#FriFotos: Peaks

I went out with a #FriFotos post, so it feels appropriate to return with one.  

As a Swiss-American lucky enough to spend a week in the mountains every few summers, "peaks" means the Swiss Alps, specifically the Bernese Oberland. But while I know the names of a few famous peaks ( Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau) I still can't identify them. Multiple searches finally confirmed that this is the Wetterhorn with the Rosenlaui Glacier to the left.  

I took this picture on a hike with my mother. We started in Meiringen, a town in the valley and hiked up to Grosse Scheidegg, past the Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes fought Professor Moriarty to the death. My mom has difficulty hiking uphill, and I have problems going downhill. I feel slightly guilty for dragging a 60-something woman 10 miles uphill, but I bought her an ice cream at the top.

Ok, I know. I'm the worst. I wanted the ice cream more than she did. 

#FriFotos: Close-Up

My mother loves gardening and dragged her children to botanical gardens and arboretums, which we proclaimed “boring”. I used to tease her about all the pictures she took of flowers, and now… just look at my Flickr stream. It is full of flowers. The lenses I have don’t let me get as close up as I want, but that doesn’t stop me. In this sense, I am my mother’s daughter, making photographs of the same flowers each year (tulip trees in the spring, hydrangeas in the summer, and those passion fruit flowers by Carmichael’s Books whenever they’re in bloom).

On my first trip to the High Line in New York this April, I spotted these little guys blooming and got down on my knees to get closer. Sadly, I’m not nearly as good as Mom (a Master Gardener now) with plant names. So I learn by asking — anyone  know the name of these flowers?

Stranger 34: "Peter Beer Slayer"

Remember the Stranger A Day project, when I was trying to take a picture of a stranger each day for a month?

I’m not bringing it back, at least not on a daily basis, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. The photographs I’ve been making for my 365 project are boring me (I literally took a picture of a stick last week. It was a large, out-of-place branch, lying in the middle of the sidewalk, but nonetheless. Picture of a stick).

When I saw “Peter Beer Slayer” at Holy Grale on Friday, I knew I would regret not approaching him for a photograph. Obviously, he agreed: 

​You can find out more about Mr. Beer Slayer at The Traveling Revelers. You can’t see it, but the pipe he’s smoking was worthy of a close-up.

Just Exploring Venice Beach

Last week, Gabe had to attend exactly one day of a seminar in L.A., so I took off a few days to join him on an extended, though brief, California visit. Since we only had two non-travel, non-work days, we decided to skip trying to see the L.A. sites and just spend our time at the beach. I love ocean-swimming, and I blew off temperature warnings. I’ve been in the Gulf in December and a St. Louis pool in November, and I relish the shock of diving headfirst into cold water and swimming until my body acclimates.

But oh, man. The Pacific Ocean is COLD.

​Me in my granny swimming suit, trying to work up the courage to get in the cold water.

Between beach-time, we saw a bit of Venice by walking around our neighborhood, looking for food and drinks. We stayed a few blocks off Abbot Kinney, named the “Coolest Block in America” by GQ in its April issue. There is little I can reasonably afford on that street, apart from food, and even that’s pushing it ($9 juice?! You get to take the jar it’s served in with you, and it’s very good, but $9 juice…). Between this hipster strip and the beach, there is the lovely, wild California plant life taking over sidewalks, and there is the Venice Boardwalk, full of vendors, tourists, homeless people, and just… strangeness. My most memorable Venice Beach characters include the large, dreaded man in an oversized purple, plush top hat rapping about passers-by; a turbaned man rollerblading while playing electric guitar; and at least two different men singing their requests for money so they could buy marijuana and booze (to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock”: “Jingle bell, jingle bell, help me get drunk.” Not even seasonably appropriate.) 

Hip bike in front of a hip store on the coolest block in America.​

​On Friday, we avoided the boardwalk mayhem by renting bikes from J’s Rentals. For $20 each, we got to keep our snazzy beach cruisers for the day (until 8 p.m.), allowing for a leisurely bike ride to Santa Monica. The madness of the boardwalk stops right around where the boardwalk ends, although it picks up again at the Santa Monica Pier. It’s mostly just tourists there, though. We biked up to the Annenberg Community Beach House, but turned around without visiting, opting for the ocean instead. What we really wanted was a Mai-Tai, but sadly, there are limited bar options right on the beach in Venice and what we saw of Santa Monica. You can find beer, wine, and champagne, but no real beach bar. And by real beach bar, I mean plastic chairs and wooden tables in the sand. There is none of that, and instead of Mai-Tais, we had ice cream in the shadow of a ferris wheel. That was good, too. It’s a bad idea to drink and go swimming in the ocean.

Just before we left to go home, a friend and her husband drove us around the Venice canals. Abbot Kinney, the guy who developed Venice, created it with the original in mind, so there are canals and homes squished in around them. You can walk along the water, and if you can get to that neighborhood without a car, do, as parking looked to be a nightmare.

Other Venice/L.A. randomness:
-the bus costs A DOLLAR

-motorcycles drive between lanes while the cars are stopped in highway traffic. This seems like a terrible and dangerous idea, motorcyclists

-LA likes Selena. I heard 3 Selena songs in less than 24 hours. This is good, because I like Selena, too

-Want an amazing donut? Drive out to Glendora and visit the Donut Man. Get the strawberry donut. I was skeptical. I was wrong (here’s a photo gallery from the LA Times)

-The most bizarre CVS I’ve ever seen:

I will have to get back to L.A., though, because I saw next to nothing of it. Seriously. Not even the Hollywood sign. But I got my beach on.

Just Exploring... Podcasting!

That’s right, five readers — it’s podcast time. 

Last night, Melissa of My Loueyville and I launched the first episode of our new podcast, Louisville, Not Kentucky. As she explains in her introductory post, I have been bugging her about doing a Louisville podcast for a year. Well ok, I asked her if she wanted to do a podcast with me last summer, and then I forgot about it until this summer (I think the extended daylight and warm weather give me courage). But once we started, we moved along fairly quickly, and now you can listen to our first episode over on our new Tumblr (which will be much more interesting as soon as I figure out Tumblr).

How awesome is that logo? Thanks, Kyle Ware!

In addition to learning the ins and outs of Tumblr, we’ve jumped into a whole new world with audio. Gabe helped us get our bearings with the audio recorder and editing software,  thankfully. I could have easily “recorded” our whole podcast only to learn that we were not recording. Seriously. He’s already offered to make our next podcast drink — a pitcher of Tom Collins. Collinses? Whatever. Yes, please, and thank you!

I’m looking forward to exploring Louisville more through this podcast and hanging out even more with my friend. Melissa is about the fourth person I met when I moved to Louisville after Peace Corps. I heard about her and Roommate when I was still in Togo — Gabe told me he met these two New Orleans transplant-writer-types. If someone from New Orleans was excited about this city, it boded well for me. Melissa’s enthusiasm for Louisville was infectious, and it got me excited about living here. Bourbon helped, too.

I love this city, and there’s always more to learn and explore. We hope you enjoy our first episode, and if there’s something you think we should talk about, tell us! We’ve got a list, but every time I cross one thing off a list, I add two more.

For now, I need to look into watching “Romancing the Stone,” and visiting Cincinnati to get yelled at by an animatronic Maid Marian at the grocery store.

And maybe listen to Hazel Miller sing, “look what we can do!” one more time, while punching the air.

Summer Swimming Wish Granted

Thanks to @@brigidkaelin! ​

Louisville To Do List: Muhammad Ali Center

Last Friday, I fiiiinally crossed off this destination on my Louisville list. I knew very little about Muhammad Ali and prefer many sports to boxing (golf is not one of them). Still, the man is called “The Greatest” for a reason, and I heard positive things about the museum. Here are some highlights:

• If you are a AAA member, you get a $1 off admission (it’s usually $9 for adults).
• The visit begins on the fifth floor with an orientation video. It’s very inspiring and may have made me tear up a little.
• Although the exhibits on Ali’s life and career are text-heavy, there are plenty of videos to break up all the reading
• Ali did NOT throw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River because he was refused service at a restaurant. It was just misplaced.

My favorite part of the museum was the Howard L. Bingham gallery. Bingham is a photographer and Ali’s best friend. Through the years of their friendship, he has made over a million images of Ali. The gallery highlights his other work — shots from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, protesters at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, a Watts’ resident’s stash of weapons. And then there is a video about Bingham that includes him talking about his friendship with Ali, and this is where I cried again at the Muhammad Ali Center.

I liked that the museum puts Ali’s life into the context of historical events. Rather than just noting that Ali dealt with discrimination in his hometown, there are sections on segregation in Louisville and the Civil Rights movement. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the army is presented with an overview of the Vietnam War. I can always use a review of anything I learned in history classes.

Even though photography is verboten (I think. I lied when asked if I had any cameras), I took a picture of this on a walkway of drawings on the theme of “What is Your Wish for the World?”

​That’s a good wish.

While I wouldn’t call the Muhammad Ali Center a Louisville Must, I recommend it to anyone with some time and even the slightest  interest. The building is beautiful, and even if you can’t get to the sixth floor, you get lovely views of the river on the other floors. I left with a new respect for Ali — I learned a lot about the man, a little about Louisville, and a little more about history.

Blueberry Traditions

Two years ago, I decided I should try to carry on a family tradition of berry picking. From about third grade until I left home, my family spent one Saturday morning each summer at an orchard. We would get up around five or six to arrive early and avoid the worst of the Texas heat. We did it when we lived outside Dallas, and we found a new place when we moved to Houston (The King’s Orchard, now apparently a parking lot for the Renaissance Fair). We’d carpool with family friends, bring sunblock and sandwiches, pick for a few hours, then head home. My mom, in a jumpsuit and gloves, headed to the blackberries. The rest of us stuck to blueberries. When we got home, we made blackberry jam, and bagged and froze the blueberries. And then, blueberries for the rest of the year.

I missed this in college, but never made a real effort to locate a farm near St. Louis. But there are a few options around Louisville, so my first summer in Kentucky, we decided visit Huber’s Orchard. So Gabe and I met some friends at the farm in Starlight, Indiana, where we rode a tractor-pulled flatbed trailer to the blueberry bushes. We picked (and ate) blueberries for at least two hours, and when we checked out, our harvest weighed in at around 20 pounds. The berries lasted us the whole year and were mostly consumed on cereal and in pancakes.

We never made it out last year, and 2011-12 was mostly barren of blueberries. This year, (tomorrow, in fact), on the recommendation of a friend and “Edible Louisville,” we’ll head to Bryant’s Blueberries in New Salisbury, Indiana, to see what they have to offer for picking. As their name indicates, they only grow blueberries, so there will be no getting distracted by peaches or blackberries (less hardy than my mother, I’m never willing to struggle with the thorns involved in acquiring a basket of those berries). Anyone willing to join last minute should be prepared for an early morning — the farm opens for picking at 7:30 and closes at noon. And bring cash or your checkbook — Bryant’s doesn’t take cards.