Happy Hanukah
On the first day.
Archive for December, 2009
Photographs from Beijing
While in Korea last month, Ji, her mother, her sister and I made a short trip to Beijing for three days; the three days that coincided with President Obama’s visit. We did no planning and bought no guidebooks. In the future, I will never go anywhere for any length of time without having first done at least some elemental research.
Day one went exactly as planned, more or less. The first evening we decided to swap our plans for days two and three; rather than visit the Great Wall on day two and the Forbidden City on day three we decided to do the opposite. Given our time frame it seemed to make the most sense. On the morning of day two we get a text from Ji’s friend letting us know that the Forbidden City will be closed that morning because of Obama’s visit. It turned out that they closed it for the entire day. Since it was too late to make arrangements to go to the Great Wall, we wandered around aimlessly, ate lunch at the same restaurant we’d gone to the night before, visited Jingshan Park, wandered through the nearby hutongs towards our hotel and then took a taxi to the hotel (getting a taxi to pick us up was an adventure in and of itself). On the morning of day three, while still waiting for our guide who was stuck in traffic due to an accident, Ji’s friend texted us to let us know that Obama was visiting the Great Wall that day and then heading straight for the airport–almost exactly our plan. In the end, we managed to see the Forbidden City and the Great Wall with the guide, though we did have to visit a different section of the Wall than we had intended.
The highlight of the trip was certainly the food. Ji’s friend Yoshiko took us out each evening (and lunch on the first day) to one fantastic restaurant after another. By that I mean we went to three really good restaurants.
A few pictures from Beijing:
Another batch from Seoul
As I have been going through the stuff I shot in Korea, a small artists book is forming in my head. It’s going to be a very small xerox book that really functions as a means of organizing my thinking about the disparate photographs I made in November.
Anyway, another batch of photographs from Seoul:
