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These pho­tos were taken on a nine-hour boat ride on the Sangker River between Siem Reap (home of Angkor Wat) and Bat­tam­bang, the second-largest city in Cam­bo­dia which (by my obser­va­tion) still doesn’t have a sin­gle stop­light. These were taken with a point-and-shoot Canon Pow­er­shot ELPH on the man­ual sepia set­ting. I’m pretty impressed with how they turned out give how com­pact the cam­era is. The light con­di­tions were favorable.

This shot of Angkor Wat is taken with a Google Nexus One Android phone (now dis­con­tin­ued) on incan­des­cent light set­ting (even thought it wasn’t). Inter­est­ing to see how it shifted every­thing blue. Makes it much pret­tier than in real life.

Shots from the tem­ple for God­dess of Mercy, Guan Yin, in Penang.

One upside of col­o­niza­tion — a legacy of beau­ti­ful archi­tec­ture in port cities around Asia. True also in Shang­hai, Tian­jin and Xia­men in China. But not as colorful.

Above is my first exper­i­men­ta­tion with wit­ness jour­nal­ism. I found myself in Barcelona’s Plaça d’Espanya watch­ing the World Cup finals with tens of thou­sands of peo­ple on a jumbo screen. Total cel­e­bra­tion erupted after Spain beat The Nether­lands 1–0. Lots of “Yo soy Espanol, Espanol, Espanol” singing, peo­ple drap­ing them­selves in flags. But then some­time after 1 a.m. the cel­e­bra­tory gath­er­ing in Plaça d’Espanya began to dis­in­te­grate as the (drunk) crowd began to toss metal bar­ri­ers and fling glass bot­tles into the circle.

Police vans, which I’d seen wait­ing just out­side the square in prepa­ra­tion, streamed in to clear the crowds with sirens blar­ing, lights flash­ing. Wear­ing riot gear and shoot­ing guns (not sure if with bul­lets or what? Prob not, seemed more for sound and light effect), they con­fronted crowds that chanted “hijo de punta” — “son of a whore.”

As police pushed down the side streets, peo­ple — many still draped in yel­low and red Span­ish flags! — began to flee. I ducked into an entry­way. In an effort to block the police’s progress, peo­ple threw metal chairs and pushed garbage recep­ta­cles into the streets. There was no tear gas that I smelled. And I was really wor­ried I’d get hit by a falling glass bot­tle because they were com­ing down just randomly.

I was really wor­ried how I’d get back to my hotel, since I only knew how to get there via the plaza. And I’d been herded down one road, with­out a map and no smart phone either. I was super­wor­ried. But when I looked up, my hotel was at the end of the alley that the police had been shoot­ing down. I couldn’t believe it.

We went to look at the July 4th fire­works. Turns out there is a great spot in a park­ing lot on the cor­ner of West 17th and 10th Avenue, where you can see the fire­works behind the Frank Gehry IAC build­ing (the music and flash on the building’s Web site is unfortunate).

Above is a shot (one of many) that I took with my Palm Pre. The qual­ity is pretty impressive.

Walked by these masks by Tom Hart of Michyelle.com by the Har­vard Square T stop. Had to stop and take a photo.

For a map­ping exer­cise, I drew a small map of my trav­els in 2010, includ­ing Lon­don and the .Was try­ing to fig­ure out how to show mul­ti­ple vis­its and cumu­la­tive days. Decided that num­ber of vis­its would be color, and size of X would be num­ber of vis­its. There must be a pro­gram be a pro­gram to help me do this.

This is my first pub­lished piece in a very long time. But I wrote it for The Har­vard Crim­son about one of my col­lege room­mates. It’s actu­ally cob­bled together some­what from an essay I wrote in col­lege, and drafts from The For­tune Cookie Chron­i­cles. It felt weird writ­ing again.

I had 11 room­mates over my four years of Har­vard, none of them for more than a year. That makes me sound rather dys­func­tional, but I pre­fer to see my room­mate roulette as a func­tion of trans­fer­ring Houses while tak­ing a year off dur­ing col­lege. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

Sopho­more year, I was a floater in Quincy House, mean­ing that I was ran­domly assigned to com­plete another room­ing group. I landed with a group of three close-knit girls in a two-bedroom apart­ment in 20 DeWolfe Street, the build­ing of cam­pus envy because it had cable tele­vi­sion and, more impor­tantly for me, a kitchen.

Two room­mates were, like me, native New York­ers. But the third, Ali, was a 5’10”, blonde-haired, blue-eyed var­sity bas­ket­ball player from a rural town in West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia with no stop­lights.
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