I am discovering that though I have no problems communicating in Mandarin, I apparently don't think enough like the Chinese. Everything from finding that restaurant yesterday to finding the ferry terminal is taking me three times as long as I predict, and they're never where I'm expecting. There's apparently just a different logic to things I've not figured out yet.

There's a certain comfort to their laid back procedures though. "Oh they sold you an 11:30 ticket even though the boat finished boarding and left before you could even reach the dock? Here just stand in this line for the 12:00. Next!"

Here, also have a pet rainbow that followed us to Macau:

This was the very first day in which I could actually wander the city. I had finished all my conference duties unexpectedly early and still had half the day remaining. After a quick consultation with the concierge, I had a list of places to visit, and started walking. 

And walking.

And walking.

The theme for this trip, between Hong Kong and Macau, was lots of walking. But I honestly don't know what else one would do in Hong Kong. Other than shopping or doing a few touristy things like going to a museum or taking a tour, it seemed to me that the one thing that really differentiates Hong Kong from any other place I've been was the architecture ... and that, one can only take in by walking.

But wait, you might ask, what about the culture?! The people?! This is Chinese at its roots!

Except ... I don't know if I simply didn't go to the right places or I wasn't REALLY as immersed in the culture as I thought I was, but it honestly felt like ... like just one giant Chinatown. 

(Okay, I kind of hung my head in shame there for a moment.) 

I don't know if maybe America's chinatowns are becoming more authentic with the ever-increasing immigrant populations, or maybe Asia's just becoming more westernized, but I really felt like everything was familiar ... until they were not. And then Hong Kong got to point and laugh at my naivety.

I'll make a posting later with the photographs of the cityline and amazingly fascinating skyscrapers, but on this particular evening, I obviously took the ground-level view. In hindsight, I was pretty ambitious, especially considering that my knee was only just beginning to make some progress, but I wandered all over a good half of the southern part of the city; from Nathan Road to the ferry terminal on the west side, and then even puzzling out the subway system to get to the night market just before it closed at midnight:

And I can't even begin to describe just how fascinated I am with these types of gritty, shadowed, industrial mazes. Even after several cullings, I probably have way more photos of this subject matter than anyone is ever interested in looking at. But beyond the richness of the shadows, the subtle swaths of color and light, the opposing contrasts of cool and warm tones, I love how there are little signs of life and commerce hidden in their cracks; as if even the behemoths of high-rises and infrastructure are forced to make space for these little shops and stores - blades of grass and other greenery poking stubbornly through the seams of a pavement.

When a work trip to Vancouver was canceled while I was in Seattle, I decided to rent a car and head on down to the Columbia River Gorge where I used to live and visit friends and old haunts. As it so happened, just that morning as I was about to pack up the car and leave, I received an email from a friend pointing out that a full lunar eclipse was supposed to occur that evening. I'd never really been much interested in the whole camping in the out-of-doors till the rear-end of the night routine that is usually associated with astrophotography, but between having a fellow photographer friend in the area (misery does love company) and the benefit of already being pretty much out-of-doors in the Gorge, I decided to give it a shot.

Trouble being, I had no proper equipment. It was sort of ironic all around - I was literally cleaning out my phone's address book earlier that week, and finally deleted an entry for Portland's Photo Pro, thinking "oh, I'm never going to use them again now that I've moved out of the area." Welp, thank goodness for Yelp, 'cause I found myself right back on their front doorstep on my drive down from Seattle. Then it was a mad scramble for whatever they had on hand (at first they didn't have any tripod on hand except for a monster of a video-tripod, but then stole someone else's carbon fiber tripod reservation if I promised to bring it back in time for them to pick it up, and then they gave me the fanciest digital shutter release I had ever seen which, thankfully, I didn't have to learn to use because I actually discovered that I, in my infinite preparedness, had actually brought my manual shutter release cable - even though I didn't have a tripod so no idea how that was going to be useful to me). Knowing nothing about moon photography, I simply asked them to suggest a lens for me - and thank goodness they're the experts, because they threw a cannon of a 400mm lens at me ... and my friend and I discovered that it was only just enough. He had a 200+mm, and it just wasn't quite up to snuff. (Sadly, he's a Canon person while I'm a Nikon, so I couldn't even offer to let him borrow my lens. Boohoo.)

A camera's inferiority to the human eye is never so apparent as when one tries to do photography in the middle of nowhere at night. I tried to take a snapshot of our setup with my iPhone, and lol it couldn't even find anything to focus on until I cheated and opened a car door, letting it focus on the frame and light, and then quickly switching over to our cameras and then taking a shot. 

I hadn't exactly packed my trip anticipating that I would be out on a windy hill from 2 am -  5 am (it was chilly enough that it snowed in the higher hills just a few days later), so it was a lot of dashing to my camera, taking a few photos, then dashing into the car and hibernating for a few minutes, then dashing back out. I was pretty much ready for the event to be over by 3 am, but it didn't even really reach full eclipse until 4 am - sadly, our position on the globe didn't afford us a perfectly centered eclipse, but close enough!

Though it makes sense that the shadow wouldn't creep over the moon in a perfect line, I found myself surprisingly irritated by this when sorting through the images later. I kept wanting to rotate them to line up, but then the craters were out of place. My inner OCD child threw a few fits over this before I managed to move on.