Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests

I have posted the story and photos from my business trip to Beijing, China. I was there for 10 days to provide training and knowledge transfer. I also met some of Rosa’s extended family.

The trip story is here http://myredbmw.net/travel/beijing-dec-2011/.

The photo gallery is here: http://gallery.myredbmw.net/v/Travel/Beijing2011/.

De Kathammer windmill

I have finally posted the story and photos from our trip to Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

The trip story is here http://myredbmw.net/travel/benelux-jun-2011/.

The photo gallery is here: http://gallery.myredbmw.net/v/Travel/Benelux2011/.

We arrived on a sunny Saturday afternoon and went immediately to the Saint-Laurent shopping area. Rosa went off shopping and I walked around with my camera, although I didn’t take very many pics. I had a nice snack and a drink, walked up and down the street and popped into a few of the interesting stores. I was looking in the used-clothing stores for props that I could use in future photo workshops. Although I did not buy anything, I did get a good idea what was available.

Rosa and I met later in the afternoon and she continued to shop until the stores closed. We had planned to visit Saint Joseph’s Oratory on Mount Royal, but we ran out of time during the day.

We went out for dinner at Ferreira Café Trattoria, a stylish Portuguese restaurant. We both had fish.

After dinner, we checked in at the Loews Hôtel Vogue, which was only feet from Sainte-Catherine, although Rosa did not do any shopping there as she found more on Saint-Laurent. The hotel was exquisite, but was a little more expensive. The location would have been fantastic, had we spent more time in the area shopping.

Dramatic Beaver

Sunday morning was dedicated for visiting Le Biodôme de Montréal. This was something I wanted to do, and Rosa was interested as well. Originally built as a velodrome for the 1976 Olympics, it was converted into its current biological exhibition facility in the late 1980′s. It houses four main ecosystems from the Americas: Tropical Rainforest, Laurentian Forest, Saint Lawrence Marine Eco-System and a Polar area (with both North and South Polar regions represented). There was so much to see, from marmoset and macaws in the trees to caimans in the water, a busy beaver and sunbathing river otter, lots of fish, the iconic East Coast puffin, shorebirds, and penguins. I really enjoyed the visit and could go back again to take more pictures!

After Le Biodôme, we went back to Saint-Laurent and had lunch at another Portuguese restaurant, Casa Minhota. It was quite good and we enjoyed the meal.

The afternoon was spent shopping, shopping and more shopping.

At the end of the day, we had a bite to eat in a café. We saw a lot of people walking out of a side street, so we investigated. It was some sort of Portuguese festival. There was a singer on a stage, lots of people walking around or listening. We watched for a little while and then we left for home.

Detail of Jean-Paul Gaultier costume

Saturday morning we drove into Montréal. Our first destination was Le Musée des Beaux-Arts to see the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit. There were many examples of his haute couture costumes. Rosa is a fashion junky, and I’m somewhat interested. Jean-Paul, over his long career, has explored so many areas of fashion, setting trends and pushing boundaries.

Next we walked around the Saint Catherine area for Rosa to shop but she didn’t find much – the area was mostly chain stores. So we left and I dropped Rosa off in the Saint Laurent area.

I drove south to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve – the Formula-1 race track. The track is actually a public road. However the speed limit is only 30 frustrating km/h. I set my cruise control and started lapping very slowly around the course. The security guards all waved as I drove by time after time. I’m sure I was not the first to do this. The circuit was split with a row of pylons, consigning vehicle traffic on one side and bikes and rollerbladers on the other.

Then I left to drive north to Lamborghini Montréal. I lost my Lamborghini hat at Mosport and wanted to buy a replacement. I went in but did not see the boutique mentioned on their website. One of the salesmen came over and asked if I was looking for something. I mentioned the boutique and he pointed to a single counter by the door. They had no hats.

Paifang entrance to Chinatown

I picked up Rosa and we checked in at Le Place d’Armes Hotel in the Vieux-Port (Old Port). The room was huge and very luxurious! We had dinner in the hotel at Aix Cuisine du Terroir. It was delicious. Afterwards, we went for a walk. It was a lovely warm summer evening. We walked through Chinatown and Rosa had flashbacks from when she lived in China. On our way back, there was a crowd of people looking down at the highway. There was a TV truck there as well. A 25-ton section of the tunnel roof had collapsed on the Autoroute Ville-Marie earlier in the day. Luckily no one was hurt.

We spent the next day window shopping. We started in the Vieux-Port at the Bonsecours Market. The weather in the morning was excellent and perfect for a walking/shopping tour of Old Montréal. We slowly wandered our way towards the Rue University shopping area. However the weather turned nasty in the afternoon while we were indoors. The rain outside became torrential. Unfortunately we left our umbrella in the car in the morning. Despite promising to never leave the umbrella behind again, we had to buy yet another umbrella just so that we could leave the mall.

Rosa shopping

During a short break from the downpour, we managed to walk down Saint Catherine towards our dinner spot. We had to stop again in the entrance of Christ Church Cathedral when the rain picked up again. We were drenched. During the next break in the downpour, we ran to the Restaurant Julien.

When we finished, we called for a taxi to take us from the restaurant back to the parking at Quais du Vieux-Port. It was nearly three hours to drive home through a traffic jam and continuing rain squalls.

Our trip journal: http://myredbmw.net/travel/eastern-europe-december-2009/

Our gallery: http://gallery.myredbmw.net/v/Travel/Eastern2009/

The Google Earth file from the trip: Eastern Europe 2009.kmz.

Our trip journal: http://myredbmw.net/travel/spain-dec-2010/

Our gallery: http://gallery.myredbmw.net/v/Travel/Spain2010/

The Google Earth file from the trip: Spain 2010.kmz.

While I could not make any phone calls, it has served as a way to send and receive emails and surf the web using Wi-Fi in airports or hotels.

It also came in handy to type in our travel journal each day. This way I can import the journal as soon as I get home. It is better to write notes each day than trying to remember it later. Typing it on the iPhone each day is much better than trying to transcribe my hand-written notes a few weeks after we return.

Shadow of the Earth

On the flight to Madrid, while flying into the sunrise, I noticed this triangular dark area on the horizon. In my sleep-deprived state, it took me a few seconds before I realized it was the shadow of the Earth.

This shadow extends out hundreds of thousands of kilometres into space, out past the orbit of the Moon. If the shadow intersects with the full moon, we see a lunar eclipse.

The act of exploring and understanding the world and universe are such an incredible joy for me.

1. I learned that if I rent or borrow equipment, I should read the manual before I need to use the equipment. During the launch, when I was using the Canon 100-400mm, I did not set the correct focus length switch. This meant that when the camera needed to refocus, it would hunt for focus over the entire focal length. If I had set the switch correctly, it would have only used the longer focus lengths and should have focused faster.

2. Next, reviewing the photos later, I realized I should have borrowed or bought a UV lens filter, to cut down on the haze. All the launch photos have a bluish tinge.

3. Always remember to bring the lens hood if you have one. When I visited the Kennedy Visitors Complex, I forgot to bring the lens hood for the Canon 10-22mm. It didn’t greatly impact any photos but it could have – always be prepared.

4. Now, about the launch itself. As many people on the Internet have noted, it is very hard to both experience a launch and take pictures. I did my best to do both, as I only had one opportunity. If I had more chances to see a launch, I would go once to experience it, and once to try capturing the experience with my camera.

I was able to watch Atlantis as it was nearly at the official definition of outer space (roughly 100km), which was after the 4 minute point of the ascent to orbit. And as I looked up at the vehicle, two thoughts came to mind.

5. First, the planned height of the SpaceShip Two flights of Virgin Galactic will be about that height. It’s only a third of the height of the typical orbit of the International Space Station. And it doesn’t really seem very high, when you can see the shuttle attaining that in such a short period of time. You can see still the shuttle as it passes that height.

Graph of altitudes

6. Secondly, it absolutely stunning how thin the atmosphere of the Earth really is. As noted above, the official edge of space is 100km. All of the air that is used by every human being and every animal and every plant that ever lived on this good planet, all used that thin veneer of air. Just 100km of air, spread across the face of the Earth. That’s all there is.

And that’s where all of the air pollution goes. It’s not a limitless sky. It’s very very finite. To a single person, it seems incomprehensibly unending, but when you think about the output from 6.8 billion people, it seems very limited. All the cars of the world, all the planes, ships and lawn mowers and leaf blowers and electric generation plants – they all empty into that fragile sheet of air.

I worry about air pollution (and water pollution) and global warming. Even if a person, against all evidence, does not believe that man is contributing to the problem of global warming, certainly they cannot deny that air pollution is a problem that is created by man.

And I think about the entire trip. I flew down to Florida, which directly contributed to air pollution. I watched the shuttle, which uses aluminum-based material in the Solid Rocket Boosters. The Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) burn hydrogen and oxygen and do not pollute directly, but it took a lot of energy to create that volume of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and another big electrical bill to cool those liquids and keep them cool. There are the transportation costs of moving everything around – the solid booster segments come from Utah, the external tank comes from Louisiana.

I’m scared sometimes that we have already passed the point of keeping our planet useful to future generations. I worry that the air pollution, global warming, pollution of our water, dispersion of all the man-man chemicals (in pesticides, medicines, leeching buried plastics, huge oil spills, garbage dumps, etc) has already put enough of our junk into the biosphere that the Earth will become uninhabitable in some distant future.

I do what I can to reduce my personal impact, but I know I am not doing enough.

Saturday morning I woke up quite early, as I am still adjusting to the 3-hr time difference. I packed up what I needed and went down to the car. I had an iPod Nano with some podcasts and audiobooks, hat, jacket, sunscreen and the Eyewitness Travel Guides Top Ten Los Angeles. I brought all my camera gear as well, including my Amod AGL3080 photo tracker.

I stopped for breakfast at McDonald’s and was on the highway around 7am.

Dennis Hopper's star

My first stop was Hollywood. It took about an hour to drive there (Los Angeles is huge – more about that later). I parked the car and started walking down Hollywood Boulevard. My first stop was the Art Deco style Pantages Theatre and the Capital Records building. From there I walked down the Walk of Fame towards the Kodak Theatre (where the Oscars are currently presented) and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I could see the famous Hollywood sign in the distance on the hills to the north. The sign is smaller than I expected. As with the Statue of Liberty, the photos I’ve seen are shot in such a way as to make it look bigger than in real life. It’s also because it is actually quite a distance from this part of the city.

In front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre are the handprints, footprints and signatures of famous Hollywood stars in concrete tiles.

After walking back to my car, I drove south from Hollywood Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard, where I drove westward. I drove by the Viper Room (where River Phoenix died), the Rainbow Bar and Grill and the Whisky a Go Go (where The Doors were the house band). From there, the road leads through Beverly Hills, past UCLA, Bel Air and into Santa Monica. Lots of nice homes, but I didn’t spend much time looking around as I did not want to get lost.

Once I reached the Pacific Ocean, I took Highway 1 south with no particular destination in mind. Driving by kilometer after kilometer of beach, I decided to pull over and take a walk. I could see a pier in the distance.

Santa Monica Pier

It was a great day for walking along the beach. From where I parked, it was about a kilometer to walk to the Santa Monica Pier. I did not realize until I arrived that Santa Monica Pier is also the west coast terminus of Route 66. The Pier had an amusement park, including a roller coaster and Ferris wheel. There is a trapeze school as well. Many people were fishing off the end of the Pier. I walked around for about an hour, taking lots of pictures before I stopped for lunch – deep fried shrimp – and then headed back to the car. I decided to walk on the beach instead of the sidewalk. At first it was nice walking barefoot along the sand, but the sand was unbelievably hot. I walked along the edge of the water to cool my feet  before crossing the beach to the parking lot.

I wanted to head south to Long Beach. I thought it would be easy to get there. Lacking a good map, I had no idea how difficult it would be.

I followed along the coast for as long as I could before I had to start taking other streets, due to the marinas in Marina Del Ray. I took Washington Boulevard, thinking that it looked big and I thought it was heading south. After driving for what seemed like an hour, I drove by the Sony Pictures Entertainment studios in Culver City, which allowed me to find out where I was the tiny map I had brought. All that driving and I had barely moved on the map. This is when it really hit me how big Los Angeles is. Almost an hour of driving and I was maybe 10% of the way to Long Beach. The only way to get there would be to get on a highway.

I found the 405 and 110 and it still took about 40 minutes to drive to Long Beach.

The map I had did not show Long Beach, so I had to guess my way around. I was looking for the Queen Mary. I thought, “Hey, how hard can it be to find a huge ocean liner?” Stupid question. I was still not grasping it how big the city is! I stumbled upon the SS Lane Victory, a World War II Victory Ship, so I stopped to take a look. I found out that it still functional and is used for tourist cruises!

The Port of Long Beach is stunning in size. The Port of Long Beach and the nearby Port of Los Angeles combine to be largest port in the world (109km of waterfront and 43 km^2 of land area in total). It goes on for mile after mile. I had heard that the rows of giant cranes along the many waterfronts inspired George Lucas in the design of the AT-AT Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back.

I took a bridge and highway east until I could see signs for the Queen Mary. I got off the highway, followed the signs to the entrance to the parking lot, but for some reason all the cars were being waved back onto the surrounding streets. I thought perhaps there was a problem, so I circled back around. This time I was allowed into the parking lot, but was soon directed back out again. I was driving around in circles, all controlled by the parking attendants. I circled around once more and again was directed back towards the exit. I stopped at one of the parking attendants to explain that I wanted to stop and see the Queen Mary. I was told that the parking lots were full. Oh, that would be why I was directed out of the facility. I was told that the facility was being used for the 7th Annual Iron and Ink Tattoo & Kustom Culture Festival. Oh, that would explain all the goths, biker dudes and pink-haired punks.

RMS Queen Mary

I explained that I only wanted to take some photos of the Queen Mary. I guess the parking attendant liked me because she let me try to find a place to park for free. I thanked her and found a spot next to a light standard (technically it was not a parking spot). I walked through the crowd to the bow of the ship. I felt awkward because it was obvious that I The RMS Queen Mary is a fine example of an Art Deco ocean liner of a time when liners were the only way to travel between continents. Incongruously, there is a Cold War Soviet Foxtrot submarine moored next to the bow. I was not able to get on the ship (or sub) to look around due to the festival. I wish I had been able to go onboard.

After that, I decided to head north again to see the Hollywood Bowl. Once I got there, near suppertime, I was mired in a traffic jam. I found out that it was a jam to get into the Bowl, as it was the Playboy Jazz Festival.

I gave up and drove north past Universal Studios, and into North Hollywood and Sherman Oaks. I gave up randomly driving around and decided to head to see Griffith Observatory, which was a good choice.

Griffith Observatory

Griffith Observatory overlooks Los Angeles. It’s a fantastic example of the Art Deco style. It’s still a functioning observatory, and I went inside to see their coelostat (solar telescope). I was starving, so I stopped at the cafe. I bought two peanut butter and jam sandwiches and a huge Rice Krispy square. That really hit the spot. I sat on the patio eating and watching the sun set by the Hollywood sign. At one end of the patio was a photo shoot – an Asian girl in a cocktail dress posing on the stairs while her boyfriend (?) snapped away. An assistant was holding the rest of the equipment and flash.

I went back to the roof to watch the lights of Los Angeles in the growing darkness. I waited about an hour for night to fall and then started shooting some longer exposures of the expanse of the city, bright against the clouds (or is that smog?).

I walked back to my car with some difficulty. It was pitch black and my knee was felt like it was burning – my body was telling me I walked too far for one day. It was a long day and I arrived back at the hotel around 9:30pm.

Today, Sunday, was a little shorter. This was because I needed to get some sleep before heading into the customer site at midnight for the start of the maintenance window.

Again, I stopped for pancakes at McDonald’s, filled the gas tank and headed back to LA.

Hollywood Bowl

My first stop was the Hollywood Bowl. I had no problems getting in and parking at 8am. I grabbed my camera and walked into the site. No one stopped me, as I think everyone thought I was part of the event staff.

Next I went north to the start of Mulholland Drive. It winds along the top of the Hollywood Hills. There are some fantastic views north and south over the city. All along Mulholland you can see spectacular homes. I stopped at one viewing area and took a short walk (my knee started to hurt again) though the hillside. Lots of people were out walking their dogs along the dusty trails.

Once I reached Interstate 405, I drove south (past the Getty Center) and down to Venice Beach. Venice Beach is just south of the Santa Monica Pier. I parked and started to walk along the infamous boardwalk. I was expecting it to be a complete freak-show, but to be honest, it was actually nothing like its reputation. Perhaps Sundays are quieter.

There were lots of artists displaying their works, a few buskers, a dozen shops offering “free medical marijuana tests”, clothing stores and tourist traps. There was a fantastic skatepark, where I stopped to take lots of pictures. I could also practice my french with another tourist who was visiting from France. Next were the streetball courts, where there were multiple pick-up games going on.

Further down was Muscle Beach, although there was no one training when I walked past. I bought some ice cream for lunch and then started to head back.

Venice Beach Drum Circle

I took some more pictures at the skate park and then came across a drum circle. I sat and watched the drummers for a while. Everyone was having fun. One older guy in a muscle shirt and surfer shorts was whaling on his drum while a Che Guevara look-alike was in his own groove on a shaker.

I started back to the hotel around 4pm. It took longer to drive home because it was close to the Sunday rush hour.