Dutch people can understand it!
Also, here are twenty pictures illustrating the most ridiculuous complaints people made while traveling :D
Travel
SA2009!
It's done! The ticket's been booked. Now I still need to see if I can get the vaccinations and the visas in time, but if all goes as planned I'll be in South Africa with Kamil one month from now. Craziness!
My new boss made fun of me today at the meeting.. :O I heard last week that I was going to get a new boss, and I asked him for holidays yesterday. Today we had a meeting and my boss was kind of enough to mention that his first official act in dealing with me was to grant me my holidays, which gave everyone in the meeting a good laugh :D Well, respect to you, Miyazaki-san, and thanks a lot!
So... anybody interested in joining? :D
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Travel
rv no Tabi
I went to Izu today. Enjoyed the scenery in the train for 3 hours going there, 3 hours going back. It was a great day in terms of weather. I'd love to share more, but I'm tired, so maybe later. For now, here's three HDR pics I've managed to put together tonight. It's quite troublesome if the source pictures aren't perfectly aligned, because Photoshop creates weird bubble-like areas that look very ugly. I set my camera to high-speed mode and bracketed between 1 and 2 EV's to each side. It works beautifully, and any imperfections in the end result occured purely because of my suckage at Photoshop. I think I'm getting the hang of it though...
The combined 32 bit RAW file of each of these images is a 180 megabyte .psd file :'(
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Photography
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Travel
Hiking mini-adventure
My first hike of 2009 is a fact, and it's a dark and dangerous beginning indeed. We went to hike up Mt. OoNoYama near Yamakita station, between Hakone and Atsugi. After arriving at the bus station we chose the wrong path and walked around the mountain first. We walked to the place where we were supposed to arrive after climbing the mountain. So we chose that point as our new starting point and started the climb. It wasn't too bad, but the weather turned cloudy while climbing, and we even got some snow (eg. 1 or 2 snowflakes) after arriving at the top.
On our way back to the train station we had to walk about 3 kms along a road, and that's when I first noticed my foot starting to hurt. By the time we arrived at the station it had turned into a serious pain, and today I really don't feel like getting up from my chair at all. I hope it feels better tomorrow...
Here's some pictures, and the route. I didn't calculate precisely, but I guess we walked roughly 15 kms. See Picasa for all the pictures.
Huge-ass panorama:
My attempts at HDR kind of failed, but I will try again later. For now, here's a mountain pic without HDR:
Edit: tried a bit with Photoshop, but I need more practice. Here's one:
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Photography
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Travel
Beijing pictures!
Finally took the time to sub-sub-sub-select from all the pictures I want to save. It's quite ironic. I still suck as a photographer but I have a lot of trouble throwing away bad pictures. Perhaps that's what makes good photographers good. They throw away their crap. I just keep it :D
Anyway, here's the pictures. Enjoy :)
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Photography
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Travel
Unbelievable
Life never quite goes the way you expect it, does it? Sometimes you have a bad luck streak for months, and then suddenly all good things happen all at once. For me, this somehow seemed to coincide with a long period of boredom and a sudden period of totally unexpected news, both good and bad. I remember one of the lines from rv Pausch's Last Lecture: "wait long enough and people may surprise you". That is so true indeed, and I take great pleasure in being surprised again and again by the people around me.
Anecdote: last Friday I flew to Beijing. I asked Northwest to give me a window seat, which I got. Sitting next to me was a Japanese woman, maybe in her 40's, with a face mask, looking a bit anxious and ready to get airsick. Five days later I requested a window seat again, got it again, and next to me was again the same anxious Japanese woman! Amazing. Of all the flights we could take back to Japan, and of all the chairs in the airplane we could have been assigned to, somehow we ended up sitting next to each other twice. I would call it a sign of god, but she was married, so better luck next time, I guess.
The time I spent in Beijing was nice. I wouldn't call it uneventful, but I took it easy and didn't rush around a lot. I took my time and relaxed, but at the same time my wonderful host Amyko-chan was stressed to the max with work, even on Sunday and on her day off. I hope that she can be less busy in the near future. Thanks to her I spent a great three days in BJ, and I managed to throw off all work-related stress of my own that had been piling up for months. It's been a while since I went on holiday.
Life is not so bad for me right now. I've got some good things to look forward to. The Christmas holidays are the first thing on my mind at the moment, but I'm also thinking ahead to the period after Christmas. Winter is coming, and it's time to make some good new year's resolutions and decide a path for myself.
Enjoy life and the world will be your playground.
Beijing, why not?
Went to Beijing this weekend. Met Amyko. Took pictures. Did a bit of sightseeing. Did a bit of shopping. Did a lot of relaxing. Good. There's something strange about China. Something that makes me feel at home. It's so different from Japan. When leaving Japan and arriving in China, I found I disliked Beijing for everything that was different from Japan. After leaving Beijing I found I disliked Japan for everything that was not like Beijing.
Crowded, chaotic, dirty and smoggy! That's Beijing. But it's also huge, wide and with lots of atmosphere, something that Tokyo lacks in a lot of places. You can't find the kind of.. moody streets that Beijing has in Tokyo. Beijing has a history, and you can see it. The brick walls of the city speak a lot more than the cold neon lights of Tokyo.
Without going into detail, I present you a rather poor picture of the back side of the Forbidden City. As usual, I promise to post more pictures later. If I'm not too lazy o_0
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Travel
Slow days
Went cycling this weekend. Two day trip to Izu. It was great in terms of cycling, but I cannot find the inspiration to try and take good pictures. I didn't take many photos. I did swim in the sea though. It was quite an interesting trip. If anything, it's shown me how close the outside world is from where I live. In one day I can reach a beautiful place. In two days I can be somewhere I've never been before.
Playing around with Photoshop. Color makes a big difference. I've been thinking about buying a new camera. And a new lens. I want to switch my 17-85mm for the new 18-200mm that Canon's announced. Since I'm cycling a lot an all-range lens like that would be great. We'll see though. I can feel another interesting period coming up. The next few months my life will be crazy again.
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Cycling
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Photography
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Thoughts
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Travel
Aokigahara travel report
I thought I'd better write it all down before I forget. Here it is:
I added a lot of pictures too. Overall I'm quite happy with the photography results. It felt good to pick up my camera again. Even if I didn't take all my equipment I'm still happy with some of the photo's I took, and even the lens I am the least happy with does it's job well when it needs to. Sometimes. Well, there ya go. I'm tired, good night.
...or is it?
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Photography
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Travel