Midwestern Road Trip

This August, I went on a road trip with my parents. I haven't seen much of them since I moved to Boston so this adventure was some much needed family bonding time. Here is some cataloguing of our adventures:

TROY, MO

My younger brother has been living in Missouri the past few months and I hadn't seen him in a year, so it was nice to get to spend some time with him and his adorable girlfriend.

CHICAGO, IL

Sci-fi themed coffee shop in Chicago

CEDAR SPRINGS, MI

Maternal genealogy in my great aunt and uncle’s house

BOYNE CITY, MI

This little town in northern Michigan is where my mom’s family comes from. We aren’t able to visit often but I’ve always found this lake to be so peaceful.

I found a treasure trove of old photos in my great aunt’s collection and knew I needed to save them.

My parents at their wedding in 1989

My maternal aunt and grandfather in the 80s

My aunt at her wedding in the 80s

My parents in the early 90s

No one could identify who the clowns are...

...or why there were so many of them.

TORONTO, CANADA

 NIAGARA FALLS, CANADA

And a bonus collection of iphone pictures.

Istanbul III: Hoşça Kalın

I've spent a week procrastinating on posting the last of my Istanbul photos. I'm still not prepared to admit to myself that the trip is over and that I'm back to my regularly scheduled programming. (I guess it's lucky that my next adventure to St. Louis, Missouri is in t-minus seven days.)

Alex posted another entry on his blog, this time featuring a video detailing just how difficult it is to make Turkish coffee. Check that out here.

HAGIA SOPHIA

BASILICA CISTERN

Alex and I have a pre-established penchant for creepy underground tunnels (thank you, Edinburgh) so when we found out Istanbul has a cistern complete with giant medusa head columns, we were excited. I only took a couple pictures thanks to the dim lighting, but I'm pretty psyched on how this one turned out.

GALATA KULESI

Galata Tower sticks out of the Beyoğlu skyline and the view from the top is amazing.

This polaroid was the both the last shot in the pack and the last photo I took in Istanbul, which felt fitting. It was an amazing adventure and I really can't wait for the next one.

Istanbul II: Kaleidoscope Sky

While I indulge my wanderlust with photographs, my partner-in-blogging expresses his with words. Alex posted a piece earlier today (which was tonight for him since he's one of them crazy time travelers) about our adventure over on his site. To tie his post to mine, we're going to start things off with a photo of a cat. Why? Read his piece here to find out.

TAKSIM, ETC.

My friend sent me a buzzfeed article before I left that listed the top coffee shops in the world because luckily for us (and our caffeine addictions) one of them was in the Taksim neighborhood. If anyone is ever in the area, Kronotrop certainly lived up to its hype.

SULTAN AHMED (BLUE) MOSQUE

I had to cover my head before going into the mosques so I bought a scarf of my own. I never did get the hang of keeping it in place.

I've never seen something quite like the mosque's ceiling. It was a kaleidoscope of tiles and I was terrified I wouldn't get any pictures that could accurately portray just how expansive and amazing it was.

KADAKÖY

Istanbul is a unique city in the fact that it is split in half by the Bosphorus and because of this, it rests on two continents. Alex and I took a ferry across to the Asian side because, hey, why not?

We saw a minimum of five kids who played accordion for lira.

Next time, Hagia Sophia, Galata Tower, and Basilica Cistern! That'll be up sometime this weekend.

PS: If anyone ever wanted their head to look like Nemo, I know the place for you.

Istanbul I: Banks of the Bosphorus

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm addicted to traveling and I'm lucky enough to have people in my life who feel the same. I met Alex in Scotland, he currently lives in Beijing, and he was just crazy enough to meet up with me for a week of adventure in Istanbul, Turkey.

After an exhausting twenty hours of travel, we both made it to Atatürk Havalimanı (airport) in one piece. Like the stubborn folk we are, we decided to find our way to our hotel via the subway system despite speaking no Turkish. Adventure, initiated.

Beyoğlu

I found a Polaroid camera at a yard sale a few weeks ago and decided to test it out. Not thrilled with the colored frames but you take what you can get on short notice.

Alex learned that the Turkish word for shave is "sakal".

Eminönü Yeni Camii

One the second day, we went to the New Mosque. In the courtyard, there were little stands set up where you could buy bird feed for the pigeon population.

More pictures to follow tomorrow!

And shoutout to the awesome dude I met in Logan airport while waiting at the gate. Ben made the ensuing five hour layover in JFK really fun. Thanks for the nerdy conversation and good luck in Singapore!

Cool Air | Exploring Boston

Sometimes I forget that it's important to spend time alone and after yet another stressful week, I took my day off as an opportunity to go on a solo adventure. I’ve spent the last year resolutely becoming a workaholic and I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t seen much of the city I’ve come to call home so I wandered downtown.  

Unfortunately it was raining and I discovered belatedly that my umbrella was broken so I holed up in a coffee shop and read a little Lovecraft.

On the way back, I had a chat with an older man on the subway who was going through a midlife crisis. He saw my tattoos and wanted to share his excitement because he was about to get his first. I listened to him talk for a few stops and he decided to share a piece of life advice with me. 

The most important thing he’d learned, he told me, was not to put all of your energy into something you aren’t passionate about because someday you’ll find yourself retiring from a job you never wanted in the first place and wondering where your last thirty years went. He finished the conversation with a sad smile, quoted Joseph Campbell (“follow your bliss”) and got off the train.

It was a short conversation but it was exactly what I needed to hear at this point in my life. For the first time in awhile, I feel like I’m pointing my energy in the right directions.

A Weekend in New York City

I spent this last weekend in New York, somewhere I haven't had particularly positive interactions in the past. This time, I was determined to change my opinion on the place. My three day adventure began in Brooklyn.

As some of you know I work for the Massachusetts branch of this rad company, Brooklyn Boulders. I've been the in-house photographer for the last eight months and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that working for this company is never - and will never be - boring. I took a pilgrimage to our home base to climb and snap some pictures for our database back home.

The next two days were spent wandering the city and while I still can't say I'm fond of New York, I met some great people and had some good times.

Boston Exploration

Last year, I transplanted myself from the eternal summers of Southern California into the actual Winterfell that is New England. Winter just kept coming and coming and "unprepared" proved to be a severe understatement. To be honest I'm not convinced it's ever going to end but even the sun gets tired of hibernating once and awhile. On the first sunny day Boston had seen in months, my friend Mike and I decided to go on a photographic adventure from Cambridge to downtown via a bike path near the Charles.

Mike wanted to test out his newly acquired, pocket sized film camera and obliged me in taking a few shots of me on my 7D as well.

 I wanted to test out the lens I recently bought off my boss (thanks Nick) and didn't think far enough ahead to realize that while the lens does close ups beautifully, it isn't meant for landscapes. I should have brought one of my other lenses along for the ride but at least I've learned for next time.

We're climbers so, naturally, that meant hanging off of bridges and out of trees.

In just over a week, I'll have lived in Boston for a year. It's still surreal to me that a city like this exists at all, let alone that I'm a part of it. A series of happy accidents coupled with incredible luck have led me to the people and places I have in my life right now and I'm grateful. Everything is pretty beautiful.