Room & Chair, #1

For today's post, the first of an occasional series of Room & Chair.

Where: the office of the Homestead Cafe in Inyokern, California.

When: 27 December 2009.

Why: hope, abandoned. When I peered through the broken window of the small building next to the cafe I spotted a single chair in a dilapidated room. The office chair, presumably from when the business was an ongoing concern, now vacant - along with the owners and the clientele.

Convergence

Parallel tracks, coming from everywhere and going, nowhere? Along a railroad siding on the way to San Juan Bautista, stitched panorama from eight individual photographs taken from between the tracks.

(Click for much larger version)

Panoramic photography has always fascinated me - the distorted perspectives that arise are often unpredictable, the final product either surprising or disappointing depending on expectations. Or in the case of this photograph, the final product was both - I was at first horrified at what had emerged from the stitching, but the starkness brought out by the near infra-red black and white conversion brought out what I was originally trying to convey from the scene.

Looking backwards, looking forwards

I look where I've been through the pictures I've taken, each image locked in an intricate dance of 1's and 0's on my computer - the vast majority never seeing the light of day. Today I begin to catch up on a years worth of moments in time from journeys through California, my home state, which all seems so ordinary because it is home.

Now for the tough part - deciding what to post; digging through thousands of pictures, looking for what I did and where I've gone the past year.

2009: The Year of the Bicycle

In May of 2009 I finally bought a bicycle, for entertainment, exercise, and basic neighborhood transportation. As a side benefit, it did help protect my sanity as an escape pod at the end of the workday, to relieve stress. It has replaced my car for basic errands around town, and I've noticed that I eat lighter if I have to pedal all of my groceries home in my backpack.

Fortunately, San Jose is a very bike friendly city and I live close to Campbell Park with an entrance to the Los Gatos Creek Trail. If you look closely at my bicycle in the panorama pictures, you'll see a tiny Pelican case bolted to the seat tube where I carry a Canon 2100is camera on my rides. The Panoramas were stitched together in Photoshop CS4, and they usually cover 180° field of view.

From home, the first bridge I cross on my way to the trail is over San Tomas Expressway on this pedestrian bridge.

Along the creek are a few bridges, with a bike path on each side of the creek.



As the trail passes through Los Gatos, it turns to an elevated boardwalk.




In Los Gatos, the creek trail crosses over highway 17 on a bridge with brightly painted murals along the walls.



At the end of the creek is Lexington Reservoir, just a couple of miles down from where my brother David lives.



Now that I've broken the ice off of the blog in 2010, it's time to dredge up the interesting pictures I've got squirreled away in the deep, dark recesses of my hard disk.

More soon, I promise!

Jerry.

Home again...

So I've been home for six months now and people keep asking me when I'm going to update my blog... so here it is.

The trip home from Korea was uneventful, if not a bit disappointing: I returned home on Saturday September 6th, slept most of the day Sunday, went into work on Monday, applied for unemployment on Tuesday, started my resume on Wednesday... well, you get the idea. Actually I didn't seriously look for work for about a month, I took the time to reflect on life and get a bunch of overdue chores done, recuperate from two years of frantic prototype development, and basically re-tune myself into living in America again.

When I was in Korea I kept thinking about what I would miss when I return home, and it would have to the friends I made during my stay in Korea, the friends that helped me hang onto the slippery bit of sanity I have left: Jason, Roger, JR, Gina, Will, and the others I don't recall off the top of my head. Curiously enough, it's the huge circle of friends I have here at home that I missed the most while I was in Korea, and frequent Skype phone calls helped me maintain the ties to my friends. There were a couple of times in Korea that my phone, er, my computer would ring in the evening and it was a friend calling from San Jose, unable to sleep at 3:00am and just wanting to talk.

I haven't updated my blog since I returned home because I didn't feel that I had anything significant to blog about. Because everything seems so ordinary here at home I keep thinking there's nothing worth posting on my blog, even though the state of California is three times the size of the Republic of Korea! Looking back through my pictures, there were a few journeys I've had after my return so I've got six months of catching up to do.


While in Korea I signed up for a retreat at the St. Francis retreat center in San Juan Bautista. My original return date was about a week prior to the retreat and I mailed my registration form from Korea - I can only image what the retreat coordinator thought when he got a retreatant registering from 6,500 miles away. The retreat was a relaxing time to reconnect with friends.

Of course, my transportation of choice for the weekend was my motorcycle. Somehow I always find another vehicle to camouflage the bike in parking lots - the picture does look like it needs a caption, though.




One Saturday morning in October I commented to my roommate that it's been months since I've had a road trip on the motorcycle - he had only one word for me: GO! I quickly packed up the bags, reserved a bed at the Yosemite Bug hostel and headed out for a quick weekend in Yosemite. There's something about being on the road on motorcycle that's indescribably wonderful, and really can't be explained - you have to experience it for yourself.


Saturday afternoon I wandered around the town of Maraposa playing tourist and taking pictures. The atmosphere of Maraposa is somewhere between folksy, kitschy, and historical - it feels like a town that's in the midst of redefining itself while holding on to it's historical past. The downtown business district looks like a wild west movie set with the crew still there, either setting up before or cleaning up after a shoot.

There's a neat little curio shop in downtown Midpines that had one object that caught my eye amongst the totem poles and jade jewelry: a piece of antler with bats carved into it. It's an odd piece that looks like the outer skin of the antler was peeled back revealing a colony of bats living inside.

Dinner on Saturday was Pizza from Pizza+ on the edge of town and it was okay, nothing really to write home about, then off to the hostel. I stayed at the aforementioned Yosemite Bug hostile just outside of Midpines and got a bunk in one of their dorm rooms. The facilities are clean and comfortable and they have a good cafe with a couple of computers available for checking email and such. I arrived too late for dinner on Saturday, but breakfast on Sunday was terrific - eggs, ham, toast and lots of coffee. The only interesting picture I took at the hostel is the dog enjoying the cool morning on the redwood deck.




Riding through Yosemite is always an amazing experience, and when I was there it was the last weekend before the park closed for the winter. Many of the campgrounds had already been shut down - the picnic tables packed up and the outhouses locked for the winter - which meant the crowds weren't there, either. Traffic was especially light, and the people I talked with seemed to appreciate the park more than the regular tour-bus tourists. I entered the park through the West entrance on highway 140 with the goal of making it to the East entrance (Tioga pass) before turning around for home. The motorcyclists in the picture were arriving as I was walking around the Tioga Pass entrance station taking pictures.


While riding out of the park I spotted a gathering of people gawking skyward, so I stopped to investigate. They were watching the climbers on El Capitan, and from the valley floor I couldn't spot them without binoculars. If you look closely at the picture on the right (click on it to see the larger version) you can spot the climber dangling from his rope near the bottom-center of the picture. This guy was probably half way up, so he still had some serious work to do.

It was amusing watching a couple of other climbers taking a break, perched on a tiny ledge eating lunch. They weren't very far up the face, thus the tree branches in the picture.

I returned home on Sunday in time to meet friends for a late dinner over stories of the weekend.

Enough for today, I'll continue again soon...

Jerry, the hometown tourist.

I'm going Home!

I received an EMail today that the company is running out of money for the project that I've been working on, and they asked me to come home ASAP. I'm not really surprised, we've been burning through cash at an alarming rate for a couple of years now so I've had a notion that sometime it would come to an end. What's most frustrating is the short notice of my return.

I've booked my flight home, to arrive in SFO on Saturday September 6th at 12:30pm and I'm already mentally on the plane home. My time here in Korea has been an enriching experience, one that I will never forget and certainly look forward to my next opportunity to work overseas. Now that I know some of what what to expect when living far away from home for an extended period, my next assignment will go considerably smoother.

I have been looking around for what I'm really going to miss when I'm back home and there is one thing that I will try to duplicate back in the states, and that's Korean barbecue. I'm still unsure what cut of pork rib they cook up at the table, but it's simply delicious. The meat is a long strip of pork with a single rib attached, marinated in something tasty and cooked at the table on a charcoal grill. About halfway through the cooking, the waitress brings a large pair of kitchen shears and cuts it up into bit size pieces. The dining table is covered with little bowls, each with something different to wrap up with the pork, usually garlic slices, sliced onions in soy sauce, spicy red bean paste ("Korean Ketchup" as it was described), kimchee (natch!), white rice, garlic shoots, bean sprouts -- the array of flavors is limited only by the imagination. To eat, you start with a folded lettuce leaf in your palm, add whatever suits your pallette and a piece of pork, wrap, and eat. We had this for our farewell lunch today and it is still my favorite Korean meal. And again, I forgot to bring my camera!

I will miss the friends I've made in Korea who helped me maintain some semblence of sanity, namly J.R., Roger, Jason, Jim, Will, Ken, Jerry, and all the others I've met who I don't remember by name. It is this loosly associated group of people who welcomed me as a friend, invited me on weekend getaways, and helped feed me spiritually. My only hope is that I was able to contribute as much as I received. God bless you all.

My next blog entry may be when I'm a hometown tourist, journaling my journeys through San Jose and the bay area, but who knows -- life's a journey, I'll bring my camera.

Jerry.

Shopping in Seoul

So my coworker Erik and I finally drove to Seoul last weekend. With the US dollar getting stronger against the Korean Won I wanted to shop for a camera lens, and all the internet opinions I found were positive for the Yesdica camera store in the Namdaemun market in Seoul. Finding an address on the internet for Yesdica proved difficult, at least an address in English, but the Namdaemun gate in Seoul is Korea's cultural treasure #1, is shown on all the tourist maps, and the market is in the same neighborhood. If you remember back to the news last January it's the old city gate that caught fire, it was the oldest wooden structure in the country. When we drove past it the entire gate was hidden from view, covered with scaffolding and boarded up while they're doing repairs.

I had been avoiding driving to Seoul because of the horror stories I've heard about the traffic and the crowds, but neither were any worse than I'd expect in Los Angeles or San Francisco on a Saturday afternoon. We left Anseong about 11:00am and drove North on highway 1 toward Seoul, stopping only once at a rest area to fill the rental car with LPG and get a quick snack. I again passed on the fresh grilled squid and got 'ham toast' instead -- basically it's a grilled sandwich on spongy white bread with a slice of ham, a patty made with egg, cheese and rice, squirted with ketchup and sprinkled with sugar. It was tasty in a strange way... too many flavors that I didn't think would work together.

Just past the highway toll booth on the outskirts of Seoul there was road construction and a chain-reaction accident involving many cars and a couple of buses that added probably an hour to our drive -- other than that it was full speed (100 km/h) most of the way. In Seoul the traffic was heavy but nothing oppressive. We did take an unintentional scenic route over a mountain outside of Seoul instead of taking the tunnel through the mountain -- I keep telling people I have a GPS because I need one, not because I want one. I had entered coordinates of the Namdaemun market, picked off of Google earth prior to leaving for Seoul, so my GPS had a good idea of where the market is. The coordinates were close enough that Erik spotted the store as I was following the arrow on the GPS. Parking wasn't a problem either, I parked on a side street half a block across the street from the store and it was a short walk to Yesdica.

Instead of crosswalks there are stairs down to an underground mall to get across the street. The stores in the mall, both underground and at street level, are almost all very specialized in their merchandise, like the necktie store, or the artsy-paper store. Also unusual were how the stores were clustered together: all the stores with clocks and watches were next to each other, as were the stores selling only cameras, or scarves, purses, swimsuits, ginseng, hats, jewelery, etc. It's a very different method of merchandising than in the US, and it's quite convenient to shop at stores next to each other for the best price, or the perfect tie.


Also unusual were the vendors selling things on the stairways leading to the underground mall. The green strips on the stairs are glow in the dark markers, perhaps the vendors have flashlights on hand to help evacuate in case of power failure?

There was even a lady selling fried silkworms, but I was too timid to try one.

What I did bring home are more pictures, some Korean souvenirs, and another camera lens.

The weather over the weekend was sunny and warm, not hot or humid, and perfect for a road trip. This week we had a couple of days of rain but the forecast for next weekend is sunny and warm, so perhaps I can find more stone pagodas!

Jerry

What I did on my Summer Vacation

I went home for a week of vacation this summer. There's something strange about taking time off and buying a plane ticket so I can sleep in my own bed, cook in my own kitchen, and get reacquainted with my friends. My concept of vacationing changed this year: instead of visiting someplace far away to enjoy and appreciate the foreign culture, I simply wanted to go home. Having been in Korea for four months I needed the familiarity and relaxation I have come to enjoy at home.

At home I did many of the things that aren't available to me here in Korea: smoking brisket, salmon, and ribs for a potluck with my friends; motorcycling through the Santa Cruz mountains and stopping for a real American hamburger with my friend Rich (pictured) at Alice's in Woodside; going to the range with Vic and punching .44 caliber holes in paper; talking (in English!) to people on the air via amateur radio. It's also an under appreciated luxury to be able to buy shirts that fit without the shopkeepers snickering at my large American size, and passing up shoes on the clearance rack because they're actually too big. More guilty pleasures: eavesdropping on conversations in the supermarket, joking with the sales clerks, and generally being included in society instead of being shunned everywhere.

I also went home to bring back the things that I didn't pack the first time, things I didn't think I'd need or thought I could buy here. Simple things, like my favorite toothpaste, socks, and underwear. Books that I've been wanting to read but had left at home, shirts, another pair of shorts, and new shoes that fit. Being home for a week really drove home the point of how comfortably I really have it.

I knew what to expect upon my return to Korea, so the culture shock wasn't as severe as when I first arrived in April, but I also realize that I've got to make a few subtle changes in my daily routine to keep my sanity intact. Specifically, I now know more than ever how important it is for me to have human contact -- friendly conversation and interaction, like discussing the news, trading ideas on the latest political developments, sharing a joke and actually having it understood and appreciated.

Here in Korea I work with a team of ten or so people, two of us are English-only Americans and thankfully Erik and I have similar senses of humor and political views. After work, however, it's like solitary confinement, the important difference being the locks are on the inside of the door. I cook dinner for myself since I can't handle the spicy Korean cuisine anymore, which is a shame because I enjoyed it when I first arrived; Ordering food in a restaurant is playing dinner roulette: I never know what I'm getting without an interpreter. Besides, cooking my own food gives me opportunity to interact with the Korean people in the supermarket, and it alleviates some of the evening boredom.

But I am back in Korea, well, rested, and ready for more adventures.

Jerry.