Colombia, the BEAUTIFUL!

I mentioned in my previous post that I was going to Colombia - I left August 29th, and came back September 7th. It was a quick 9 days and I'm broke now, but the experience was worth it! Below are some of my favorite shots - all pictures were taken with my newest obsession, the Nikon D40. I was a purist before, reserving film for special occasions, but this has made me into a digital camera believer!

I started my trip in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia. It is incredibly high up in altitude - I was a bit dizzy at first, but you get used to it. The above picture was taken from the top of Cerro de Monserrate, which is a church built on top of the peak (3160 m).

Another view of Cerro de Monserrate.
The city of Cartagena - I would have to say it was one of the most aesthetically pleasing cities I've been to. This is part of the wall that enclosed the city - it was built to keep away enemies from shore. It is now a haven for domestic and international tourists - it is packed with horse drawn carriages offering tours of its winding streets, as well as an abundance of restaurants, shops, and money changers. The city stole my money, as well as my heart!

Cartagena, again - love the colonial architecture! I think I took over 100 pictures of just the buildings!

This is one of a couple of forts that protected the city of Cartagena.

Volcan de Lodo El Totumo - located 50km northeast of Cartagena. It is a small 15m dirt mound, but actually it's a volcano that spews mud! The selling point is that they allow you to swim around in the "lava." It's a little bit like swimming around in gravy. It was really warm and gooey. It's also impossible to sink! It was the most indescribable feeling.

There were enterprising locals everywhere - there was a person to scrub you down, a person to take pictures of you, a person to take the dirt off of you in the nearby river - craziness!

Playa Blanca - accessible only by boat. This was my first experience swimming in the Caribbean Sea. It was like bathwater! Nothing at all like the Atlantic Ocean. I could have stayed there all day. I also went snorkeling, and once I got the hang of breathing out of my mouth, I was able to see wildlife that I was only able to see in an aquarium or a fish store.

A typical meal in Colombia, also called Comida Corriente. It is usually a protein, like fish or chicken, with rice, beans, and a salad. If you're lucky, you may even get some soup. All for the low price of $2.50! For an extra $1, you can get the typical drink of choice, a Coke. I never drink Coke in the States, but I drank it all of the time while I was there - it was the best way to beat the heat and get back some much needed energy!

City #3 on the agenda was Santa Marta, and the Parque Nacional Tayrona. The first introduction to the rain forests. It was quite a hike to get there, and the heat for the past couple of days admittedly took a toll.

Lizard(s)! They were everywhere - once you saw one, you saw a hundred!

Another flight took us back to Bogota, near the historic downtown. The sky was unreal.

A busy Sunday morning - 6 short hours later, I was at the airport (sob!), planning my next trip abroad in my head! I have to say that there were a lot of naysayers who told me not to go to Colombia because it was too dangerous, I would get mugged, etc. Even though I didn't speak Spanish as well as I should have, I still managed to get around. The people were incredibly warm, friendly, and polite - they were great ambassadors for the country. The only time I felt that not all was well was going out of the airport - I had never been questioned, prodded or gone through so many checkpoints in all of my life! Too bad for me, I now have the travel bug. Got to start saving up for the next big adventure!

Update

Happy belated fourth~! Such crazy, unorganized-ness. Most everything I love has been abandoned for immediate needs:

1) Finding another job. Ick - what an energy suck. I've been on 7 interviews during the past year, 4 of which had gotten me past the first round. These 4 were especially hard to take, as it was between me and another candidate, and always the other candidate won out. The jobs range from my specialties (grant and contract management in a non-profit) to far stretches (bi-lingual IT customer service specialist in the Japanese auto industry) but nothing pans out. My most recent rejection was especially annoying, since they wanted to talk with my current supervisor - if my boss was amenable to such things, I wouldn't be looking for another job! I told them I was open to letting them speak to my current supervisor once an offer was made. Wrong answer, apparently. An interesting discussion of this topic could be found here. So the job search continues...

2) The second thing that is somewhat related: test prep! Social work burnout has lead me to reassess and develop new career goals. In order to reach my new goals however, I need to re-enter grad school, hence the GMAT. GMAT studying is no fun.

How to cope? A number of things, but the most effective one (but probably not the most constructive) is just running away from my problems, albeit temporarily. A trip to Colombia in August is in the works. For July 4th, we took the LIRR to Glen Cove, where a group of us claimed a blanketed patch of grass for the day, at a small park (see pic on top left). Apparently, the property was originally owned by J.P. Morgan, who then donated the land to the public when he died. It has been an especially rainy summer this year, and the 4th was one of the first days it was nice out. Actually, it was painfully, gorgeously sunny - the skies were an unbelievable color. It made me so happy!

Some unrelated items: just read a great book, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. It's 700+ pages, but I read it in three days - so good! Although it was a fictional account of Marilyn Monroe's life, it was still very gripping. Feeling inspired by the book, I also watched the Seven Year Itch, which was surprisingly hilarious... and speaking of movies, there's a movie out in select art theaters now that was very good - Departures. This movie is funny too, but is mostly really, really sad. I know someone whose only experience in Japanese cinema was watching The Taste of Tea - if you are expecting the same experience, I advise you to beware that diversity in cinema does exist, so please go in with an open mind : )

The Yarn Tree

I never liked going to yarn stores in NYC much - they tend to be overcrowded, and the regulars who dominate the knitting tables are a little intimidating. Perhaps that's why I've been drawn to stores not centrally located, and therefore harder to access; my yarn store of choice this past year has been Brooklyn General, but I didn't get to go as often as I would have liked, given my job in the Bronx - by the time I get there, it's usually closed, and then I have to transfer three trains to go home empty handed (sniff)! This weekend I went to the Yarn Tree for the first time with a couple of friends and I think I've found my match! Although the yarn selection isn't as big, the hours are geared towards the working folk - 4 to 9 pm on most days - how lovely! The woman at the store was very friendly, and the one person knitting in the back of the room did not have a crazed look in her eyes. Plus, there was a dog in the store, sleeping on a little ledge in front of the store. All good signs. The store is located in a remote part of Williamsburg, and tricky to get to - the J, M, or Z will get you there the quickest, although I think it's possible to take the L as well if you want to walk. The upside of walking is looking at all of the random graffiti on the walls of buildings. It's more like art than graffiti though, I think...... so after being taken in by the neighborhood and the shelves full of woolly goodness, I ended up buying 665 yards of fingering weight alpaca. I was very excited to make a sweater out of this, but now I am starting to think that this is still not enough. Now I have to go back before they run out of that dye lot, and I know I'll end up falling in love with something else and end up buying more yarn. Ugh! The vicious cycle of buying and stashing begins...

Skiing in Maine

While I love winter for its sweaters, I love winter for another reason: skiing! Unfortunately, I don't get to go as often as I want to - skiing is a very expensive hobby to have (I guess my other hobbies of knitting and eating is too, depending on how often and how much you indulge)! This year, my first ski trip was a belated x-mas gift from a friend to Butternut, which is a little-known mountain in Massachusetts. The trails aren't steep at all, but they are very long and leisurely. A good mountain to start the season with! My next mountain had to be more challenging - turns out that my boyfriend's relatives in Maine all work on a ski resort and had mounds of ski passes to give away - all we had to do was find a way to get there and we could ski as many times as we wanted. Yes! The trip to the ski resort was a bit long -the infamous Fung Wah Bus to Boston took 4 hours (no crack smokers in the bathroom, nor an accidental viewing of the driver's porn collection on the bus' movie screen occurred this time), then a bus to Portland was another 2, then about another 3-4 hours to Rangeley, where Saddleback Mountain is. While it sounds horrible, it was totally worth it. While New York doesn't have a lick of snow left, Rangeley looked like a winter wonderland - when you get to the top of the mountain, you can see even see Canada. The winds from the north were pretty brutal - I thought my face was going to fall off, even with a ridiculous face mask on. Luckily, we were invited back to visit in March, when the weather is more temperate. Hurray!

Having Fun with my Diana F+ and Epson Scanner...

... the only thing I haven't gotten a hang of is keeping the pesky dust particles off of my negatives as they are being scanned. Also, while my Epson Perfection 4490 has adapters for both 35 mm negatives and medium format film, I haven't figured out a good way to scan the entire 35 mm negative, sprockets included. Any advice on that would be much appreciated, as the inclusion of the sprockets are what makes the pictures interesting in a lot of the shots... Below are some test shots with the Diana while I was visiting my parents in Ohio during New Years. It took me awhile to figure out that people shots with my Diana didn't turn out well at all (it's hard to tell how well you're doing, because you obviously don't see the results until you develop the film!), but I think that my future usage will be restricted to landscape shots for the most part.

The double exposure feature on the camera was fun to play with.

See the dust particles above? Annoying! I don't know how to get rid of it...

Taken with a fish eye lens.

DTW Airport

Who knew that airports can be pretty? This is the walkway connecting one concourse to the other at the airport in Detroit. This picture was my consolation prize after missing my flight out of NYC on thanksgiving - an airline that shall remain nameless (starts with a D and rhymes with bksdfjzelta) has a faulty speaker system, where the announcements are made centrally (not from the person who is processing your ticket) and is barely audible. That technological problem, coupled with my tendency to be oblivious to everything resulted in my first missed flight. What was even worse was that I was sitting right in front of the gate - I wasn't late or anything - how embarrassing! My flight back was not much better - we were delayed for four hours, then had some turbulence on our landing, causing the person two rows behind me to vomit in the aisle... they didn't have an air sickness bag apparently, and the smell caused a chain reaction among other passengers on board. I thought that it only happened in the movies. It's amazing how the passage of time makes these situations quite comical - at the time, I don't think anyone found it very funny!

From the Eye of a Fish

Although I am not a trained photographer, I am definitely a wannabe photographer. I always have a camera in my bag, and much to the dismay of those around me, I take pictures of anything and everything. For the longest time, I was one of few without a digital camera; I held out until a couple of years ago, when I gave into convention as the prices got lower and the quality of pictures got much better. Upon the discovery of the above camera however, I've reverted back to my obsession with film, and have spent the better part of Saturday dragging my boyfriend around NYC in the bitter cold, taking the pictures that you see below.

As you can probably tell, the lens is curved so that everything in the picture looks like it is contained in a bubble, or a fish bowl. My first roll was a bit of an experiment, as I wasn't sure what I was going to get, and you obviously don't see your results until you finish your roll! An interesting feature was that the camera lets you take multiple shots on the same exposure (top left), which is very neat. I used ISO 100 film on these pictures, which turned out to be problematic when it got dark in the late afternoon. Buying ISO 400+ film should solve that. Another issue for the long term is that the negatives cannot be uploaded online or on one's computer very easily. The photo CDs that I have gotten in the past have been disappointing to say the least. Another option is looking into getting scanners that handle negatives - Canon and Epson are the two best known, but they are a bit pricey...

Pics from Sheep and Wool

Here are some of my pictures taken at the Duchess County Sheep and Wool Festival. It's about a two hour drive from NYC, and it's as crazy as everyone said it was going to be - lots of knitters wearing their hand knit creations, accompanied by similarly outfitted spouses/partners/pets - it was very nerdy, but very fun to be around people who were so passionate! It was also very cold - I always forget that the city with all of its concrete and lack of trees makes the temperature 20 degrees hotter than it actually is elsewhere - thank goodness we were surrounded by skeins of yarn that we can conveniently drape over our necks! I promised myself to be good and not go too crazy with the yarn purchasing, as I am starting to have an unmanageable stash - I did get a good deal on two skeins of alpaca tweed that I couldn't resist - each skein was 600 yards, and winding that one into a ball was certainly a workout! I also got some salmon pink yarn that I think is going to be a Sideways Spencer, and I had to make one luxury purchase - a variegated superwash yarn from Brooks Farm (see center pic), which I think I am going to incorporate into a fair isle pattern - another idea I had was to do a yoke pattern, and use the variegated yarn for just the yoke part, as I only have 300 yards. Ahhh... so many decisions!

Beautiful Leaves in Maine

Columbus Day afforded us some time away from the city; we took the infamous Fung Wah to Boston, where we were picked up and whisked away to the Vacation State by my boyfriend's parents, who very generously picked us up at 11 pm, then drove us back, arriving at 2:30 in the morning. As we crossed state lines, we noticed right away that the Republican party was campaigning very hard; it turns out that the state is among the very few that splits electoral votes. Although the party has conceded southern Maine to the Democrats, they have put their efforts toward the north, and are rallying at every town that will welcome them. This is quite a change from Brooklyn and the Bronx, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. We were pretty much in the middle to southern part of Maine, so no one bothered us for the most part, giving us more time to appreciate the beautiful fall scenery. Although some areas had lost their leaves, most of the leaf-turning was at its peak. Weather-wise, it was perfect autumn weather: sunny, but cool - the word "crisp" comes to mind. Needless to say, much of my mornings were spent on the deck that was built on the side of my boyfriend's parents' house, being a complete picture taking fool! They also have a fire pit on the deck, and it seemed like everyone from town came by to roast marshmallows with us when we started a bonfire one evening - I guess that happens when one's parents are both elementary school teachers in a small town~ And here's a random fact: I was told that red leaves are an indication that there is a lot of sugar in that tree. If those trees are maples, it means that those trees are prime candidates for quality maple syrup! Good to know.

Knitting/Pranking Fun at Shea Stadium

Although I love playing sports, I'm not much of a sports spectator. So when my boyfriend's two uncles came to NYC this weekend to see the Mets (in Queens) and the Yankees (in the Bronx), I was dreading the obligatory outing, making sure to bring plenty of knitting to keep me sane during the long inning stretches. One must note that this season is somewhat significant, as it will be the last time the two teams will be playing in their old stadiums, because each team has simultaneously built new stadiums that will be unveiled in the upcoming season. (If you see the pic on left, the old and new Mets stadiums are built right next to each other... ugh... Personally, I think it's a waste of space, resources, and money to build new stadiums when the old ones were perfectly adequate, but for one reason or another, people are very excited about it, so I won't say much more!)

Just as my luck would have it, our game on Saturday ended up being a doubleheader, because the game from the night before was rained out. There were some good outcomes: I finished a belt for my recently completed Starsky because I couldn't make up my mind about closures. I casted on 12 stitches, and on the right side, K1, P2, K2, P2, K2, P2, K1 and did the reverse for the wrong side. Although I didn't measure, I think it ended up being a little over 48 inches. So an immediate decision about closures can be postponed for a little bit longer...


I also got another gift at Shea Stadium in the form of amusement when in the middle of the second game, a drunken and passed out spectator became the object of ridicule for many. The incident amazingly enough was chronicled on YouTube - in essence, the guy was so out of it that he was oblivious to people stacking beer cups on his head. Yes, it's very juvenile and reminiscent of the antics of college frat boys, but after enduring nearly 5 hours of baseball watching, listening to baseball talk, and staunchly defending how appropriate knitting is to the occasion, I was very happy for the distraction! While we weren't sitting directly on the field, we got a pretty good bird's eye view of the whole incident. The first pic is when we first started noticing that people were cheering for something other than the players on the field, and that there was a strange clump of people in one particular spot. The second picture is a close-up of what was happening when we figured out what was going on - clearly, you can see the stack of beer cups, as well as the poor victim's well-shaved head. Is this entertainment-worthy enough to blog about? Probably not. I have learned however, that everything is relative. In this case, the incident was a welcome alternative to watching the game. Sorry baseball lovers!

Poconos for Labor Day

Being a country girl and traveler at heart, I was itching to get away from NYC during the labor day weekend. My attempts to find good deals on airfare didn't go as planned - I had underestimated the reports of increased prices on tickets. Therefore, my optimism and resistance to spending gobs of money hindered my ambitions. When I was about to throw in the towel, my boyfriend very practically suggested the Poconos as an alternative. Although I was quick to scoff, (the Poconos is a well-known winter ski destination) I finally caved in after realizing that we would have to bus it to any place we would end up going. Despite my initial snobbishness (I wanted to get out of the country, after all), the trip turned out quite well. We stayed at the Mountaintop Lodge, a quaint little bed and breakfast, adjacent to the Lake Naomi Club (which is every bit as chi-chi as the name suggests). The views from the lake were nice:

The bed and breakfast had access to club amenities, so we rented kayaks for a couple of hours and paddled around (excuse my obese, flat-footed feet, only useful for competitive gymnastics, although I am happy to say I hardly ever fell off the beam):
We also toured around the town a bit in our rental car, which we got after being convinced by the innkeeper that this was NOT New York, and we cannot just walk around where we please, and no, there is no public transportation (how easily we forget)! We also attended the area's annual garlic festival, and saw The Niagara of Pennsylvania in the town of Bushkill:I was so impressed with this tree! It seems near impossible to get nutrients from where it is living, but it seems to be doing just fine...
So all in all, it was a good trip. We got some good garlic vinegar at the festival, indulged in frivolous spending via antique shops and outlet malls, and got to inhale good clean mountain air. For a ski fanatic such as myself, it will definitely be worth another trip to explore the slopes. As a summer getaway, it's a laid-back place to hang out, go hiking, and eat a lot of food.

Park Down Under the Brooklyn Bridge

One of the wonderful things about living in NYC is that you never run out of things to see. On Thursday I went to a small park near the Brooklyn bridge where they were screening Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. I think the concept of the activity is much cooler than the reality of sitting around and waiting for hours on the cold hard ground, surrounded by swarms of people! The highlight of the event was the amazing view - the viewing area consisted of a stretch of land sandwiched between two big bridges (Brooklyn and Manhattan bridge I think), in perfect view of downtown Manhattan - so pretty!

Note that the night view showcases the waterfall installation that the tourism bureau is hyping up. There is divided opinion on whether they are paragons of beauty, or plain eyesores...