Month: March 2011

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Thursday/ The Great Wave off Kanagawa

I was sorry to learn of the tsunami and earthquakes in Japan of Thursday, so closely following the one in New Zealand.   It prompted me to look for this famous picture that I didn’t even know the full name of.    In its most simple form its title is The Wave but it is really The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, lit. “Under a Wave off Kanagawa”).

From Wikipedia : It is a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.   An example of ukiyo-e art, it was published sometime between 1830 and 1833 (during the Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai’s series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景?)), and is his most famous work – probably one of the most recognized works of Japanese art in the world.

Click the picture to enlarge it and then check out Mount Fuji in the distance and the boatsmen in the foreground.      We are so small against these forces of nature.

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Wednesday/ the red-eyed tree frog

This truck is in the back alley by my house since the neighbors there is adding a new room to their house (from the looks of it).  So is the colorful tree frog found in nature? I wondered.  Sure enough – it’s a Red-eyed Tree Frog (Agalychnis callidryas) and this picture was taken in Costa Rica in 2007 by Jan Sevcik, a zoologist from the University of Prague.    Look at those sticky fingers!  They eat insects, are 2 to 3 inches long and can live up to 5 years.

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Tuesday/ how to cook a wolf

No, it’s not a recipe, it’s the name of a restaurant in the Queen Anne neighborhood that 5 of us went to last night.  The outside is very low-key, as is the inside : it looks like a wood-slatted den.   The dishes on the menu are all served family-style with small plates for everyone.  It could be cold starters, pastas or meats or fish.    We had roasted beets(*), sea bass(*), sturgeon, potato gnocchi (*), speck (thin-sliced cured ham, really a prosciutto I thought) and a pasta with a spicy meat sauce.   The food was delicious, but with 5 people sharing one plate we had to share carefully to make sure everyone got a bite!     (*)  I liked these best

I stopped on the way back to snap the Space Needle from Denny Way (it’s nice to be a tourist in one’s home city), and the Starbucks pictures are from earlier in the day.  That’s a brand new logo on the cup (supposedly making the coffee goddess more accessible overseas without the Starbucks text around her, and implying like Nike’s swoosh that the brand is so recognizable that it does not need text).   I also stocked up on my favorite instant coffee (Columbia Medium Roast), which also has new packaging.

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Monday/ posters at 11th and Pine

It’s time for taxes and I checked in with my tax adviser close to the corner of 11th Ave and Pine St today, and took these pictures afterward.   (Found a $39 parking ticket on my windshield when I got to my car even though I overstayed my paid time only by 15 mins.  I guess the City needs dollars$$ for the budget!).    I don’t know the name or year of construction of the white building, but it houses the Velo Bike Store.  It has empty spaces and is looking for more tenants.   (BTW the Seattle Bicycle Expo is next weekend).  The 12th and Pine corner of the brick building across from it is always plastered with posters, and I collected a few with my phone camera.  Two of them are very political since 1. the 8th anniversary of the start of the Iraq invasion is coming up and 2. Washington State has not yet legalized same-sex marriage (but the State does have an “everything-but-marriage” bill of rights which was signed into law in 2009, and which survived a referendum challenge in November of that year).

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Sunday/ Google’s Goggles

I’m finally downloading a few more applications for my iPhone .. this one is Google’s Goggles : a very ambitious little program that tries to ‘recognize’ an object that you snap with the phone’s camera.    I got some impressive results but also some disappointments.     The program recognized the m from from m&m candy canister; the zhong character* from my Chinese Without Tears book; the Logitech logo on my mouse, and a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the computer screen.   I could not get it to recognize my little space shuttle model (aww) even after a dozen attempts at different angles; or my own little Eiffel Tower replica.    Maybe the lighting or the background should have been different.

*zhong 中 means ‘center’ or ‘middle’ and is used in the characters for China, literally ‘middle kingdom’  中 国

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Saturday

This picture was taken on the corner of Denny Way and Fairview Ave today.  The blue skies are reflected on the Olive 8 luxury hotel and condo tower downtown in the middle of the picture.    The olive8.com website reports that floors 19 to 27 is sold out and that 15 units were sold since the start of the year albeit at a reduction of up to 40% below pre-sale prices in 2007. (Yikes).    Elsewhere, in Bloomberg Businessweek – it is reported that Seattle is at the top of the list of cities in the country where apartment rental rates have dropped (see below).

From Bloomberg Business Week article Feb 11, 2010 re: cities with the biggest drops in apartment rental rates –

No. 1: Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.

Average monthly rent: $1,023
Annual drop: -13.8%
Q4 2009 drop: -3.5%

The Seattle area, home to companies that include Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Amazon, saw rent plummet as the unemployment rate rose to 9% (133,300 people) in December, from 6% a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The vacancy rate in 2009 was 6.4%, up from 5% in 2008.

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Friday/ Man Zou 慢走

慢走  màn​zǒu ‘Walk Slow’/ Don’t go yet! / Please stay a while longer!

Man Zou is a common phrase in Mandarin that translates literally to ‘Walk Slow’.   Used as a farewell, it is a way of reminding one another to be careful and mindful on our journey, and take the time to see things along the way. Walk slowly and you won’t fall. .. from the web page describing the documentary I saw last night on the KCTS9 public television channel.

The documentary is of four American friends (from Seattle) and their Chinese guide set out on a mission to bicycle more than 1,000 miles between China’s two largest cities : Beijing and Shanghai.   (They did it in 28 days).  I could relate to their experiences in such a heartfelt way : the chaotic traffic, the foods Westerners are just not used to eat, the friendly people (still finding Westerners strange and stare-worthy, especially in smaller towns), and people doing hard, hard manual work without complaining.

.. and here is a picture from Hong Kong airport I forgot to post yesterday.  It’s ‘The Dew Drop’ (see me in there?) by artist Lee Chin Fai Danny (2005).  The plaque says ‘Nature is all around us.   Yet often we look but do not see. Next time you see morning dew, take a look at just on dew drop.  See your surroundings reflected there. Look closely and you will see a reflection of yourself.  So why not pause and try to look at ourselves, objects and people around us from a fresh perspective?’

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Thursday morning/ at SFO airport

I found this picture in the check-in hall in Hong Kong airport.   The dashing aviator is billed as Hong Kong’s first : a Belgian named Charles van den Born.   The picture was taken in 1910 and he was 35 years old at the time.

Then there’s the nose of the Cathay Pacific plane as we boarded*, and I found a nice picture of the flight path on-line (11h 42 mins and 6,951 miles).

*We were scheduled to fly on a Boeing 747-400, but now looking at the picture I’m not so sure it was one.

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Thursday morning

Here’s this morning’s breakfast : clockwise from the bottom there is a little samoosa, noodles with soy sauce, chicken and beef dumplings, glutinous rice in lotus leaf and fried tomato.   All very tasty.

And below that is last night’s view now that the sun is shining.    Now it’s time to clear out and go to the airport!

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Wednesday/ in Hong Kong

I found the golden dragon on a tea container at work and couldn’t resist taking a picture.  And the ‘looking down’ view is from my 31st floor hotel room at the Marriott.   My colleague and I made it to Hong Kong – the driver had to wait 30 mins for me because at the last minute another crisis with the data conversion happened.       So there will be more of that and there is still hard work ahead before we can switch on the system in two months, but hey – how nice to get away from the work site for awhile and go home!

 

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Tuesday/ pop culture pirate

This picture was a print on someone’s sweater here at work, and I felt I had to look it up.   Roronoa Zoro is a pirate-like character in the  One Piece manga and anime series, and only one of an extensive cast of characters created by Eiichiro Oda. The series takes place in a fictional universe where vast numbers of pirates, soldiers, revolutionaries, and other adventurers fight each other, using various superhuman and supernatural abilities. The series’ storyline follows the adventures of a group of pirates as they search for the series titular treasure.

The cute little birdies is actually an English-Chinese character translator from my colleague’s PC.   They sit next to each other fluffing their feathers now and then, but when the mouse is drawn over them they go into a tizzy, some flying up and coming down again.   Of course the egg does something special, as does the black bird, but I’m not sure what.   

The driver will pick three of us up tomorrow (Wednesday) and us out of here to Hong Kong for the trip home for a week.     I look forward to be at home very, very much.