Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Paris vacation part 1
I’m going to try something a bit different for my Paris photo sets. When I was picking my London photos to post here, I tried my best to choose only one of each subject (two if you count day and night lighting) to minimize repetition. I have too many Paris photos I like to be able to do that, so I saved myself the agony of picking and will be posting all my favorites. For example, that means about half a dozen photos of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe a bit self-indulgent, but overall I’m quite pleased with my Paris photos so I hope you’ll enjoy them.
This is part 1 out of 3. Originally I had planned to upgrade to a Flickr Pro subscription so that I can host all my images on their service. However, when I reached the limit of the free account and I was faced with the screen to pay, I balked at the price. So part 3 images will be hosted on my webhost Bluehost. If the images take too long to load, let me know.
Teaser image for part 1:
London vacation part 2
I’m finishing up my London photos tonight, then I’ll be posting my Paris sets probably this weekend. Paris is a very photogenic city so it’s not surprising that those photos are my favorites.
Teaser photo for this batch: walking across the Millennium Bridge at dusk. I absolutely love this sky, so moody and threatening!
London vacation part 1
If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter feed on my site sidebar, you might have noticed that I said I took over 6,500 photos while at London and Paris. While that figure is no exaggeration, it’s slightly misleading. My amateur photography skills necessitate that I take a high volume of photos, tweaking aperture and F-stop values and shooting the same photo many times to hopefully produce some quality shots. Frankly, at my low level of knowledge, my attempts at adjusting these manual settings on digital SLR amount to little more than guesswork.
With such a quantity of photos, it takes a while to sort through them. I’d estimate about 20% are trashed immediately, and then I go through the repeats of the same shots and pick a favorite. I’ll be posting a series of photos representative of my vacation on this blog, with 2 posts each for London and Paris. As this was my family’s first trip to Europe, we did little else other than sight-seeing and being the most typical American tourists.
I’m becoming strapped for time with school starting again so I’ll let the photos do most of the talking. In brief, London superficially feels quite a bit like a hybrid of two cities: Washington, D.C. with its similar architecture and monuments; and Hong Kong with its hectic pace of life and streets crowded with double decker buses. In terms of tourist attractions, London had a few key destinations but paled in comparison to Paris. We spent 3.5 leisurely days in London and generally saw everything we wanted in the city. Our 5 day stay in Paris was quite rushed and we could have used a couple more days.
It was remarkable to me how London and Washington, D.C were so similar. Particularly around the government building areas, they seemed virtually identical. Other than the English main language, I can understand now why a lot of people don’t really consider England to be “Europe”.
On to the photos! My favorite out of this set below as a teaser: the London Eye, a giant ferris wheel besides the River Thames.
Southwest airline Wi-Fi at 30,000 feet
On my flight home to Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to ride a plane that was equipped with the in-flight Wi-Fi service Southwest is beta-testing. The Wi-Fi is switched on upon reaching cruising altitude at 30,000 feet, and then the fun begins. This was my connecting flight from Phoenix to Los Angeles, so I only had about half an hour to test out the service. Screencaps below with some basic speed tests. Overall I was impressed (click on pictures for larger images).
Harvard Medical School and MIT
After helping my brother move out of his dorm and going apartment hunting, we visited Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I had already seen the usual sights two years ago on my first trip to Boston, but we went again this time largely to show my cousin around and also to occupy the last afternoon in Boston before flying home.
2009 Harvard University graduation
My brother graduated last week from Harvard University undergrad. It was a sentimental moment for many of his peers, who would be saying goodbye to Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, my brother still has 8 more years to go in the Harvard M.D.-Ph.D program so he was comically ho-hum by the whole event.
This post will be passed around to family so there’s plenty of personal photos. I don’t know if it’s that interesting honestly, but if you’ve never been to Harvard University, think of this as a quick tour.
CUT - Beverly Hills, CA
I’m not quite sure how and when I first learned about Wolfgang Puck’s signature steakhouse named CUT, but it seems like I’ve been hearing its name every other week for the past year. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith were photographed having a double date there last year, it was the setting for a lunch meeting in a recent Entourage episode, Adam Carolla on his radio show/podcast talked about his encounter there with a couple The Hills stars in December, on and on, not to mention all the food blog reviews I’ve encountered. CUT is a very hot restaurant, to say the least, and for quite a while, I’ve been looking forward to eating here with its genuine Japanese Wagyu steaks (think: Kobe beef). I made reservations a month in advance!
