April 24, 2010

After much anticipation, here are my Bahama pictures! Before throwing them up though, I'd like to say that the Bahamas isn't all that people make it out to be. In fact, Jean and I found ourselves to be fairly bored. The best part of our trip was visiting the manta ray farm and petting manta rays... Aside from that, it was a lot of beaching, hanging out by the pool and eating bad food. Beaching is fine and lounging by the pool is great, but I can only do it for so long. However, bad food is unacceptable. Apparently all food in the Bahamas is imported, so they regularly run out of ingredients. This made for very painful dinner services when I had to order two, sometimes three different dishes before they could reassure me they had all the ingredients necessary to complete my order. Sigh... I wouldn't go back, but at least I have some cool pictures to show for this! So without further ado, my Bahama pictures (although, we had to get an underwater, film camera for the manta ray farm... And those haven't been developed yet, so those will come on when I get them printed)!


Jean giving me the evil eye as we head towards downtown for the first night! It was fairly exciting flying in and seeing all the open beaches and clean water... I was so eager to see what they had to offer in the city! That was, until we realized most of the shops close by 5 and downtown is dead by then too.


Here is a family of strays at Fish Fry... There are quite a few strays on the island, but looking at them, they look better off than most. The irony was that there's a animal shelter several blocks away and I can't believe they don't see these fellas from the break room.


This is one of the very few restaurants open for 23 hours... In the world. I mean, who thinks to open for 23 hours, but not 24 hours? And at what hour do they decide NOT to operate? Anyway, I never had a chance to eat here, but I imagine if I lived closer this may have been my hangout. Instead, Jean and I found ourselves eating at this Chinese restaurant near the Sheraton. Chinese people, you know you can depend on them to stay open late!


Conch! The first time I saw this, I thought conch was a style of cooking (fried). Then much later, I realized conch came in many different forms, including grilled and boiled, in addition to fritter (fried). That's when I realized that conch was a type of meat... Which turns out to be a giant snail. It's pretty good, but conch fritters are heart attacks waiting to happen, so I'm kind of glad I didn't have more time to get carried away eating this all day.


We dropped by the post office to pick up some stamps... And by 3 pm they were already closed (on a Monday)! I don't understand how anyone does business here...


We wanted to load up on some water bottles, so we dropped by the local super market to pick some up. In doing so, Jean came across this local, spice drink that was re-manufactured from a beer bottle (Kalik, another Bohemian invention... Which I'd like to add was pretty good). We weren't sure if it was a drink or something for cooking, so we opted not to get it... But here it is, in all of its re-manufactured glory!


I love subway sandwiches (not the brand, but the type)! This was one of the few "good" meals we had. This shop also happened to be next door to the Chinese restaurant, which Jean and I fondly called "Chinese restaurant" (w/o the article 'the'). As in, "Lets go to Chinese Restaurant!". Wow, that was fobby.


Chinese Restaurant. This, my friend, was $30 USD... It's like Chinatown food, except 100% more expensive (and not as good)!


People in the Bahamas seem to really like their canons. In fact, I saw a number of canons placed right in front of homes, and here's one now!


Our view from the Sheraton. The cool part was that we could rent water sport equipment, including kayaks and a giant water bike. Jean and I ended up playing w/ the kayak and paddling around beach area.


No suicide diving.


Yea, there were so few restaurants open on Good Friday, we even ate at Burger King. The good news, I've been re-introduced to the milk shake. :)


One of the government buildings in downtown.


It's interesting to see how Chinese people assimilate into other cultures. Here's a failed attempt by Chinese people to combine Ebonics with English.


On our last (failed) attempt to visit a national park in the Bahamas (Friday we failed, cause it was Good Friday and nothing was open. Also, Sunday everything was close because it was Easter... So our only chance to see a national landmark was Saturday), we made our way to VIP Chinese Restaurant. We ended up not making it to the landmark though because it got super hot and after lunch, I got sleepy. :(


A picture of Jean getting her hair braided.


I gave up... It was late one night and I did what everyone else did when they were hungry, I ordered Domino's. And as usual, they ran out of something. In this case, they ran out of ham to make my Hawaiian pizza and replaced the ham with some kind of ground pork in bbq sauce... Wow, it's bad when Domino's runs out of ham. That's like Burger King running out of beef patties.


One of the few contraptions I brought home with me -- a plane built out of coke cans! I've seen these before, but never knew where people got them. I'm glad I found it though, that way I can build my own Coke plane using Diet Coke cans. :)


Delta has these really delicious cookies as part of their in-flight service and Jean wanted to take a picture of them as part of her "lunch meal".

March 29, 2010

This is clearly cheating on my part, but I haven't updated forever and I just got back from Bahamas. However, I still had a backlog of pictures from the previous few months so instead of uploading all the pictures as just one post, I thought I'd break it up. One post (this one), highlights my adventures during Feb/March (timestamped the day before I left for vacation) and the next post will highlight the Bahamas. :)


I decided to start tracking Boris' and Heffer's weight. As you can see, Heffer is currently 2 lb and 3 oz. My goal is to get him to 4 lb by the end of the year...


Here's a picture of Boris. The irony here is that when I got him, he was twice the size of Heffer! Now, he's only 2 lb and 1 oz... Clearly, smaller than Heffer. Although, far more intelligent and with just as big of a heart!


I was in Japantown the other day and since the last time I was there, they've added koi to this fountain. It's kind of interesting, but at the same time kind of sad. Esp since it looks like they dumped koi into a small, backyard pool. =\


I discovered this store that sold giant egg tarts in Chinatown! I didn't expect it would taste as good, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was even better than the regular sized egg tarts I normally get!


Jean and I volunteered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival again this year. We signed up for a greeter role at the Kabuki and this is a photo of this year's film festival t-shirt that was on display. I always enjoy volunteering here -- the people I meet are great and it makes me feel productive.


Toyota was a major sponsor of the festival this year and here's their plug to get you to buy a Yaris. I wonder if this model also had acceleration problems??


I'm no pug lover, but this guy was unusually large for a pug so I spent time talking to the owner and she suspects he's a pug/English bulldog mix. Makes me appreciate him just a little more.


There was a grand opening celebration at Tuttimelon and Jean and I got free samples. If we had gotten in with the first group, we would have had free reign to fill our own cups -- but after the early raid, the employees began to fill cups up for us. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

January 28, 2010

I saw a few photos on my screen saver this morning of pictures I hadn't bothered editing earlier, but in full view, seemed worth my time to photoshop. That said, you can find the edited versions below!


I think a (small) fire broke out at this anime studio near me and a ton of fireman came to take care of it. In the background you can see Caesar's Italian Restaurant. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but they have this classic looking bar and the restaurant is 1950's themed.


More pictures of the "fire" area mentioned above.


This was taken on our way to Vegas. I believe I took it with my one-hand shooting skills, but it could very well also be Jean shooting out my window. In that case, I would give Jean credit for the shot and me credit for photoshopping it. :)

January 9, 2010

Happy Belated New Year! I've been out of town these past 3 weeks and haven't had the time/energy to update. But I thought I'd make some time this evening to organize a few pictures and throw them up on the site. Overall, I had a great break! I spent time in LA, Vegas and New York and really just tried to catch up on some R&R. I hope all of you had a safe and happy holiday! And enjoy the pics!


Jean's picture on our way to Vegas. We decided to go 2.0, except this time we made it a road trip with a few friends from LA. I was fairly impressed with Jean's photography skills here. Almost enough to want to take credit for the picture myself. =P


Dan took this picture of Jean at a rest stop. Jean, in all her smiles!


I can't help but make a trip to Manna's each time I'm in LA. I love Korean BBQ, and at $16.99 for all you can eat, what is there not to like?


Dan and Norbert enjoying some bulgogi!


Before leaving for my break, I gave Boris a haircut. I think the mane look suits him well.

December 7, 2009

I finally had a chance to watch Scanner Darkly this weekend. The director, Richard Linklater, also filmed Waking Life, another movie that I really enjoyed and drove me to checkout his newer work. I have to say, I'm really drawn to the interpolated rotoscoping that Linklater uses to give his films their animated feel and this time, he managed to land some heavy weight actors including Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey, Jr. As for the movie itself, it's like 1984 meets American Psycho with an emphasis on the whole "Big Brother" and loss of identity themes. Come to think of it, if I were ever to teach a class on postmodernism, I'd use this movie as the bedrock example of that movement. I thought the film was great and am somewhat shocked it didn't do better in its initial release. It's very avant-guard, even given that it's an independent movie, and very thoughtful in its illustration of a dystopian future and if you have any interest in these topics (or in the trailer below), I highly recommend you watch it!


A Scanner Darkly trailer.