Kowloon, Hong Kong
It seriously took a half hour of wandering around to find this place (billed as the cheapest one Michelin star restaurant in the world) and querying one bank employee (who had no idea what I was talking about), one janitorial staff (who knew what I was talking about but didn't speak Mandarin and kinda hand-waved me in the general direction), and a private apartment tower security staff (who had no idea this existed just around the corner and pointed me to a mall info booth) to finally take the totally unintuitive path through an alarmed fire door (which apparently doesn't go off as long as you only push on the door WITHOUT pushing on the handle). I'm totally ready to taste these one Michelin star cha shao bao buns.
Kowloon, Hong Kong
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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. Hong Kong
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. I was surprised by how even a tiny place like Hood River and the surrounding towns still threw up enough light pollution to make it difficult to capture the night sky. It really drives home just how much our artificial lights can affect our environment. Cook-Underwood, Columbia River Gorge, WA
I think the most surprising thing is that I'm surprised sheep sound exactly how I expect them to. By this point I've been so conditioned by Hollywood to think everything Hollywood gives me is fake that having real sheep sound exactly like fake sheep was a genuine shock. (Also they are chatty and noisy as heck. A flock of gossips, all of them.) Hadrian's Wall, England
Santorini was such a last-minute shoo-in, I ended up grabbing the last flight of the evening back to Athens, just half a day before an early morning flight back to the US via Germany. Not the best of planning, as rather than run through the stress, logistics, and cost of getting to a hotel, sleeping for 4 hours, then getting back to the airport, I ended up just staying overnight at the airport. Luckily, Athens International is fairly used to such things: There were just bodies EVERYWHERE. Other than the obvious suckiness of doing an all-nighter though, I also made a new friend - a Chinese girl who randomly started talking to me in Chinese while I was waiting in baggage claim (I have no idea how she could tell I knew Mandarin) and it turned out she was doing the same thing I was, except traveling in the opposite direction; she was to head to Santorini in the morning. So we watched each other's bags and kept each other company for as long as she could stay awake, and I felt pretty proud of the fact that I not only managed to carry on a 3 hour conversation in Chinese but did so while exhausted. On the flight, the great thing was that I could watch three movies at once and even keep track of our flight progress at the same time. The worst thing was that I could watch three movies at once and even keep track of our flight progress at the same time. I've never had ADD so bad before. (And it was really weird to no longer be worried/thinking about where I'm going to stay tomorrow or how I'm going to get there.) Lol so glad I have Global Entry. Seriously, it was worth jumping through all the hoops to get it. Look at how many people were still stuck upstairs in customs and not retrieving their bags. (Some airport guy had to come and re-distribute all the bags so that they wouldn't logjam.)
And holy cow, I slept 11.5 hours straight the night I got home. But I suppose that's what happens when you get up to watch the dawn, catch an hour's nap after, then do a full day's hard scramble around an island and volcano, then catch a a flight, pull an all nighter at the airport, catch another 2.5 hour flight, wait through the 4 hour layover (cuz you don't dare nap after you nearly missed your second flight by nodding off for 30 mins unexpectedly), and then mostly only cat-nap through the next 12 hour flight and then valiantly try to stay up for another 7 hours in order to adjust to PST in one night. It's weird not to hear church bells chiming anymore. Los Angelex, CA I distinctly remember sitting on my bedroom floor when I was in 3rd or 4th grade cutting pictures out of a magazine. One of them was a waterfall that I would end up living just 20 minutes from in Washington (the famous Oneonta Falls in the Columbia River Gorge), while the other was of the white washed buildings and deep Marine blue roofs of Santorini. For the longest time, that was the only image of Greece to me. Over two decades later, I'm actually here! (This particular panoramic was fun because the plane was coming in on approach, and by that time we were close enough to the coast that the plane's own forward motion created the panoramic shot itself - I just had to hold the camera steady while we flew by. FYI, found out the hard way the panoramic feature in the Samsung's native phone app doesn't use accelerometers to detect which direction the panoramic should build in - it detects edges in the image, so if all you have is wide blue ocean against wide blue sky, it'll never get started.) Sadly, I only have just a little over 24 hours on the island, but I'm making the most of them. Renting a car was a three minute consideration - all reports on the net was that driving on the island could be a hair-raising ordeal. Luckily, between past experiences driving in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Road to Hana on Maui, it was no big deal after all and I'm all too glad I took the plunge. (Renting was a bewildering combination of ease and unease - the Villas manager referred me to a "friend" who owns a car rental agency. The friend points out the car I can take and we go through the motions of filling out a one-page form for it. He notes that the gas tank is almost empty, there's a station I can fill up at a few klicks down the road - with the presumption that it would make it that far - and says I can bring it back just as empty. He gives me his cell phone number and says to just give him a call when I was ready to bring the car back so that he could meet me to take the keys. I suppose, though, that when you're on an island that only takes 1-2 hours to drive across, that there's really not a whole lotta places for you to take the car off to.) Aaaaaaaaa Oia, Santorini! *flails* A picture of the very first blue dome I saw - it literally just popped into view right in front of me - and then all of the town itself. I almost drove right past the town - if it wasn't for the fact that I had unwittingly turned through a dead end parking lot I would've completely missed it. Instead I accidentally grabbed the ideal parking spot and now also parked my butt on the best spot on the island for the sunset. I actually ended up not exploring the town at all except for the short segment that I had to walk from the parking lot to my sightseeing spot. I had read about how you had to claim a space there early in the day, but had totally forgotten about it and simply chanced across it when looking for good photography spots (much like Oia itself). But it was already obvious from the steady stream of people that it would be full quite soon, so rather than give it up, I simply stayed well into the evening, after the last of the photographic opportunities had been exhausted. If you look closely at the below panoramic, you'll find a perfectly round white dot near the right hand side about halfway up the photo - that's the moon rising over Santorini, one night after the lunar eclipse (which wasn't viewable in Europe sadly)! I was pretty lucky - it was definitely getting cold after sundown and I was about to leave but wanted a few last shots of the town lit up. So I got up to walk along the wall I was perched on, happened to glance over my shoulder, and then nearly fell off when I saw what was happening behind me. I didn't have either a telephoto or tripod with me but hopefully some pics I'd taken with my Nikon of the moon will have turned out! Oia, Santorini, Greece
When I left for Greece, I literally only had two things related to it in hand - a one way ticket from Germany to Thessaloniki, a one way ticket from Athens to the US, and about 8 days between them. Oh, and also a short list of places that a Croatian/English friend had flung at me on Facebook, but which was just so much alphabet soup to me for the time being as I had had no time to look up anything, as work literally swamped me up until midnight before I left Germany, even though I had supposedly buffered my Greece trip with 2 extra days between the end of the convention wrap-up and when I was supposed to vacation. So, the hour wait at the airport becomes a mad research of places to stay in Thessaloniki. At Thessaloniki, I guess I look sufficiently lost to the bus ticket seller that he takes pity on me, waves off the people waiting behind me, and writes a detailed list of what routes I need to take to get to the hotel I had just booked that morning. The 1 hour, 2-bus trip to downtown is occupied by a rush research of the sites my friend had suggested and I arrive at the hotel with the determination that I would remain only a night and then move on the next day to Meteora. After I drop off my bags I walk to the train station to buy a ticket, and HELLO TO QUEUING AS A CLOSE-CONTACT SPORT - two people simply walk up to the ticket window ahead of me before I realize that the line drawn on the ground is merely a western artifact of the station's construction and is in no way an indication of where the queue actually starts. As soon as I leave only 2 inches of space between myself and the back of the person currently at the ticket window, people understand I am next, I don't have to make angry faces at anyone, and yay it becomes a win-win situation overall. Then I try to buy a ticket. And I am told I can't. Because the trains are going on strike tomorrow and so there are no tickets being sold. I gape at the lady behind the glass while the people waiting behind me shuffle impatiently, and ask when the last train leaves for the day. "45 minutes." I've seen enough of Thessaloniki on my bus ride into downtown that I think I would vastly prefer to be out in the countryside (especially after literally 2.5 weeks of being stuffed into hotel rooms, conference rooms, with people and meetings and lights). So after 10 minutes of hand-wringing and emergency searching of B&Bs near Meteora, I make a mad dash back to the hotel, pay a cancellation fee, grab up my bags (so glad I hadn't unpacked yet and oh god it still haunts me I accidentally stole the room key when I stuffed it into my back pocket to free up my hands for my bags and forgot to return it) and beat it back to the train station in time to catch the last train. (I don't even have the satisfaction of getting reimbursed for the cancellations by my trip insurance, since my journey has to be interrupted for 24 hours and heck if I want to wait that long on an 8 day vacation.) Of course, as the train starts chugging out of the city, that's when I realize my utter insanity as 1) there is not enough bandwidth in middle-Greece to do more than map the fact that I am currently inside the country and 2) my phone is down to 9% battery and I still need it once I reach Meteora - hours later - in order to call a place to stay. I have no paper maps on me, and I can't even read my train ticket without breaking into a cold sweat over Physics-related PTSD. (At one point, thanks to a well meaning fellow passenger, there was even some question of whether I was sold the right ticket, at which I mentally threw in the towel and thought they were welcome to try and throw me off the train if they thought they could.) I sit in two wrong seats in order to take advantage of their power outlets, and pretend (haha 'pretend' - it was totally true) I'm the poor illiterate foreigner when the people who actually reserved the seats show up. When the train finally fills up completely, I start skulking up and down the train car until I find an empty cabin (the one reserved for handicapped) in which there is an outlet into which I can plug my phone. Then, not to look like I am totally taking advantage of the empty handicapped section, I leave my phone propped into a cranny and nervously pace up and down the car corridor during the whole trip, twitching nervously whenever someone passes by it, afraid that they might spy the unattended phone and take it. At every stop, I hold up my ticket and motion, 'do I get off the train here or do I stay on?', and THEN I bother with, 'do you speak English?' This manages to get me to Paleofarsalos, where I have a half hour stopover before a connecting train arrives. The evening is absolutely BEAUTIFUL with the bugs chirping and the humid spring air. In spite of all the extra anxiety of traveling blind with no method of communication in a country I have literally only done a collective hour's worth of research on, I'm beginning to feel really glad that I jumped the train *wink wink* rather than waiting another two days ... ... and then night falls. The towns we pass through become little more than a few un-lit buildings scattered through open fields. The train gets emptier and emptier. I'm contemplating the possibility that I will run out of people to ask where I am, or that I'm actually on the wrong train going who knows where, and I'm busy reviewing whether I've packed enough clothes to survive Greece's evening temperatures in case I have to spend a night on some random bench or patch of ground when oh hello I actually reach Kalambaka at the foothills of Meteora! \o/ It's 9:30 pm. By this point, I have been literally en route to someplace for 12 hours, of which 6 of them were spent wondering if I would ever make it back to the modern world again. Thessaloniki and Kalambaka | Meteora, Greece The trains were amazing murals of graffiti (I couldn't tell if they were intentional or not but ALL of them were like this). Got some lovely scenery including the sun behind what one guy claims was Mount Olympus.
AND LOOK LOOK I'M EATING A GREEK SALAD IN GREECE. It's kinda weird, like the palm trees in Israel, where I'm experiencing something ostensibly in its native habitat and yet all I can think of is the California yuppie/hippie/Hollywood culture. |
JourneysWork sends me to a LOT of places, most times of which I piggyback some vacation days afterward to check out the local sights. This means I have plenty of opportunities for various (mis)adventures. Archives
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