Yangzhou Posting (2)

I talked about winter last time, today will be about transition of winter to spring and if it's not too draggy, I will talk about spring too.

So it snowed during winter, and very few greenery and even flowery can be seen, it's just white.
Until when it's around Chinese New Year, where the plum flowers of sort start blooming.
You will start seeing reddish pink to white, but surprisingly, the trees are still bare without leaves.
I waited until the 3rd or 4th day of CNY to visit the Yangzhou most famous ShouXiHu, having transliterated as "slender west lake".
It's a long lake, designated by government to be a botanical park.
It's beautiful with the swans start going into water, sprouts can be seen here and there, and all sort of pinkish flower blooming on dark brown bare trees.

Flower starts to bloom

One of the ancient Chinese hut in ShouXiHu

Flower blooms on bare tree

Locals told me these plum flowers are the first to bloom when the winter is ending.
It signifies the end of winter and the start of spring.
The temperature is still cold at around single digit degree Celsius, but it doesn't usually snow anymore.
The weather on the day I went is cloudy with drizzling rain, and then throughout the week, it's just windy or cloudy, with hardly any sun.

And then suddenly, when the sun comes out, the temperature climbs to around 15 degree Celsius or so, the greens start to grow, and these all starts around 2 weeks after the CNY one-week holiday.