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| My Souvenir Button |
Have you ever heard of a Corpse Flower? Yeah, me either. But when my friend Tygriss told me about them, and how Houston has its very own Corpse Flower named Lois, I said "Sign me up! I want to smell!"
It just so happens that I was heading to Houston the weekend it was opening up, apparently when it smells the worse. See, a Titan arum, AKA Corpse Flower, has earned its name because the "fragrance" it gives off is not unlike rotting meat. The purpose of this is to attract carrion-eating beetles and Flesh Flies that pollinate it. The flower's color helps to give the illusion of a piece of meat, and its temperature is said to help its own perfume disperse. The heat is also believed to assist in the illusion of rotting meat that attracts carcass-eating insects.
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| Mature Titan arum |
We killed time at a sushi place until 2 AM when they kicked us out. We went over to a 24 hour Starbucks and killed some more time there. Then, we went back to the museum and got in line with our tickets for our showing. From there, we waited in another line that led us through the Museum's bug center where we learned everything possible you could need to know about bugs. We finally worked our way to Lois.
And it was utterly anticlimactic. By 3:45 AM the Stinkometer had dropped back down to a level 5... we missed the stink! When we first walked in to the warm area it was displayed in, we all caught a great whiff of what smelled like garbage, and then it was gone. As my Bestie stated, "We could cook up more stink wearing Sketchers with no socks"...
But, I will never forget that evening, the laughter, the experience, and most importantly that I waited 5.5 hours to see a stinky flower at 4 AM in the morning at a museum. How many people can say that?? It was totally worth the sleep-deprivation coma I was in by the time this picture was taken:
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| Just the 5 of us |
