Pictures I took today

So this post is not the post I promised about the bees but I promise I am not a chronic liar. I just wanted to share these pictures I took today when I decided to take the day off to take care of my permit issue and ended up wandering around with a camera.                

       
These are pictures of a leftover display of lanterns from the Lantern Festival.  If you look closely you can see that they are decorated by local kids.

I love the vibrancy of the colors all together and I particularly liked the textures and colors of this lantern.  I was thinking that these pictures could make great desktop backgrounds.  What do you think?

Self-portrait shot, also I'm going to have this double as the picture of my new hair cut that I promised back in January.  

I'm not quite sure what this building is, but I found it while wandering Taipei's governmental area so I want to say it's something official.  I believe it is left over from the Japanese colonial period, as many Taiwanese governmental buildings are, you can tell by the psuedo-Western style architecture that the Japanese were fond of using during the Meiji and Taisho eras.  


Hope you enjoyed my endeavor into some photography!

2009!

First up, some pictures from my trip to Japan!

This is me in front of the Hiroshima A-bomb Dome.

Pretty picture of the dome, this was one of the few structures still standing near the epicenter of the bomb.

I saw geishas (maiko) in Kyoto!

So as not to overload blogger, I'll make another post with pictures from my New Year's night at Taipei 101.  Hope everyone likes the pictures!

JAPAN!

I just got back from snowboarding in Japan yesterday and I am exhausted! I loved Japan, their cities are super clean and they have just the right amount of mix between old and modern architectural styles. The people there are really cute and they are way too curteous for their own good. Besides getting a small cold and getting held up in immigration on my way back, this was such a great trip!

I went to Osaka, snowboarded in Hiroshima, and toured a little bit in Kyoto. I went to go see my friend Thomas, and he was so great to show me around the country! We ran around and pretty much owned whatever town we were in. It was refreshing to get to speak fluent and coherent English pretty much the whole time I was there.

Snowboarding is ridiculously hard but I sort of figured it out on the second day. I managed to beat myself up learning so I've got several big bruises on my legs. Thank goodness our hotel had great hot springs so we could unwind every day afterwards.

Food-wise, I had great okonomiyaki in both Osaka and Hiroshima but I do have to say that I preferred Hiroshima style better. I also had amazing sukiyaki in Kyoto and I finally got to eat conveyer sushi! Now to plan my next trip... Korea anyone??

Pictures to come soon!