Outside Jogja

From various excursions outside Jogja:

Photos from a bike ride into the rice paddies and hills north of the city with Ben and his friend, Andre:

Andre

The best meal I ate in Java

Oh my god, a fried chicken head!

Detail from a bamboo workshop we stopped in on along the ride

A cemetery north of Jogja

Photos from a day trip to the beach at Parangtritis, south of Jogja:

We ate a delicious seafood lunch on the beach. This place gets an honorable mention in the best food in Java contest.

Ben navigating our way home

Imogiri, the cemetery for the Javanese royal family:

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Yogyakarta (Jogja) is the hip university city in central Java where Ben lives. I visited him there and had a wonderful time exploring this busy, chaotic, confusing city. It was a lot of fun, especially thanks to my excellent host and guide!

Dutch colonial architecture in downtown Jogja.

Graffiti downtown

I loved this playground!

The view from the main mall's fourth floor food court

Ruins of the Sultan's Water Palace:

Jogja's bird market:

Bodie State Historic Park

Bryn and I finished our backpacking early, so we squeezed in a side trip to Bodie. I love Bodie. It's one of my favorite ghost towns. Parts of it are more well preserved than others (like the Chinatown and "Maiden Lane / Virgin Alley," which are almost entirely gone - cough, cough), and the park's management approach of "arrested decay" may be somewhat problematic, but it is gorgeous. And the landscape is so beautifully sparse.

While we were there, we took the guided stamp mill tour, led by a guide playing Mrs. Hoover. (Theodore Hoover, who ran the mine for a few years, was Herbert's brother and a future chair of Stanford's Dept. of Mining Engineering.) The tour participants were a tough crowd: Bryn and I (who were very well behaved), two former Bodie SHP employees, three tourists from a mining town in New Zealand, and two mining history buffs from Reno. Props to Mrs. Hoover for keeping us all in line!






Downtown Bodie:
(Peaking in the windows of the schoolhouse.)






A bit farther out:
A view of the Chinatown area, with the remains of a liquor store in the foreground.


What is left of "Maiden Lane / Virgin Alley."




Bryn reads the interpretive brochure! The old mine area is closed to the public, due to safety hazards and such.

Hoover Wilderness

Last weekend, I went backpacking with Bryn in the Hoover Wilderness, just east of Yosemite. It was very pretty, if hazy at times, with a number of wildfires burning in the vicinity. I need to get out of the Bay Area more often!

My First Real Forray Into Night Photography

The night of Wednesday, August 13th, was the peak of the perseids meteor shower. It also marked the beginning of the Lockheed fire in Santa Cruz County near the towns of Swanton and Bonny Doon. I could see the fire glowing on the ridge to the southwest of the ranch where I was staying. It was spectacular and somewhat ominous.

I have always wanted to learn how to take good photos at night, but have never really tackled the challenge. But I figured that had to be the night I tried, so I set up my tripod in the yard behind the house and tried my best. Of the dozens of photos I took, only a few of them came out well and in focus. But I'm very proud of them.

Big Dipper Ranch 2009

For the past couple of weeks, I have been house-sitting again at my coworker's ranch house on Skyline. (Here are the photos I took last year when I was up there.) It was beautiful up there, and a great mini-vacation. The sunrises and sunsets were spectacular. (I wasn't there too much during the day, since I had to work.)

Chicago's River Architecture Tour

After seeing Barack Obama speak, my Mom and I took a river architecture tour of Chicago. There were lots of amazing buildings, but, from my vantage point on a boat with a bunch of other tourists, most of my pictures weren't that great. (For example, I was not able to get a picture of what was probably my favorite building, Chicago's old main post office, which is absolutely massive and currently abandoned.) Here are some of the best pictures I did take:



Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City and River City:

President Obama Addresses the AMA

I was in Chicago to visit my Dad (an early Father's Day present). He was in Chicago, because he is one of Maine's delegates to the American Medical Association. On the Thursday before I flew out, the New York Times reported that President Obama would be giving the keynote speech at the AMA the following Monday to kick off his push for health care reform. I was very excited that I would just happen to be there, and hoped that I could see the speech. Alas, the AMA did not have enough space in the ballroom for everyone, and only delegates, state medical society ceos, and delegates' spouses could attend in the main room. They had a ballroom next door set up with a live video feed for the medical students and advocates for various issues who were attending the AMA meeting but were not delegates, and I got to watch the speech there. It was still an incredibly cool experience.

Obama's speech was excellent, and it was great to watch it with such an engaged audience. Many members of the AMA are very conservative and are apprehensive about Obama's plans (you can hear boos at a few points in the speech), but a lot of the New England delegates I spoke to really liked the speech and are hopeful about the prospect of health care reform. They certainly see the need for it. After the speech, I ended up in an elevator with a number of delegates from Virginia, who were going through a passionate play-by-play.

Outside the hotel, a small group of protesters and curious onlookers gathered, along with police, secret service, and tv news crews. There were anti-abortion people and gay rights protesters, but I only saw one person with a health care-related protest sign.

Miwestern Gothic

Chicago's Lincoln Park