Saturday, January 30, 2010

Brightly Above the Rest

Yep, thank goodness I still have that yearning for photography. I know because I nearly froze my fingers for this.


After a rainy week and seeing the sunlight do its thing, I think it's your turn to filter through the clouds.

Keep on shining. (:

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Concept of Us

Unique, yet the Same.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Recipe for Richness


"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are built for."
John A. Shedd

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Short Scare

In big and bold black capital letters: Tornado Warning. Well, that's a first. Fortunately though disappointing at the same time, no tornado was spotted.

I don't understand you, California weather. And stop harassing me with your thunder. I keep on thinking it's another one of your earthquakes.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Hira Hira

This song brings back so much memories. Another year of cherry blossoms blooming again.

Monday, January 18, 2010

On and On (and On, On!)

"The existence of forgetting has has never been proved: we only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them."

Friedrich Nietzche

Friday, January 15, 2010

Wings

Behold,
Santa Clara street from the 18th (Mayor Chuck Reed's) floor of San Jose City Hall! Don't ask me how I got access; I just walked in armed with a phone. Without a word, snap snap. Okay, bye.

It's hard to believe this once was a small, sleepy farming community. In front of my eyes are buildings whose heights are just below the limit set by an ordinance, in the same area where twenty years ago was just a run-down slum neighborhood. Rewind that back to a century ago and it was nothing but trees and a few small houses. Honestly, I've lived a suburban lifestyle my whole life, and the last 12 months is the time where I've begun to take an interest in my birthplace.

I blame my parents for not taking me out as much, but that's okay. ;) Heck, I'm an American and a few weeks ago, I realized I didn't even know how to order or how etiquette is at a restaurant. I stood around innocently smiling and blinking at the waiter, expecting him to tell me where to sit, when to pay, and all the fancy things people do at restaurants. It's embarrassing, but on the contrary, it's rather stimulating. To me, the feeling of exploring a hidden realm or something unfamiliar gives me a rush of thrill, or perhaps a token, as one can say. A token of experience which, held forever, accumulates as time goes with increasing value. These minute events are one of the many types of things I highly treasure, which perhaps is the reason why I think I take so many darn photos, making memories. Darn me. I'm running out of hard drive space, too.

As for the time being, I can leave my city next year happy. (:
I'll come back every now and then, but can't wait to see how it'll be in twenty years. I still wonder whether I'll be in this country, though. I'm beginning to chase what I dream but have not yet dug up my roots until recently.


Sunday, January 10, 2010

Pure White


So did you all see the fog early in the morning today?


You couldn't see anything, including headlights of other cars, farther away from 2 houses. Family had fun, or I at least, making out what color the traffic signals at the next intersection were.

"It's red!"

"No wait, it's green!"


It eventually cleared up though. Boo.
Even so, we ran a yellow light in the next picture because it was still damn hard to see. CAN YOU SEE IT? Yes, this was how much we had to struggle to FIND the signal even AFTER the fog cleared up a bit. Definitely not a good day to practice driving.


With that ski sticker on the top right, I can fool just about anyone that this picture was taken from Interstate 80. It's really Montague Expressway.

Monday, January 4, 2010

New Year's Eve in San Francisco


I know this is supposed to be a San Jose-oriented blog, but I have pictures from San Francisco on New Year's Eve. Oh, what the heck.

Happy New Year.





The city was jammed pack. Ridiculously packed at the Embarcadero Plaza and Market Street. Obviously, with all of these people and a few drunks here and there, the presence of police and emergency personnel were also heavy. The following video serves no other purpose but to demonstrate what I mean.

Noisy. :(

Despite the rowdiness of some people around me, especially the "wanna-be" gangsters shouting obscenities at anyone they could lay their eyes on, the whole trip turned out pleasant. Watching the fireworks bloom above the Bay Bridge was a first for me, and this day marked the beginning of a new decade and a new me (now that I'll be turning 18 in 6 months). I have a video of the whole thing but refuse to upload it since the file is half a gigabyte. I do, however, have a short clip recorded from my phone...



Going home was a big problem. I wanted to ride BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway) for the whole way home for the convenience of time but my cousins refused and wanted to transfer on Caltrain, one of the slowest commuter train system I've seen, to their house. Goodness, you can race a horse with these trains and you'd win, as the trains average 20~30 miles per hour. They wanted it this way too on the ride TO San Francisco, so I had to break my wallet paying for unnecessary tickets for transfers. Ugh. I was bitter. Thanks to Caltrain, we finally stepped into our home at 4 AM in the morning, a time when the sun was already rising in New York and when we haven't even brushed our teeth.

This was not to say the ride home on Caltrain was all mumbles and grumbles, though. Check out our car; everyone was doozing off while in the next car in front of us, the others were partying.



And I saved the best for last! (: Not that it's pretty or anything but it made me smile.

Now in school, I have to remember to write the number one (1) first when writing the date for "mm/dd/10" rather than writing zero (0) for "mm/dd/09" as I have been for ten whole years.