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Week Ten: Drink Deeply

Even though it's early March, we're already getting amazing weather here in Berkeley. I love to spend the afternoon out on the back porch, laid out on a lounge chair, my Jambox providing the tunes while I read or do homework. Today, I was out there studying for exams and decided to grab a glass of cranberry juice to cool off a bit. As I was heading back outside, the sun shot through my glass and lit it up in the most brilliant shade of red. It was hard to capture that in a photo, but I'm really pleased with how the color and the shadows came out.

[ 9 / 52 ]

Week Nine: California Sakura

About a week ago, trees all over Berkeley suddenly burst into bloom. I'm not sure if they are actually cherry blossoms (their red leaves make me think no), but they reminded me of sakura season in Japan. I always loved sitting with friends, eating and drinking away a weekend afternoon under the trees. I hope they are in bloom over there too when I visit in a few weeks...

Back in the Game

やりなおす (yarinaosu) - To do over or try again

I'd made it a goal in 2012 to complete the 52 Weeks Project - posting one picture every week for a year. I had made it about a third of the way through and was making some of the most interesting pictures I have ever taken. And then my computer died.

With just a few months left before I was set to move back to the US, buying a new computer with a Japanese OS (or paying a ton to get an English one) didn't make sense, so I got by borrowing my girlfriend's under-powered Sony netbook. Unfortunately, it didn't have anywhere near the horsepower to run Lightroom and its tiny screen meant checking the quality of my images was nearly impossible. Unable to process my RAW files, I was forced to abandon the project.

Over eight months later, I decided to have another go at it. I spent most of January travelling and it took me into February to share those stories, but I've finally cleared enough time to start posting my weekly photos to this blog. So far, I'm pretty pleased with the shots I've taken (even if some of them were done at the last minute on Sunday night) and have started taking my camera out with me more often in search of cool images.

This post is meant to share my shots from the first two months, and hopefully I'll be posting new ones on a weekly basis from here on out. I am really excited to see where the project takes me and my photography.

Week One: Looming  

Week Two: After-Dinner Thoughts

   

Week Three: Blue Sky, Blue Water, Blue Suit  

Week Four: Rubix Cube Domination  

Week Five: What Color is Your Hair?  

Week Six: For Whom the Bell Tolls  

Week Seven: Yukata Blues  

Week Eight: Noodle Soup for the Soul

Consumption

気付く (kizuku) - To notice

I have an eating problem.

The truth is, I don't need to eat very much to get by. Most days I just eat a very small breakfast and a relatively light dinner. I've been skipping lunch ever since moving back from Japan to this world of enormous servings. Some days I don't eat anything until 8 or 9pm, if at all - it's easy for me to just forget meals. This isn't an eating disorder - I don't eat this little because I think I'm fat (though I do love being skinny) - it's just that this is the amount of food my body craves on its own.

The reason I'm writing about this is that my lifestyle has become unsustainable. Over the past six months or so, I've honestly felt like I've been getting dumber. I wasn't as sharp, it took longer for concepts to stick, and it felt like my brain just seemed to work slower than usual. At first I simply wrote it off as not being used to being back in school again but, rather than improve, it got worse with time. It wasn't terrible during the fall term, but I finally hit a breaking point this semester.

On top of feeling mentally dull, I started to find myself often just generally lacking energy. There were even a few days where I would get really lightheaded later in the day. In hindsight, that shouldn't have been a surprise. I've been going to the gym three or four times a week recently and, according to my wonderful Jawbone Up, burning something close to 2,500-3,000 calories a day on average. In contrast, my normal diet is probably closer to 1,500 calories a day tops, so you can see how there would be problems.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to up my food intake in a reasonable way. Lots of fruits and vegetables, bigger breakfasts, snacking on almonds, walnuts and baby carrots in the afternoon, making sure to always have rice with dinner. So far I've been feeling better, but it's not easy. Even today, I've nibbled on food all day without ever eating a proper meal. I think at this point it's just a matter of keeping it front of mind and working to turni it into a habit, so all I can do is stick with it and hope for the best. Hopefully I can get myself up and running properly and bring back my A game again!

CA Trek 2013 - Manuel Antonio

After two weeks of constant traveling, sleeping in hostels and riding in vans for nearly the entire length of Central America, we were all ready to treat ourselves to a few days of luxury. Enter Manuel Antonio.

Getting there wasn't easy. The Nicaragua - Costa Rica border I has for to be the most poorly conceived border crossing in the world. In fact, if you asked me to design the worst international border in the world, I probably still wouldn't come up with something as bad as this. After three hours of maneuvering our way through that mess, we were finally in Costa Rica and rented a car to take us the rest of the way to Manuel Antonio, six hours south on the pacific coast.

What awaited us there, however, made it well worth the hassle.

We spent the remainder of our trip in the most magnificent house, built on the side of a hill overlooking the Pacific. The house itself was expansive and gorgeous, but the best parts were the spaces on the edges.

The first floor opened up into a triangular infinity pool, where I spent the vast majority of the time. On one side, there were swinging chairs and chaise lounges to lie around in. On another, bar stools inside the pool, in front of a grill where we often ate dinner. And on the final side, an endless view of blue skies and ocean as far as the eye could see.

The house also had a third-floor lookout with a thatched roof and two big hammocks. As awesome as the view from the pool was, the view here was even better. We didn't have the greatest luck with sunsets during our stay, but there weren't many better places to watch them from than those hammocks.

For four straight days, we did little more than lounge around the house, soaking up rays by day and partying at night. We bought groceries and cooked delicious meals. We drank bottle upon bottle of rum. We sang, we danced, we loved life.

After two weeks on the road with packed schedules and tiny hostel rooms, this was the perfect way to end our trip. It's hard to find the words to capture the simple pleasure of the carefree time we spent in that house. I could have stayed there for weeks and was really bummed when the time came to leave.

Our three weeks in Central America were an amazing time and we all became much closer for the experience. There are people I had barely spoken to before the trip that I now count as friends. Together, we explored new countries, had glorious adventures, and shared unforgettable experiences. I'm so grateful to all the wonderful people who helped make it all that it was. The trip will go down as one of the most memorable I have taken.

CA Trek 2013 - San Juan Del Sur

Our arrival in San Juan Del Sur clearly marks the beginning of our sun and surf portion of the trip. Located just north of the Costa Rica - Nicaraguan border, the heart of the town is only four square blocks. People go to San Juan for just one thing: the beaches.

I shared a room with a small group at Pacha Mama, a cool little hostel popular with surfers located on the edge of the town center. The rest stayed at Casa Oro, a solid hostel that also arranges a lot of tours and transport. San Juan is right on the ocean and the beach is never more than a ten minute walk away, but there are much nicer beaches a few miles out of town. We made Maderas our go-to and took Casa Oro's shuttle out there both afternoons.

The actual beach at Maderas wasn't all that great, but the water was awesome. Refreshingly cool and clear enough to see your feet, it provided a constant supply of waves to ride. Ever since I was little, I've always loved jumping around in the waves and getting tossed about by the surf, so this was an absolute playground for me. Richard showed me some proper (?) bodyboarding technique that made it possible to ride a wave ridiculous distances and I spent most of my time in the wonderful loop of catching a wave, swimming back out, and repeating over and over. Combined with cold drinks from a beach shack, a book, and a chair, it was an awesome way to spend a day. Considering it cost almost nothing to do, I could completely understand how some surfer-types spend months and months in this kind of lifestyle.

The first evening, we were lucky enough to have a shuttle back to town that left at dusk, which allowed us to watch the sunset from the water. Without a cloud in the sky, it was nothing but beautiful colors smeared in an uninterrupted gradient and reflected perfectly back by the ocean. I'm a huge fan of sunsets and this was hands down the best one of the trip.

We spent our nights eating late dinners and drinking rum, a fantastic way to cap off the day. There was some pretty solid food available for a town so small, and our willingness to drink bottle after bottle of Flor de Cana rum never flagged.

As much as we all loved San Juan Del Sur, the luxurious stretch of our trip awaited us in Costa Rica, so we took off early to make our way down to the city of Manuel Antonio.

CA Trek 2013 - Ometepe

Isla de Ometepe is an island made up of two connected volcanos in the middle of Lake Managua, accessible by an hour-long ferry ride. Having had amazing weather to that point, our luck ran out and it started raining almost immediately after getting off the boat. We managed to find a hostel that could accommodate all of us on Playa Domingo, in the middle stretch of the island, but the rain kept up all afternoon and we had little choice but to hang out on the porch. It was raining so hard that we legitimately began to consider the fact that we might need to cut our losses and leave the island the next morning if the weather didn't improve.

Fortunately for us, we woke up to sunshine and blue skies. One group set off first thing to climb one of the volcanos, an eight hour slog up muddy trails into the clouds to find a lake in the crater. That sounded a bit more intense than I was looking for, so I opted to go with the rest on a shorter hike to the islands biggest waterfall.

The hike itself was pretty good, maybe an hour each way with a few steep stretches. The weather was hot and, by the time we reached the waterfall, we were eager to wade into the pool at its base. It wasn't a roaring thunderous waterfall but it was probably close to a hundred yards high, sending a steady stream plummeting downward. Standing directly in the fall, letting the cold mountain water pour over you felt amazing.

We didn't make it back to the hotel with enough time to catch the last ferry of the day off the island, so a few of us set off to find a place to watch the sunset. Armed with one liter bottles of beer and our cameras, we made our way down the road and up the hill before finally hopping a fence into an empty field. We showed up a little too late to catch most of the sun's descent, but were still able to enjoy a great view as the evening sky changed colors behind one of the volcanos.

The next morning, we packed up our bags and hopped on the ferry, our sights set on heading to the surfer haven of San Juan Del Sur in southern Nicaragua.