"Raises bat"
That's right, I've somehow made it to centurion status with this little publication. It's taken a short while but we've finally hit this milestone. What better way to celebrate than with a lengthy photo essay?
On my trip abroad we ended up taking a lot of photographs. Going snap happy isn't overly difficult these days, with digital storage space being as expansive as it is now. It was also a good opportunity to fiddle around with our new semi pro camera, pointing it everywhere we could just to see what tricks it could do. According to my computer we ended up taking over 900 photos, and naturally I could keep on posting and posting for each little moment that occurred, but I don't wish to string you guys along for too long. I've chosen a collection of moments I consider worthy, I hope you enjoy them.
This was taken on Lantau Island near the cable car leading up to the giant Buddha. I can't say there's an awful lot to see there since the entire cable car thing is a ploy by the MTR company to attract visitors. There's even a fake Chinese village at the end of the line dressed up like the old olden days where you can buy souvenirs presumably just like they used to hundreds of years ago.I chose this photograph because I spent a good 30 minutes with my dad here waiting for the rest of my family to find a toilet. There's something about the elderly that requires some of them to report to a urinal every couple of hours, and when several of them congregate at once there is no escape.
Here we have two fine specimens of the ancient and noble order of the Starbuck, a mystic organisation devoted to serving you every possible combination of coffee imaginable, no matter how diabetes inducing or caffeine shake effecting it is.
Here's a nice night shot my sister took of the new fancy casino in Macau. It looks ridiculous during the day but at night it has a strange degree of fascination that attracts the eye. For a town driven completely by gambling, it really is a nice place to visit. I wasn't there long enough to find the seedy underbelly that runs the place but my inner Gamblor felt right at home.
Food in general is fairly cheap in these parts of the world, but being in a casino as part of a captive audience tends to inflate prices somewhat. The silver lining of sorts is that the prices becomes about the same as food would cost back home so you feel slightly not so bad about it... well self delusion was worth a shot.
I took the next pic at the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. It's a countdown clock letting you know how soon the looming 2009 East Asia Games are. Can't you just feel the excitement building up?
If you could win people at the fairground, I guess they would come in giant human sized enclosures like this. The clamp would really hurt though.
In Hong Kong, missing the train is no big deal. You simply wait 3 to 4 minutes for the next one. It's quick, reliable and most importantly nothing like the public transport system here. No bullshit about the tracks being too hot or there not being enough trains to service everyone, things just work there. Oh, and they have a smartcard system that doesn't take forever to implement.
Seeing this anti-drugs ad while on the train somehow made me think of that Jennifer Garner movie "Suddenly 30", but with a different set of numbers.
(Scene: young Chad, a surly teenager with a lust for sloth visits his grandfather in the nursing home and observes all the equipment keeping him alive.)
"Aww man! Look at all that neat stuff! I wish I could have a machine eat, breathe and extract my waste for me!"
(Chad then goes home to his closet and breaks out the jar of fairy dust that's been sitting on his doll house. Chad's a confused, lazy kind of sloth who will grow up to become the lead singer of Nickelback but of course he's skipping it all, thank Christ for that. He proceeds to sprinkle a liberal amount of fairy dust on himself.)
(Chad awakens 53 years later in the closet, only to stumble out and fall down the stairs and dislocating his hip in the process. He later finds out all his friends are dead and he can't afford all those nice things his grandfather had and has kidney failure from his days as a propagator of bad stoner rock music. On his way back to the house to gather the fairy dust to return him to his adolescent state, he is attacked by a mob of former PoWs who were tortured by the US government with the use of his music and the theme to Sesame Street, which he also somehow wrote before he was even conceived.)
Ok, so it starts out like a screwball comedy but ends up like a tragic drama. You might think that this is the worst script idea ever and that it'd never work but then they did make Hancock. I just need Will Smith to play Chad.
And this brings us to the end of this long winded journey, definitely worthy of the 100 post milestone. Thanks to everyone who even bothers visiting this site every now and then, I look forward to writing the next 100 posts.
Join me next time when I buy a new record!
Yes comment on the 100th post XD.
well done. You're a good regular poster. By the way, the train system in Japan is exactly the same, and I made the same jokes at the expense of our system to my relatives too.
And you're a great photographer!