Nothing much to say about today, so let me fill in yesterday’s trip to the botanical garden.

We followed a friend to the Beijing Botanical Garden for a spring outing.

Spring in Beijing is brief and brilliant. Besides the beautiful flowers, of course, there is willow fluff filling the sky. Once you let yourself mistake that all-enveloping white for snow, you cannot help marveling at how perfectly Xie Daoyun described it.

Wandering without any particular aim, I was surprised by a familiar name: Cao Xueqin. Would you believe the botanical garden contains one of his former residences? I certainly did not expect it. I have never read Dream of the Red Chamber, but its characters and stories have seeped into the culture around me for so long that the place felt familiar for no reason at all.

Naturally, no outing would be complete without geocaching. The caches in the garden were unusual, though: the map showed nothing but blue question marks, meaning every set of coordinates had to be earned by solving a puzzle. Fortunately, they were only simple sudokus. Give me another Pascal’s triangle and I will explode. (See my Puzzler’s Day write-up for details… oh, right, I still haven’t written it.)

With a little help from technology—online solver, anyone?—I obtained three coordinates and found two corresponding caches. Yes, one defeated me. With somewhere else to be that afternoon, I had to leave in regret.

And then I left my phone in my friend’s car.