birth of an aquarium

A few months ago, I decided to get an aquarium on my dorm room. So I purchased one on a second hand site, only to find out later that it had an incandescent light bulb instead of TL lighting which is usually used for aquariums.

But that wasn't something that couldn't be overcome. I would just go buy a CFL with 6500K light (you need that kind of light to be able to grow plants in an aquarium) and small enough to fit in the hood. Only I couldn't find a CFL like that anywhere, not in any of the 4 DIY stores that I visited. Luckily, I found one eventually, but it was very expensive and needed an E27 socket. The socket in my aquarium was an E14, much smaller than the E27. There are adapters that can convert an E14 socket to an E27, but they weren't available in any local store. My only option was ordering one online in China; it didn't cost me much, but...the first one they shipped me got broken, the next one got lost during shipping, so I only got a working one after 1.5 month.

Finally, I was able to put the lamp in the hood. I decided to put in some plants right away:

-salvina natans, a floating plant that I got from my pond

-hygrophila guanensis, which I planted in the left background

-bacopa lanigera, which you can see on the right of the aquarium

-microsorium pteropus or java fern, which I tied to the driftwood

-java moss, which I also tied to driftwood

-Ophiopogon japonicus, better known as mondo grass

After buying the plants, I looked them up and found out that the mondo grass isn't a real aquarium plant, it's actually a garden plant and will die and rot after being submerged for a few months. I decided to keep most of it as a house plant, and put a bit in my aquarium to see how it

Because I was going on a vacation, I decided to just leave the aquarium on my dorm to cycle until I was back.