We’ve been enjoying the spring here in Albany. Lot’s of grilling in the parks and a little bit of hiking. We ran out to Utica to visit Matt’s Brewery – the place that makes Sanarac beer, my favorite beer! It was a very fun visit and had “Strange Flavor Chicken” at a local Chinese restaurant. I also found a great spot to take photos of downtown Albany at night!
Enjoy the pictures!
Chris W.
I have never had any experiences with monsoons. This trip brought me to Shenzhen where I had my first monsoon experience complete with flooding factories (I happened to be in the factory), river fording in a van, and flight issues. It was completely unlike any weather phenomena I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been in hard rain but it’s usually quite short in duration – I’ve never seen hard rain for hours on end. It was unreal!
Shenzhen itself has a pretty weird layout. There are mountains all over the place so it disrupts the urban sprawl and there many tall buildings all over the area in smaller conglomerations. It just means that it takes a bit longer to get different places.
Enjoy the pictures :).
Chris W.
Shanghai is a phenomenally interesting city. One quickly notices how everything is illuminated at night – buildings, road, trees, and so on. It goes on forever, it’s absolutely incredible! I haven’t been to many areas of China, but, from what I can tell, it’s not typical. The only other city that comes remotely close is Hong Kong; however, in typical Chinese fashion, it’s bigger, better, and brighter in Shanghai.
I decided to watch the sunset on the really tall buildings from the Bund. I took a timelapse video of the whole ordeal which can be found here: Shanghai timelapse. It’s a pretty big file (~60MB) so give it a bit to load.
Enjoy the lights :).
Chris W.
Leaving to China from Albany is surprisingly complicated. There aren’t a lot of good flight times from Albany and it’s a lot more expensive to fly from the east coast of the US to China. So, I decided to route my trip through Vancouver and get a free afternoon in the city to run around. It was more spectacular than I thought – very beautiful, it smelled great, lots of places to eat, plenty of things to see and, of course, everyone’s very nice!
While walking around, I heard a local remark, “we finally have a nice day”. I’m glad that “nice day” happened to be when I was there!
Enjoy the pictures.
Chris W.
We had a quick trip down to New York City at the beginning of April. We walked around a lot and went to a new area that we’ve never been in – the Tennement district. The best part was going up Rockefeller Center and looking out over the city at night – very cool! Oh, and I slipped two photos of Chicago into this. Enjoy the photos!
So March is here and supposedly winter will be ending. Lot’s of snow here in New York and it’s been cold in Chicago. The standard unit of snowfall in this area is around a foot; if I see a forecast for snow in Albany I figure we’re getting about a foot, probably more. It’s not windy so the snow simply accumulates and is really pretty.
I picked up a 36MP full frame DSLR with a wide angle lens and have had a chance to put it thru some paces. Compared to my Canon point and shoot, the DSLR is amazing!
I had a chance to see some sights in Albany and Chicago over the last few weeks and the pictures are below. A few notes:
Enjoy the pictures.
Chris W.
We have to travel to go see our family now that we’re in Albany, NY. I also have to travel quite a bit for my work since I work remotely in New York. The winters here in Albany are delightful compared to Minnesota. For example: the snow generally falls vertically from the sky and very gently. In Minnesota, the snow typically is moving horizontally at a very high speed. It doesn’t really get that cold either, generally around freezing. Unlike in Minnesota where it was -30F for awhile. With that said, it doesn’t prevent the folks here in Albany from complaining about the winter :).
So here’s some photos from the last month or so where we traveled back to Minnesota for the holiday & work, Chicago for work and Philadelphia / Pittsburgh for work. I really liked Pittsburgh; great skyline view, great food, great airport, super easy to get around.
We visited Boston and enjoyed the sites! Boston is a very walkable city and we walked all over the place. We didn’t let the government shut down slow us, we were able to see a lot of stuff still.
Running around New York City over Labor Day. We stayed in Harlem thru Airbnb. Everything worked out great!
Work trip to China / Hong Kong 2013. I didn’t have a whole lot of notice, 14hrs in all. I didn’t know how long I was going to be in China either, I bought a one way ticket! Shenzhen was OK; the hospitality offered by the supplier was nothing short of spectacular and Hong Kong was wonderful. Great adventure!
