Location: Isle of Skye; Small Towns Across Scotland
It’s been a long time coming, but here’s a video of our trip across the countryside. As usual, you can get the video from YouTube or on Vimeo. Pick your favorite, and check out our first foray into drone footage!
It’s official. I won.
If you haven’t yet heard, I entered a video contest for the iSchools organization. It’s a global consortium of information science and technology schools. They staged a contest for promoting the organization, and selected my entry! I wasn’t able to announce it for a bit, because they wanted to do it first. But I’m allowed to now; I placed second.
On March 20, I’ll have an all-expenses paid trip to exotic Philadelphia and a generous honorarium. I’ve never been to Philly, but I have some friends there that I’m excited to see. If there’s time in between the conference talks, I’ll be sure to check out all the historical landmarks and take as many interesting pictures as possible.
If you’d like to see it, check out the winning video below. I do my best radio announcer voice, and V even makes a cameo!
Location: Jian’ou, Fujian Province, China
I can say with much sincerity that one of the things we miss the most about China is the food and the food culture. Especially breakfast, which I think most Chinese people would agree is the most important meal of the day. One of the most common responses I get to photos from our journey is: “That’s what you guys ate for breakfast!?”
In Jian’ou, breakfast is the time the city hummed with life. Everyone would venture out to one of the hundreds of local breakfast shops to start their day off right (and maybe catch up on a little gossip and get a glimpse of the resident foreigners). More people would routinely eat out for breakfast than lunch or dinner combined. And seriously, what do Chinese people eat for breakfast? If you’re coming to China expecting a piece of toast, bacon, oatmeal, pancakes, or some cereal in the morning you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Happy holiday season, all! V and I were sick for a week, so we lost the momentum of putting stuff out there. Sorry about that.
Specifically, the reason I haven’t put together a video in a while is because I thought I lost the footage from the second half of the trip. I erased my computer a couple times this year, and was convinced that several things disappeared in the migration. Thankfully, this is not the case!
I managed to put together a quick recap of some of the things we did in Thailand. The first two parts of the video are from a train market, and a floating market. The final section includes some shots from temples around the city. Bangkok is famous primarily because there are hundreds (thousands?) of temples in the municipality, so I showcased a few of those.
Location: Angkor Wat, Kingdom of Cambodia
Even though it’s been a few months, our memory of Cambodia has yet to fade. The other young people we met at the hostel were kind, generous with their time, and great to talk to. They were some of the first people we spoke to in English after leaving China, and our eagerness to make friends showed. But our experience there wasn’t just about cheap beer, swimming pools, and markets.
Cambodia is home to the Angkor temple complex, an astounding relic known the world over. One can easily spend a week going from ruin to ruin and seeing the testament to human engineering and spirituality. People make pilgrimages to the place for good reason, especially Angkor Wat.
As you know, V and I have been very busy these past weeks. We have left our post in China and moved to other points west, finally settling down in familiar Columbus, Ohio. And as I am sure you have assumed, dear readers, I’ve taken some time to put together a few videos from our time in Southeast Asia. I’m still solidifying the projects, but each of them provides a brief window into our experiences. We saw some crazy, amazing, beautiful things, and I’m really excited to share all of it with you.
However, we’re going to try this a little bit different. Instead of doing the video sequences in the order of our travels, I won’t. These ones are a little more poetic and a bit more varied than the previous ones. As a result, I’ll just release them as they’re done. Maybe they’re short, or long, or about a brick in the wall of a monastery, or an entire city in macrocosm.
I’m also working out a documentary. I’m not entirely sure if it will come to fruition, but I’m scripting it a little bit now. It’s going to focus exclusively on our China experience. Stay tuned.
School’s out for the summer!! And we have less than 20 days left in China before we leave on our Southeast Asian travels.
K and I can hardly believe it. Time really does fly.
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