Month: July 2013
Hello, World!
After a couple of days in which I enjoyed the privileges of having my parents around – read: dinner prepared, waiting for me, everyday after coming from work, breakfast prepared in the morning, we decided to head out on one week-end around Washington state.
First stop: Snoqualmie Falls. Even though it was end of June – beginning of July, the weather managed to upset us a bit – it rained for a couple of days in a row. Nothing unexpected, but the weather was pretty bad for a day trip. Nevertheless, a day trip where you can see stuff is a lot better than staying at home.
Snoqualmie Falls is located in the city of Snoqualmie, about 30 minutes by car from Bellevue via I-90. The falls is spectacular, with a height of 80 meters. But, the more interesting thing about this falls (at least from an engineering perspective), can not be seen in the pictures: at the base of the falls is the first completely underground power plant. This power plant, built in 1898, is dug into the ground at 82 meters (the height of the falls) and has been featured in the Twin Peaks TV series. The power plant is still operational (it was actually extended and there are 2 power plants now) and they are “responsible” for the low debit of water that actually reaches the falls (even on rainy days).
Another touristic attraction for the city of Snoqualmie is the Northwest Railway Museum which has a train that runs on the route: Snoqualmie – North Bend – Snoqualmie – Snoqualmie Falls – Snoqualmie (the start point – Snoqualmie – is half-way between Snoqualmie Falls and North Bend). The train trip was very … bumpy, let’s say. It was slow and bumpy up to the point that I was actually wondering if this train passed the space-time continuum and came straight from my childhood in Romania when it took 3-4 hours for a 60km trip from home (Bucharest) to my grandparent’s city (Oltenita). But enough with complaining – the carriages were very old and tried to reproduce as much as possible the atmosphere of using them. For example, the one below was from a train from the beginning of the 20th century and at the very end of the carriage, there was a barber seat. Honestly, if the quality of the tracks was the same then as it is now, you really really REALLY had to trust your barber to shave off only hair and not skin. The train offers an interesting view of Snoqualmie Falls (from the top), as well as a view of the Snoqualmie river.
Even though it was not the brightest of days, I decided to continue the journey with my parents to the city of Leavenworth. Leavenworth is a very small city (2000 inhabitants) in Washington state on the Wenatchee river and it has one special characteristic: the entire city is modeled to look like a Bavarian city. After living in Germany for 5 years, this feels a bit like going back in time. Herzlich Wilkommen, indeed!
They even have a nutcracker museum (not that big, but the old lady will tell you about her and her husband and how they came to the US).
It’s a nice city where you can have some real German Wurst and some good German beer. There isn’t a lot of stuff to do around here, but to just sit back, relax, have some good food and beer.
The road back was on a Sunday evening on US-2. Unfortunately, there was a 30 km traffic jam since everybody was going home to Seattle, but at least we got to experience the size of a traffic jam in the US.
Over and out,
/cd
I just came back from a pseudo-pub-crawl, so take all my words and wording with a grain of salt (and a bit of lime afterwards, just like a tequila shot). Anyway…
Secret of the trade: presentations should start with a joke or something to get the people hooked. My take on it: Europeans think that 200km is a long distance and Americans think that 200 years is a history (managed to insult about 3/4 billion people with this). Yet, the fact that amazed me most on this trip that I took was the amount of stuff that was built in the United States while many things that should have damaged the economy were happening (e.g.: WW1, financial crysis, WW2). And then, you take a look at Romania and you take a look at the United States and realize that Romania suffered throughout the 20th century, while the United States have (almost) continuously flourished. That made me realize that most of the great “achievements” of Romania either were done before the 20th century or, if in the 20th century, they were not that great. As for the US, you can win wars by funneling just the right amount of resource at the appropriate time and keep your economy stable. Anyway…
The story is in part about my experience of Seattle and also of my parents’ visit which starts in Seattle, where they arrived after their first inter-continental journey. Of course they were tired and had lots of luggage, but I was happy to see them and they were happy to see me. I was even more excited to see them when we got at home and they pulled out a bottle of TUICA (or RAKIA or plum brandy) out of their bags and we got to celebrate with Romanian goodies. After that, we took a stroll around Seattle by car. Of course, I forgot to take my camera with me, so the picture taking was reduced to my phone (which, honestly, did a pretty good job). First we went to Kerry Park. This is, in my opinion, one of the first places that you should see such that you can capture all the breadth of Seattle, from Queen Anne and Capitol Hill all the way to Alki Beach. While you are here, you can get a view of where things are in the city and it will help you get a better understanding of where the Space Needle is, where the Columbia tower is and pretty much what’s in between. If you are really lucky, you can also see Mt. Rainier there in the background (unfortunately, I was not that lucky on that day). The view is impressive and it’s not just my opinion – the price of a 1-bedroom facing the city is very high in this area. Just take a look here – I would love to wake up to this view every morning (please remember to click on the image for a bigger size):
We then took a trip to Alki Beach (furthest to the right in the picture above). This provides a whole new, contrasting perspective on the city. While at Kerry Park you can experience views of the city from above, Alki Beach is actually at the sea level and you can see the skyscrapers and the city from afar. The view is particularly spectacular at night when the whole city is lighted up (this is a picture from February – it took a bit of shivering on my side to get such an exposure, but well worth it, as always).
One last perspective of Seattle is from on top of I-90 (Interstate highway), at the top of Rizal Park. The view of the skyline is similar to Alki Beach, but you are now on top of a hill again (like Kerry Park). The difference that I feel is that you are now more “engaged” into Seattle, you can see the people driving, you can almost feel the heart of the city beating.
Time is creeping in on me and I have to get up in 6 hours, so I will stop here.
Out for now,
/cd
It’s been a while since I last wrote here… and for a good reason: for the past couple of weeks, I had some guests – my parents, coming to visit me and their first time in the US. Therefore, my bed was “invaded” (I actually offered to sleep on the couch), my kitchen and in general my life – I don’t complain though, my parents’ cooking skills are amazing and it was all for a good purpose. It had been a while since I last saw them (6 months) and it was their first time to see where I am and what has become of me out of their influence, 16 hours by plane and 10 time-zones away from them.
Since my vacation days are numbered and wanted to make the most of my parents’ time here, I decided to take some trips with them and experience the US. First, we went to Hawaii (Kona on the Big Island). I had been there before, but that place is so amazing it deserved another visit from me. On our way back (via San Francisco), we decided to skip the last leg of the trip back to Seattle and take a short 3-day trip to Las Vegas (actually, Vegas was only about 24 hours, more on that later) and only after that come back to Seattle (some of us have to work). Finally, on their way back home, I decided to escort them to New York and experience the Big Apple (more impressions on that later as well). Besides these trips, we also had some time to visit places around Washington state (for some reason, I didn’t take that many pictures in WA, at least not with my camera – I took some with my phone).
Now I’m back. Some statistics: I was away for about 2 weeks in total. I took about 1700 pictures, most of them for HDR purposes (3 exposures, so maybe I have some 600 pictures in total). I shot both RAW+JPEG fine at full resolution (16.2MP) and managed to use about 36GB for RAW and 15GB for the JPEG. Even though my camera (Nikon D7000) has two SD card slots for recording the images, the performance penalty in shooting RAW was very high – the buffer would be filled after 6-9 exposures and you would have to wait until those exposures are written to the card.
Side note: It is a bit shocking to me to see how much space I have used with these pictures at a reasonable resolution (to be frank, on the high end) and can’t dare to imagine what would happen with a Nikon D800 that has over twice the resolution (36MP).
The faithful servants in this trip (besides the camera) were two lenses: Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 (with UV and CPOL filter) and the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 (also with UV and CPOL filters) and my tripod. I was on the fence with my 70-210 f/4-5.6, but I decided to pass on it due to the added weight and size restrictions (I only had a carry on luggage on the trip). I decided to also pass on my other lenses, the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 and 50mm f/1.8 as I am not sure I would have taken any good portraits and, even though they are small and almost weightless, the overlap with the 17-50 gave me no extra reason to bring them with me.
Off I go now, to edit some pictures, run around the house and… why not, actually sleep. I leave you with a low-light, low-quality picture of my tools.
/cd