From Blogging to Vlogging
June 21, 2018 § Leave a comment
Oh my! It’s been half a year since I’ve updated here — partially because I haven’t done that much traveling in the past six months, but also because two of the trips I did take were captured in video format. Even writing my thoughts in these few sentences feels foreign already.
During Memorial Day weekend, I spent a week in China with my relatives that I haven’t seen since 2010:
Editing a video is definitely more work than editing photos and writing a blog post, but I feel like it’s much better at encapsulating what a place and time really felt like in the moment. A photo has to be near-perfect to warrant a spot in a blog post, but even a random video clip can be perfectly imperfect within a longer video.
Plus, people have been trained to either pose or seize up when being photographed — it’s easier to catch them being candid on video.
The downside is that vlogging entails me having to talk to the camera, and I hate listening to myself talk. I don’t think I’ll ever get better at it!
I don’t feel like paying for Adobe Premiere, so I just used iMovie, which makes editing fairly simple except for its garbage caption/title options. It takes me twice as long to make those separately in Photoshop and then import to iMovie, but it must be done so long as I fail at narrating most of my clips, hehe.
The Genie’s Bottle Life in Roxbury
December 13, 2017 § Leave a comment
After our shopping expedition in Woodstock, we drove farther northwest to the town of Roxbury, where J had found what is probably the most interesting hotel in the country.
The Roxbury is a boutique hotel in the Catskills with 20+ rooms, each inspired by a movie or TV reference from the ’60s and ’70s. The rooms are decorated with a level of detail bordering on insane. We looked at some TripAdvisor photos the night before and really weren’t sure what to expect — the kitschiness could either be really cool or really gross.
The property doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the lime green doors and decorations on the porch hint at the spectacle inside. We got a taste of it from checking out the reception bathroom:
Where do you even get a sink like that??
Our room wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we wandered around the patio and made our way over to the spa lounge. Every inch was a celebration of sparkle or color or both.
Hold the Tuna
April 7, 2017 § Leave a comment
Almost every time I go to Las Vegas, the first dinner is always at Kabuto Edomae Sushi. There’s already plenty of literature on why it’s a fantastic restaurant, so I won’t elaborate, but we’ve always enjoyed our meals here, and the price is really good for the quality, especially compared to similar places in NYC.
This time, though, I was accompanied by the burden of guilt. I had just read this fascinating and compelling article about endangered bluefin tuna, and I knew it was definitely going to show up more than once in the omakase. But I wanted to do my small part as a consumer and stop eating bluefin. So I had to steel my resolve before going so as not to chicken out. Think of the poor tuna!
It was mostly that I didn’t want to create a fuss at one of our favorite sushi restaurants. I don’t actually like tuna that much. Yes, fatty pieces of chutoro and otoro are objectively delicious, but I actually prefer leaner cuts of meat in general, and that includes tuna. I want to taste the flesh, not just fat. (I realize I’m definitely in the minority on this.) And when it comes to any kind of tuna, it’s just not as high on my list of loves as other things like giant clam, squid or amberjack.
Not tuna, still delicious
Day at the Cemetery & NOMA
April 28, 2016 § 1 Comment
After our morning of eating and shopping in the Garden District, we figured we should go see one of New Orleans’ famed cemeteries. Metairie seemed like the best bet because it was right at the end of the Canal streetcar line. I later realized it’s still quite a haul from the streetcar stop to Metairie — and you have to cross a busy intersection/highway ramp — so it’s a good thing we took an Uber instead, though our driver got lost for 20 minutes even with the GPS so I guess the cemetery isn’t as common of a destination as I assumed.
On this map, 1 is the entrance to the cemetery, admittedly a little hard to get to from the south if you’re not paying attention. 2 is the All Saints Mausoleum where we went to take a quick bathroom break. It was very solemn and quiet inside, with lots of fake flowers everywhere.
I had never encountered a mausoleum up close before, and we were pretty confused about whether the names on the tiles meant the bodies were laid to rest inside the walls of the building? (Apparently yes.) There were even some on the outside of the building. Does that mean once the building is full, it accepts no more corpses? Or is it more of an apartment-rental type of situation?
Number 3 on the map above is where the more well-known mausoleums were. The cemetery is VERY large, and walking from one end to the other was hard work under the hot sun! I’d recommend just driving around if you can. We also saw a small bus of people — clearly a tour of some kind — come, take some pictures and leave.
auradis 