12.14.09
Posted in China, Culture, Good Stuff, Photography, Travel at 11:01 pm by thomas
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese street clothes.
Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.
I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.
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11.15.09
Posted in Good Stuff, One World, Travel at 12:16 am by thomas
Friday morning while I was getting ready to move my bike out for the ride to work, I heard on the radio that there are two men in a boat coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge… from Japan!
My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought was – “Wait – if I speed up a little bit through Sausalito, I can see these guys!”. So off I went, biking at full speed (not as fast as you may imagine, trust me) up the hill to the bridge, and there they were – they had just passed under the bridge and were surrounded by a small fleet of boats, guys on surfboards and even a news helicopter:
I figured that they would probably go towards the Marina, and I kept an eye on the group of boats while I crossed the bridge and rolled down through Crissy Fields. As it turned out, the timing was perfect:
Meet Mick Dawson and Chris Martin, who in their boat Bojangles just finished rowing across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the US. It took them 189 days on the open ocean to complete this amazing feat.
Yesterday evening I spent several hours reading through their very entertaining blog Golden Gate Endeavor and it is just amazing to follow along from day to day with their struggles. The Pacific Ocean did not make it easy for them, that’s for sure! The weather was often brutal, and on a number of days the wind and the currents did everything to push Mick and Chris back towards the East.
So Congratulations to the crew of the Bojangles! And thanks for taking us all along on your expedition across the ocean – the blog and the pictures of your adventure are quite fascinating and very inspirational.
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07.31.09
Posted in Navel Gazing, Travel at 9:16 pm by thomas
After visiting my family in Germany we tacked on a few days for ourselves in Italy – we have been there together before maybe five or six years ago and it felt great to go back for a little bit more time in that wonderful country.
We traveled by sleeper train across the Alps and woke up to a hazy Italian landscape glowing in the early morning light, only a few kilometers away from Florence. We had been to Florence before, and so we just switched trains there to continue on to Pisa, which was a new place for both of us.
Pisa was only a short stop-over on our way to the real destination for this trip, but we did spend a few hours walking around, checking out the sights, and for a late, lazy, second breakfast in a small alley amongst an Italian crowd getting ready for the day. Here is a short audio piece I’ve recorded in the outdoors seating area of this café in Pisa.
After another two hours on a local train we finally made it to Sestri Levante, which is a small beach town north of Cinque Terre, a national park renowned for its picturesque fishing villages that are hanging precariously on cliff sides above the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
Here is a gallery of some of the photos we took in three days in the villages of the Cinque Terre, a few hours in Pisa and, at the end of our trip, half a day in Venice.
Through this all too short time, our hosts and everybody we met was fantastically friendly and welcoming. We couldn’t have hoped for a better time in this sun-drenched country and our love affair with Italy has been renewed for another trip, hopefully very soon…
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05.21.09
Posted in China, One World, Travel at 11:40 pm by thomas
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989.
Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships.
There were the banners, held high.
And the faces. Sweaty excitement in the faces of the young students, many of them looking like they were still in high school.
Bold, colorful characters put down with a heavy brush. White banners. Red characters, rippling in the wind.
The faces, so open, so happy with the sudden empowerment. Shouted slogans filling the air.
Crammed between other onlookers, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people on the old Garden Bridge. Marching students ahead, coal barges on the water behind. The steel girders of the bridge digging into my back.
So much applause, people clapping in the rhythm of the marchers. Arms raised, fingers pointing at banners.
The infectious excitement of the crowd. Waves of emotion passing through us like the wind through trees. Laughter, shouts, chants picked up by group after group of marchers.
Students. Workers. Teachers. So many faces.
Happy, excited faces.
Even if only for a brief moment,
Freedom.
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03.01.09
Posted in Culture, Japan, Travel at 6:23 pm by thomas
Japanese restaurants traditionally display artificial menu items in their shop windows, and every visitor to Japan has been dazzled by the amazing quality and realism of the plastic models for every conceivable food item that can be found in restaurant windows.
Sooner or later it dawns on the visitor that there must be a massive industry for artificial food items in Japan, where huge amounts of fake sushi, spaghetti plates and curry bowls are produced. But for the casual tourist there is usually no opportunity to visit one of these factories.
Tony McNicol is a journalist and photographer in Tokyo and he visited one of the plastic food factories at the outskirts of Tokyo and has a great slideshow and article on this subject on his site.
While looking at the photos I started wondering how often one of the plastic food artists catches themselves licking their fingers while shaping epoxy into the shape of a dessert… 
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12.18.08
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Photography, Travel at 11:42 pm by thomas
Richard Howe spent much of 2006 walking the streets of Manhattan, taking photos of ALL the street corners in town.
I love these kinds of projects that take on a mysterious life of their own. On first thought it sounds like a ridiculous idea. A photo of every street corner? But once you click your way into the galleries, and move from photo to photo and from corner to corner, suddenly it all starts to make sense.
The photos are presented in a widescreen format that lends itself well to the subject, with every street corner revealing a panoramic microcosm of life in Manhattan. There is yellow taxis everywhere, bike couriers, businessmen out for lunch, hustlers and shoppers.
Many of the corners have well-known brand stores in the downtown areas, but further along the island there are many unique local cornerstores and sometimes quite exotic businesses that add so much to the charme of the big city.
The galleries offer an autoplay function that invites to take effortless, dreamy strolls through parts of Manhattan that many tourists never visit.
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01.25.08
Posted in Culture, Media, One World, Science, Travel at 11:27 pm by thomas
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself in all those exotic places.
If you are an unreconstructed map-fetishist like me, you will love this site: strange maps
This site is a treasure trove of very unusual maps with very thoughtful descriptions and I found it to be quite an inspirational place for the tired creative mind.
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09.17.07
Posted in Good Stuff, Media, Travel at 10:27 pm by thomas
“A World Of Sounds” is the title of a sidebar article that appears in this month’s Travel + Leisure magazine’s online feature about the Top 25 Travel Websites.
The sidebar article features ten audio recordings from places around the world, including my Competing Chinese Operas, that has before been listed on the Quiet American.
I’m pretty thrilled about this and I will definitely do more recordings in the future. It’s in fact such a nice medium to go along with travel stories, that we have just added it as a feature to Mapskip.com. You can check out the same recording on that site, too.
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03.12.07
Posted in One World, Travel at 11:38 pm by thomas
Here’s a fun little quiz:
Name all the countries in the world in ten minutes!
There’s 192 countries that are currently officially recognized, and this little quiz almost drove me crazy. I thought that I would easily be able to spell out half the countries in ten minutes, but I had 127 countries left at the end of my first try.
Time to study some geography. Again.
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12.16.06
Posted in Photography, Travel at 12:30 am by thomas
Found in Hawi on Hawaii’s Big Island
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