink, and you can bet all your money that they all bloom at once in one week and then leave just as quickly. From a distance, these trees do not seem to have any leaves since they have a collective umbrella of pink, but zooming up close, you c...

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