Galleries

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Saturday/ baseball in Japan

This picture is from the website of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
This is from the Yomiuri Giants website.

I thought the long pink balloons (see picture) at a baseball game on Japanese TV was just for the visual effect and waving back and forth, but no : at a given signal everyone let go and up and away the balloons went, and plopped (deflated) back onto the spectators – that was part of the fun. Baseball is very popular but not the national sport (sumo wrestling is).   of the league can be traced back to the formation of the “Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club” in 1936.  (In the USA, Major League Baseball traces its history back to 1869, the year the ‘Cincinnati Red Stockings’ was established as the first professional team).

 

 

The teams all have their fan clubs and websites and each team is a franchise that endorses or markets all kinds of products and events.

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Monday/ arrived

The pictures are from Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo airport.
The airport stores are well-stocked with African handicraft and souvenir items, and seemed to be doing a brisk business even though it’s winter time and not the tourist season.

Our Airbus A340-300 was filled to capacity. The number 4 engine did not start properly, though, and we went back to the gate for a check-up.
Take your time, technicians, I thought .. make sure everything is A-OK. All was resolved after 30 minutes, and we were on our way.

This wire frame-and-beads Nelson Mandela is outside the ‘Out of Africa’ store that is filled with locally made handicraft and artwork.
It’s not too late to buy a bronze vuvuzela and go make some noise at the Euro 2012 soccer!
The stuffed monkeys must be vervet monkeys – they have black face with a white fringe of hair, and are overall grey.
This is the last few hours of the long flight out to Hong Kong from Johannesburg. We have just completed flying over Viet Nam.
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Sunday/ at Cape Town airport

I am at Cape Town airport.  It’s a 2-hour hop to Johannesburg and then onto a direct flight of 13 hrs to Hong Kong from there.  I resisted buying any more Afrikaans books (already bought 4), t-shirts or bottles of South African olive oil that are shaped like Table Mountain !

Cape Town to Johannesburg is 2 hrs. Johannesburg to Hong Kong is 13 hrs.
I found the ‘donkey with pajamas’ (as we sometimes call zebra here in South Africa) at the lounge entrance. Zebras are good subjects for black-and-white pictures. 🙂
Check out the items on the South African Alphabet book’s cover.
Among others : Aardvark, Braai (barbecue), Koeksister (syrupy twisted doughnut), Leeu (lion), Mahem (crowned crane), Miskruier (dung beetle), Nelson Mandela, Protea (the national flower), Rondawel (Africa-style hut), Taxi (minibus taxi)
Olive oil in a bottle shaped like Table Mountain (on its side).
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Thursday/ Stellenbosch buildings

Thursday was overcast and cool which made for good picture-taking weather.  All the buildings are from the central area of Stellenbosch.

The ‘old main building’ of the University of Stellenbosch was completed in 1886 and recently renovated. It is built in a style that could be called Cape classical.
This is the Sasol Art Museum is on Ryneveld Street in a beautiful red Dutch Neo-Classical building dating back to 1907. The building was previously home to the Bloemhof school.
This is Crozier House in Victoria street.
This is Van der Stel liquor store on Andringa street, a simple building but I love the roof arches and the Victorian style trim.
This church is called the ‘Mother Church’ and this building and tower were consecrated in 1863. The style is neo-gothic, built from plans from Carl Otto Hager, a German master builder and architect from Dresden.

 

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Tuesday/ at the grocery store

I am staying in the town of Stellenbosch in the Cape Town area with my family for the week.  Here are some of my favorite offerings from the big local grocery store – that sells much more than just groceries.

Stellenbosch is South Africa’s second oldest town after Cape Town (which is a city and not a ‘town’). I think in the USA we tend to call everything a ‘city’ regardless of its population or size.

 

Stuffed Springbok, mascot of the South African rugby and cricket teams.
This variety of protea is called ‘pink ice’ and is the hardiest of all proteas. The king protea is South Africa’s national flower.
South African stores offer a wide range of locally produced fruit juices. This one is a blend called ‘Whispers of Summer’ (it is winter here right now).
And here is my jar of Marmite. First marketed in the UK in 1902, the product name may have been derived from a famous French soup, petite marmite. A “marmite” (pronounced “mar-MEET”) is a French stock pot or cooking pot – like the one pictured on the front of the jar and shaped somewhat like the jar itself.

 

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Monday night/ arrival in Cape Town

My journey to Cape Town at the southwestern tip of Africa was complete on Monday evening.  Here are a few more pictures from the connecting airports.

The escalators up to the cavernous lounge at Doha’s premium connection terminal.
Porcelain souvenirs from the shop downstairs. (Hmm. The camel looks a lot friendlier than the oil sheik).
And here are some furry camels from a caravan depiction.
The flight tracker on the flight from Doha to Johannesburg shows us crossing the equator. The blue blob on the right is one of the great African lakes, Lake Victoria. By surface area only Lake Michigan-Huron and Lake Superior (in the USA) are larger than lake Victoria.
I love these African patterns .. in Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo airport.
And this life-size African elephant is made from wire mesh with little beads. (Amarula is a cream liqueur manufactured in South Africa – made with sugar, cream and the fruit of the African marula tree).

 

 

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Monday/ at Doha airport

We arrived at 4.45 am local time with the sun just coming up from the east.  So one of two 8 hr flights done, and the next one is due south to Johannesburg.

The Qatar airbus with the oryx on the engine that brought us from Hong Kong. I am standing in the door of the bus that is taking us to the transfer terminal.
And here is my Google Places map. We are at the old airport. There is a new airport terminal under construction about 4 km away which will open in 2013.
It is summer in the desert, so these temperatures are in Celsius, of course! (90 F at night, goes up to 110 F by day).

 

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Sunday/ Tsim Tsa Tsui

These pictures are from near the Tsim Tsa Tsui station in Kowloon, along Nathan Road.  It is warm and muggy outside!  Walking around makes you break out in a soaking sweat for that ‘swimming in it’ feeling.

The Prince jewelry store on Nathan Road is new.
A collection of piggies from 7-11, one is issued each month.
This is the underpass by Nathan Road and Salisbury Road.
This sign is at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The Eight Immortals are a group of legendary xian (“immortals; transcendents; saints”) in Chinese mythology. Each Immortal’s power can be transferred to a power tool (法器) that can bestow life or destroy evil.

 

 

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Saturday/ Hong Kong is wet

My flight to South Africa is on Sunday.  It rained all Saturday which was fine with me : I could use it as an excuse to relax in the hotel and catch up on what’s happening in the world with the TV coverage of the elections in Greece and in Egypt this weekend.  I did catch the Marriott SkyCity’s shuttle bus to the Tung Chung station and shopping mall close by.

This is inside the Tung Chung station entrance : a map with directions for the aerial tramway to the Big Buddha hill on Lantau island.
This picture is displayed in a travel agency's window. The construction of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge is underway, slated for completion late 2016. The dotted line is a sea tunnel that will allow ships access to the Pearl River Delta.
My acquisition from the Puma outlet store at the shopping mall by Tung Chung station : three t-shirts. Count the pumas on the three t-shirts! How many? (Answer: 9, of course - for the nine loves the big jumping Cat has.)

 

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Friday/ to Hong Kong

Shenzhen at 91°C (33°C) on Friday at 5pm.
Our driver stopped for gas in Shenzhen, explaining that the ¥8.32/ liter (US$4.96/ gal) is a lot cheaper than the HKD18/ liter (that's US$8.37/ gal! yikes)across the border.
And here's the gas pump.
New construction to be seen as we were approaching the Shekou Shenzhen Port border crossing.
The main stadium of the 2011 Universiade in Longgang district has been around a year now, but still a highlight for me to check out as we drive by.
Here is the mainland side of the Shenzhen Bay Port crossing. The Hong Kong customs is behind this one.
.. and once the bridges to Lantau island come into view, you are almost there. It is a 2 1/2 hour drive from Shenzhen, border crossing wait time included.

It is time for a get-away from the slog at work. A colleague and I got the van to Hong Kong on Friday for our flights from the airport this weekend.  A little travel disaster struck me when I got out of the van at the hotel : inadvertently left my cell phone on the seat, with the driver disappearing from sight as I ran back out of the hotel.  We did have his phone number but as I was trying to figure out the dialing codes for mainland China to call him from my room, the front desk called.  Was I the person that left my phone in the van?  Yes, yes!  I said.  May we ‘inconvenience you, sir’ into coming down to the lobby to get it?  (You can inconvenience me all you want!).  And there he was, the driver with my phone.  Don’t worry so much! he said, as he handed me the phone.

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Monday/ the K computer is a beast

NHK World TV had a documentary on Sunday night, reporting that the world’s fastest supercomputer in the city of Kobe is nearing completion. It is called the K computer. The water-cooled beast has more than 80,000 nodes and consumes 13 MW of electricity.  That’s enough power for 10,000 homes.   It is the first machine to break 10 petaflops : 10 15  or 10 quadrillion calculations per second.   It used mostly for research – molecular modeling and finding matching molecules or genes for cancer treatments and the like.

The K computer is named for the Japanese word "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion. It is made by Fujitsu.
The supercomputer is housed in a building located on Port Island, Kobe, in Hyogo Prefecture.
Numbers are crunched at 10 quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Here is IBM's Watson supercomputer trouncing two very smart humans on a special edition of Jeopardy.
Watson broke up the Jeopardy question into pieces and looked for matching words or patterns or connections in its vast database of connected information.
Here is a futuristic smartphone with an incoming phone call. Got to love the rotary dial phone symbol harking back to the days when you twirled that rotary dial with your fingers!
And here is the girl at the coffee shop meeting a new guy for real. The phone camera compares his face with the records in the database and automatically pulls up his digital profile information (from Facebook?). I hope she likes his ninja 'warrior' avatar !

 

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Saturday/ Shenzhen’s Mix-C Mall

I had to get out of the hotel room for a bit on Saturday, and off to the Mix-C Mall in Shenzhen I went late afternoon, a 20 minute taxi ride.  I would have walked around more but it was raining when I emerged from the mall, and I decided to come back instead of waiting to see if it would clear up.

The staggered rooftops on the left is the Grand Hyatt Shenzhen, and that's a Louis Vuitton store in front of it.
This is across from the Mix-C mall, at the base of the 384m (1260 ft) Shun Hing Square skyscraper. On the left is the top of the Kingkey 100 tower, the city's tallest skyscraper at 442 m (1,449 ft).
This is from the fancy grocery store in the mall : water with basil seeds. Soaked in water, the seeds become gelatinous, and are used in Asian drinks and desserts. The seeds have potent antioxidant and antibacterial properties. I just liked shaking the bottle and watching the seeds move around and then stop again, suspended in the water.
Here's a drink I can relate to much better : South African rooibos tea with the African elephant.
Cornflakes are 玉米片yù mǐ piàn in Chinese which seems to translate to 'little stones of husked rice splinters'. (Kellogg's rooster has gotten a really in-your-face look lately! That's NOT the rooster that was on MY cornflakes box when I was a kid !.
This is a display advertisement at the mall's Golden Harvest movie theater, inviting patrons to buy soda pop and pop corn. Movie tickets are ¥70 (US$11).
And here is my parting shot before stepping into the taxi. It wasn't raining very hard, but the shoppers were evidently not eager to get too wet !

 

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Saturday/ walking around Capitol Hill

This artwork is in the Safeway grocery store on 15th Ave.
The green house on the corner of 13th Ave and John is at least a 100 years old, and now has a brand new set of small apartments brushing up against it. (I believe they are apartments and not condos).
The view of the Capitol Hill Light Rail station from John Street is not much different, but the tunnel boring from Capitol Hill to the University of Washington is now complete. Still a long way to go to 2016 when the station opens!
This artist is at work the corner of Olive Way and Belmont. I couldn't quite make out the lettering.
And this truck was parked on 15th Ave and sold organic parfait ice cream (it has custard in, so more egg than regular ice cream). There were lots of people in line the first time I walked by .. and parfait is French for 'perfect'.

Here are a few pictures from my neighborhood walk last around Capitol Hill on Friday night.  The streak of summery weather is coming to an end with rain in the forecast for Sunday.

 

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Monday/ the Facebook IPO

Social media giant Facebook is set to go public in the next few weeks, possibly as early as May 18, initially priced at between $28 and $35 a share.  Mark Koba from CNBC says the IPO is ‘set to raise the roof off Wall Street’.  The valuation may go as high as $100 billion (which most analysts deem extravagant; by most measures it should be closer to $50 billion).

The list of risk factors noted in the Facebook prospectus is sobering and in some ways I think I am Exhibit A for the risks.  I have a Facebook profile with 40-some ‘friends’ but I have stopped making posts there.  I don’t message my ‘friends’ or ‘poke’ them, or spam them with silly game requests (think Farmville) or with quizzes. I don’t like that Facebook mines information I write about to send me and my friends marketing messages.  And finally – I don’t like every one of my ‘friends’ (the non-friends ‘friends’) to know every thing about me.

But hey – maybe I am old and cranky (non-social?) and there is a return on an investment to be made if one lets the dust settle and see where the stock is a week or two from the IPO.

The first page of the Facebook Prospectus.
What's not to 'like'? (Statistics from the Prospectus).
Mission : 'To make the world more open and connected'. Yes - but you have to be on Facebook to 'connect', which is unlikely if you live in China, Russia or Japan where users have their own local social networking platforms.

 

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Saturday/ the secret(ive) aardvark

The ‘secret aardvark’ sauce is from the Kingfish Cafe on 19th Ave here in Capitol Hill in Seattle. I had dinner there on Saturday night with my fiends Bill and Dave.  Aardvarks are very special from a classification point of view : the only living species of the order Tubulidentata – and genetically speaking a living fossil!  Check out the entry in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark.

The 'Secret Aardvark Trading Co.' sauce is very hot (too hot), made with habenero peppers.
This aardvark is resting and is from Himeji zoo in Japan (picture from Wikipedia).
The menu cover from Kingfish Cafe. They serve up traditional Southern food such as gumbo, buttermilk-fried chicken and fried green tomatoes.

 

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Thursday/ more Houston architecture

I finally had some time before the sun set on Thursday to walk around downtown Houston and snap some pictures.  At the courthouse a guard chided me, said I am not allowed to take pictures (because it’s a federal building).  What a sad state of affairs, I thought – if citizens cannot even take pictures of their own city’s or country’s courthouses and buildings.   But then one of my colleagues pointed me to a 2010 New York Times article http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/you-can-photograph-that-federal-building/ that says the guard was wrong.  As a general rule – a photographer can stand in a public place and take pictures of federal buildings.

Houston's starter light rail system runs from downtown to the the Fannin South station by Interstate 45.
This is the First United Methodist Church on Clay street in downtown Houston.
This is the elevated circular walkway at the base of the Chevron tower on 1400 Smith street.
The Allen Center is just a workhorse office block close by the Chevron tower but I like the glass-enclosed entrance with the escalators up to the entrance lobby.
This building was formerly the headquarters of Gulf Oil (whose gas stations have long since left the gulf coast but are still found in New England). It was built in 1929, and is a beautiful example of Art Deco architecture.
More art deco styling at 815 Walker Avenue in downtown.
More art deco from the JP Morgan Chase (formerly Gulf Oil) building.

 

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Wednesday/ the state capitol in Olympia

I drove down to our state’s capital city Olympia at the southernmost end of Puget Sound today to meet a colleague from work for dinner, about an hour’s drive.  On the way I stopped by the capitol building.   The Olympia waterfront and downtown are are both a stone’s throw from the capitol building.

Olympia is about an hour's drive south of Seattle on I-5 (but it can be much more if you drive during rush hour).
The main entrance to the Washington State capitol building in Olympia. Olympia became the capital city of the then-Washington Territory in 1853, but this building was completed only around 1923.
A view from the back of the dome of the capitol building in Olympia.
Another view from the back. The dome is atop the Legislative building, so that's where the State house and State senate representatives meet.
Here is the inside of the main atrium beneath the dome. There is a giant bronze seal in the middle on the floor.
Detail of the bronze seal on the floor.
This bust of George Washington is upstairs overlooking the floor. (Scout's honor : it was not me that rubbed his nose. Apparently visitors just can NOT resist touching it!).
I love the giant suspended light fixture in the center of the dome.
This is a waterfront scene nearby. The water is Puget Sound, a large inland body of water connected to the Pacific ocean.
Japanese style 'gazebo' nearby.
This is downtown Olympia. I first read 'grosvenor hotel' .. then saw no, it is the governor hotel.
This fairy tale brick-building with twin turrets is actually the OLD capitol building, across from the Governor Hotel in downtown.

 

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Sunday/ shopping BIG

I don’t have a membership card for Seattle’s Costco store*, but I have friends that do, and I went with them to the store today.  The store is no-frills and looks like a warehouse inside.

*A warehouse ‘club’ retail store selling a wide variety of merchandise, but only in large, wholesale quantities.

We were intrigued by this Coleman solar power generator kit. Should I have bought it, now that we finally are getting some sunlight in Seattle?
And here is a 190 lumen lantern to scare the hyenas away from the campfire that's dying. I recall a long time ago that Coleman sold a '1,000 candlelight' flash light. That is about equal to 79 lumens.
Nothing is more American than apple pie! (well, maybe Coca-Cola. And I have a picture of that as well).
These boneless legs of lamb are from Australia. (There are actually Costco stores in Australia as well - in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne).
This bag with 3 pounds of peeled California-grown garlic should last a while!
The smallest offering of eggs : a box with 18 Extra Large ones.
And here's the Coca-Cola, in packs of 32 cans.

 

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Tuesday/ Hong Kong update

Life goes on in Hong Kong after the conclusion of a bitter election for new Chief Executive.  Leung Chun-ying or Leung CY was elected by the 1,200-member Electoral Committee over Henry Tang and Albert Ho in a campaign marked scandals, dirty tactics and smears.   The city also had some protests against the Electoral Committee, saying every resident should get to vote (of course).  Then last week there was the arrest of two billionaire brothers Thomas and Robert Kwok who run Hong Kong’s top property developer in a high-profile corruption probe.  They proclaimed their innocence at a news conference yesterday, and were released on bail.

The pictures are all from Monday night.

The gold dragon in the jewelry store did not have a price tag, but it might be as much as $US 50,000.
I took this picture from the tram. The stately old Western Market building in Sheung Wan close to the hotel is now a theatre.
This is a very large Easter rabbit ! It's in front of the new iSquare mall building in Tsim Tsa Tsui.
Japanese strawberries for sale in the Sogo department's store's basin.
One of the many tunnels in the MTR. The train gets you where you need to be, but sometimes you walk 5 or 10 mins to get to the other line that you connect to.

 

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Monday/ Junk Wood Animal Farm

This outdoor-indoor exhibit is currently on display at Times Square in Hong Kong in Causeway Bay.  The artist is Won Tin Yan, a graduate from the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000.  He has been making farm animals from junk wood pallets over the last 10 years.  Here is his website http://www.wongtinyan.com/

The cows are doing a conga line! P.S. Conga lines come from carnivals in Cuba, and first became popular in the USA in the 1930s.
The water is vinyl. And the ducks are scary . .or are they cute?
The dog looks a little like Scooby-doo.
The Picasso-esque bull facade is part of the barn.
There's also a store that sells t-shirts and other items.