20090423-1240 CEST - At the airport

Hello! I'm at the Frankfurt airport waiting for a flight to California. I'll be in California for a week and then Maryland for a week before heading back to Germany. If you're my friend and live in one of those states and I haven't called you yet, my apologies. Life is crazy as usual. Don't take it personally. ;)

On the plane, I hope to finish my writeup for the Prague/Dresden/Berlin trip, and post a few other photos from a couple small trips I've been on recently. One of them is up already. I went to a role playing convention a couple weeks ago with a few friends. Here's the official site, and here are my pictures of the event. It was a good time, and made me feel normal for once. Haha - just kidding. I still didn't feel normal.

Look for a new post soon!

20090402-2357 CEST - London

Finally! Almost a month after the trip, I've finally managed to collect all the pictures in one place and write about London. I landed around 9:00 am on Saturday, March 7, got my bag, cleared customs, and headed for the Tube station at the airport. It turned out that the subway system was undergoing some major work during the month of March, and the original route I had planned to take to the hotel was not available. So, I studied the map for a few minutes, bought my ticket, and hopped on. It took about an hour to get to my station, and it was another 10 or 15 minutes of walking to actually get to the hotel.

The hotel was booked under my friend Matt's name, but I figured I'd try to check in anyway. It worked! I was able to get a room key and go on up to the room. I didn't expect Matt to make it to the hotel for an hour or so, so I settled in and flopped onto the bed to try and catch some sleep. (I only got a few hours of sleep the night before, and had to get up at 4:45 am to make it to the airport to catch my flight.) Matt rolled in right around lunch time. After he got settled in, we grabbed our camera gear and headed out.

We spent the rest of the day just walking around and taking pictures. We poked our heads into St. Paul's Cathedral, but found out it was 11 pounds to get in, and decided not to go. When you've seen one cathedral, you've seen them all. It was really crowded, too. After a quick lunch, we walked back across the Millenium Bridge, which lead us straight to the Tate Modern art museum (official site). We didn't pay to go in and see any exhibits, but there were a couple things out on display in a big entry hall that we looked at for a while. After the museum, we headed east towards Tower Bridge. As we walked, we came upon the HMS Belfast, and we had a conversation.

This was but the first of many similar conversations that we had over the weekend. The conversation wasn't deep or engaging. In fact, it was quite short. It went something like this:
Jason: I'm going to take a panorama of the boat.
Matt: I guess I will, too.

This is quite a bit different than how my conversations with travel partners usually go. Normally it's more like this:
Jason: I'm going to take a panorama of the boat.
Adam and Ben: <sigh>
(I'm just kidding. Adam and Ben are actually really patient with me and my addiction.) So, I could tell this wasn't going to be a typical trip. I should have been able to figure that out before hand, since Matt has been the inspiration for much of my photo gear. He bought a Gitzo tripod, I bought a Gitzo tripod. He bought a 5D Mark II, I bought a 5D Mark II. "He get a clock radio, I cannot afford. Great success!" (But I'm saving up to get one...)

So the great photo trip was on! When one of us decided to shoot a panorama, the other one followed suit. When one of us stopped to take a picture of something, so did the other one. And so on, and so on. I'm pretty sure that except for a few pictures here and there, we each went home with the same set of pictures. It was a good time. Here's a link to Matt's pictures. He was in the UK for a couple weeks before I met up with him. The London pictures start about half way down the page.

Here's the picture of the Belfast:

A few more minutes of walking took us to a nice view of Tower Bridge City Hall.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the weather was not cooperating. It was a rather dreary day for taking pictures, but take pictures we did. After crossing Tower Bridge, we made our way over to Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column.

After dinner, we went to the east bank of the Thames to take some night shots of the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben.

We were both pretty tired, so we headed back to the hotel around 9:00 pm, copied our pictures to our laptops so we could start fresh with new "film" in the morning, and went to bed.

We ate breakfast at the hotel on Sunday morning, and then headed for Hyde Park to catch the free walking tour. This was the third tour I'd been on with New Europe Tours. I guess I just really like the idea of a tour guide that is paid only in tips. It means they have to be good. If they suck, they won't get paid.

Here's what the tour covered, taken straight from their web site:

• Hyde Park Corner
• Buckingham Palace
• The Changing of the Guard (most days)
• Churchill.s War Cabinet Bunker
• The Houses of Parliament
• St. Martin-in-the-Fields
• Westminster Abbey
• Trafalgar Square
• Nelson.s Column
• Wellington Arch
• St. James.s Park
• 10 Downing St.
• Horseguards
• Whitehall
• Big Ben

The last stop on the tour was the Palace of Westminster. I took a quick two-row handheld panorama of the west side of the building. It turned out to be a little too quick. As you can see on the upper left corner of the picture, there is a little bit of sky missing. That's because they sky is falling. Actually, it's just because if I cropped the picture any more you wouldn't be able to see the top of the tower on the right. Woops. I guess I'll try and slow down a little more next time.

After the tour, we found a pub to have some lunch at. By the time we had finished eating, it had started to rain. Fortunately, it was only a 10 minute walk to our next destination--the British Museum (official site). I was surprised at the lack of security at the museum. No bag checking! And, unlike a lot of museums these days, photography was allowed. I snapped several shots of the interior of the main hall, and later decided to stitch them all together to make a super-wide angle shot. Here it is:

You can see a couple of stitching errors if you look closely. I didn't feel like going back and fixing them. Sorry. :) I didn't realize it before this trip, but the British Museum is home to the infamous Rosetta Stone. It was pretty cool to get to see it live and in person.

There was quite a bit of Egyptian art in the museum. Actually, there was a whole wing. Pretty cool stuff, including this big stone carving that was on the wall. It was probably at least 20 feet wide. I took the panorama by moving parallel to the wall to take the pictures.

To show you the level of detail in the full-sized panorama, here's a 100% crop from the middle of the picture, of the group of two people between the two pack mules. You can see the head of the shorter of the two.

After the museum, we met up with my friends Kirstin and Jörn and a friend of theirs for dinner. (For those of you who don't know, I went to high school with Kirstin and Jörn.) They live in London now! We had Indian food. I had heard very good things about the Indian food in London, and from my one experience, they seem to be true. Mmmm, Indian food. :) After dinner we bid farewell to my friends and headed back for the hotel to clear off our memory cards again.

Monday morning we checked out of the hotel and left our bags at the desk. We went and bought tickets for the London Eye, then went and found a McDonald's to use the free Internet to check in for our flights. Once we were all checked in, we went and rode on the Eye. It was well worth the price. The views of the city that it gives you are amazing! Unfortunately, they made my check my tripod before we got into our pod, so I could only take handheld panoramas. It's probably just as well, because the pod is moving almost constantly, and you'd have to be pretty quick to get a whole panorama in on the tripod before you moved very far. Here are the panoramas:

I also set up my little point and shoot camera to take a time lapse video of the ride. I just set it on the ground pointed out the window. Part way through the ride, someone knocked it over, and a few seconds later Matt set it back up for me. This time lapse was one frame per second. The whole ride took about 25 minutes.

After we rode the Eye, we walked across the bridge toward Big Ben. I zoomed in to fill the frame horizontally with the tower, and then took a vertical panorama:

Here's a 100% crop of that one. You can see that there's an inscription of some sort at the bottom of the clock face! I'm loving this new camera!

I snapped these panoramas as we were walking back to the hotel:

We went back to the hotel, picked up our bags, and headed for the airport by way of the Tube. Matt's flight was two hours before mine, which meant I got to the airport about four hours early. Fortunately, I recently earned Star Alliance Gold status, and I was able to hang out in the lounge. I actually got started stitching these pictures, not that that helped me get them posted any faster.

Well, that's it for the London trip. I'm pretty close to being done stitching everything from Prague, Dresden, and Berlin, so look for another post before too long!

20090324-2301 CET - Pictures are coming, I swear!

I'm back from Prague, Dresden, and Berlin. What a trip! I'm exhausted. I had a great time, and shot around 30 GB worth of pictures and video. So, I have a ton of work to do. The London panos are pretty much finished... I just need to caption them and write a little something about the trip. I also managed to get a fair amount of the Prague panos stitched while on the trip. I know what you're thinking... "Why didn't you just write stuff and finish the London post??" Well, I wanted to make sure that the pictures I had taken in Prague were going to stitch well, so I chose to get started on the stitching instead of working on the writing. Sorry.

Here's a little something to hold you over until the rest of the pictures are finished. This is me and my travel companions (left to right: Stefan, Aneta, Yours Truly, Jannine, Nathan) in front of the East Side Gallery, which is the longest section of the Berlin Wall that is still standing.

20090317-0940 CET - Busy busy busy

Hey everybody. Sorry I haven't updated for a while. I have pictures that I need to post from California and London, and I just haven't found the time to put them up. I've been busy getting ready for Jannine and Nathan to visit, and trying to get back in the swing of things after being gone for a month. Things should calm back down in a week or so.

Today we're off for Prague, and then we'll be going on to Berlin. Should be a good time, but it means it's going to be even longer before I get my pictures posted. Sorry. :(

20090218-2211 PST - Ski trip and Salzburg

Boy, was that a long ski trip. ;) I mean, err.... I got lost on the way back? I broke my leg and had to spend the last four weeks in an Austrian hospital? Hmmm... Not buyin' the excuses, eh? I didn't think you would. I don't really have any excuses for not updating the site other than the fact that I'm lazy. Well, actually, I did go on a work trip for about 10 days at the beginning of this month, so I didn't have access to my computer for a while. But, I should have gotten the update done before the work trip. Oh well. Better late than never, right?

I discovered something about myself on this ski trip: I am not a snowboarder. I am a skier. I had so much more fun skiing than snowboarding that I'm not sure I'll ever even try snowboarding again. After a couple hours of class, I was able to go down the slopes with relative ease. The only times I fell during the day were on the little kids' training slope. Once I hit the "real" slope I did just fine, and never fell. In fact, I went speeding past quite a few snowboarders who were sitting on their butts after falling. I felt their pain. That was me last year. And probably never again.

So that was Sunday. I only bought a one-day lift ticket this year, because I wanted to drive up to Salzburg on Monday. The drive about an hour, despite the fact that there was a little "fresh" slush on the road. (It snowed about an inch on Sunday night.) I was signed up to take the Sound of Music tour at 9:30 am, and pulled into the parking garage below the plaza where the tour was going to leave from around 9:15. I piled into the van with the tour guide, four Australians, and three Koreans, and we were off to see if hills can actually live.

The tour hit all the major filming locations in the city, including the buildings they used for the front and back of the Von Trapp house, the tree-lined road that the children were playing on when the Baron drove past and called them local urchins, the lake that the children and Maria tipped over in, the church that the wedding took place in, and the gazebo that the... uh.... gazebo scenes... took place in. Here I am in front of the lake and the building that was used for the back of the house:

And here I am in front of the gazebo:

On the way out to Mondsee to see the wedding church, the driver stopped at a scenic overlook of Sankt Gilgen. Here's a panorama of the town:

Mondsee was not only the location of the wedding church, it was our lunch stop. The guide suggested a restaurant with good pizza that most of us ended up at. Since I was traveling by myself, I decided to go out of my comfort zone and asked two of the Australian guys that were sitting at a table if I could join them. They obliged. One of them had been in one of the Scandinavian countries studying (I can't remember for sure which one--I think it was Finland), and the other one had flown over to travel with him for about a month. We ended up having a lot of common interests, and I found out just how popular American TV is in Australia.

After lunch, the three of us headed into the church. I'm pretty sure it was the first time I had been charged admission to a church in Europe. It was only one Euro, so it wasn't expensive, but it was still a little unusual. Since we did have to pay, I decided to ask the lady collecting money if I could set up my tripod in the church. She said it was fine. So I did. This particular panorama ended up causing me a bit of a headache to stitch together. The software had a little trouble getting the roof done just right, but with a little coaxing I was able to get it to come out pretty good.

The church was the last stop on the tour. Once we all piled back into the van, we headed back to downtown Salzburg. The driver suggested that we walk to the Mirabellgarten on the opposite side of a building that he pointed out so that we could see the fountain and the steps that were featured in the Do Re Mi song from the movie. I headed over there after dropping some stuff off at the car, and ran into the Australian guys again. I asked them what they were planning on doing, and they mentioned heading for the fortress up on top of the hill (the Festung). I was planning to go there as well, so I tagged along with them for a while. Here's a view of the Festung from the Mirabellgarten:

There is a funicular that goes to the top of the Festung, but unfortunately it was out of service. Boy, was it a hike to get up there, especially the day after skiing for the first time. I was pretty tuckered out by the time we made it to the top. It was definitely worth it, though. The views of Salzburg, in both directions, were fantastic. Here are the pictures:

(No, my left arm does not actually end abruptly like the picture shows. I wasn't lined up very well for the picture, and didn't realize it until I started looking at the pictures at home. Oops.)

Sometime before I started taking all these pictures, I got separated from the Australian guys, and didn't see them again. The time finally came when I needed to head back to get dinner, and I started the trek back across town to the car. Part way down the path, I found another nice angle on the cathedral in the town, and took one more panorama:

Well, that's it for the Austria pictures this time around. It's looking like I'll have a chance to take some more in March when Jannine and Nathan come visit, because they want to spend a couple days in Vienna--can't wait for you guys to visit! I'll be spending next week in San Francisco for a class, so hopefully I'll have some time in the evenings to take some pictures. We'll see. It will probably be March before I have a chance to get another post done, but check back often just in case. ;)

<-- Previous posts Recent posts -->