Happy Monday! We’re experiencing a bunch of NEW things on this trip. In my last post, I created a 5-senses portrait, but really, I could do that over and over again! I’ll just add a few new photos this time. The photos above and below are of Hoi An, Vietnam. Hoi An is a UNESCO heritage site because the town is a well-preserved example of a Southeast Asian trading port from the 15th to 19th century that remains largely intact. They have lantern festivals every month (which we will just miss), but every night there are lantern boats out on the river.
This is at Ba Na Hills. It’s a pretty iconic bridge in the area! It’s on top of a mountain. People get here by cable car, and as you go up the mountain, you go up into the clouds/fog! Pretty cool!
I’ve lost track of how many temples and pagodas we’ve visited! All are ornately beautiful!
As you all know, I adore experiencing NEW things and learning NEW things. Traveling sure is the best way to do that! I hope you have a terrific day and get to learn or do something NEW today too!
I often listen to Gretchen Rubin’s podcast (link HERE). She and her sister chat about a lot of different things. Sometimes, Gretchen talks about doing a 5-senses portrait of someone or something, and that makes her more fully appreciate it. Here is a link of Gretchen’s 5-senses portrait of her dog, Barnaby (link HERE). I decided I’d do a 5-senses portrait of our trip to Vietnam. Here goes:
SMELLING:
The incense burning at the entrances to many of the temples; The street vendors cooking various foods; The stench of garbage that hasn’t been taken care of; The smell of the ocean surf.
SEEING:
The chaotic driving in Hanoi was SO interesting to watch! They don’t have many traffic signals. The drivers just go where they need to go! Whether it’s turning left into a mass of traffic, or weaving back and forth between vehicles and motorbikes, the system seems to work. We only saw one accident. And there are so many motorbikes! I’m hoping to prepare a collage soon of all the crazy things we saw people carry on their motorbikes. Stay tuned for that, haha!
Of course, seeing the rock formations in Halong Bay was also highlight (see this post), and riding in a bamboo boat through those rock formations and through a small arch/cave was great fun!
TASTING:
Pho, spring rolls, lots of fresh seafood, lots of fresh fruit and delicious soups.
TOUCHING:
A fish massage! We stopped at a little village on Cat Ba Island and we dipped our feet into a small pool of water and fish sucked on our feet! What a freaky feeling! That was a NEW experience for me. Apparently, the fish like to suck the dead skin off the bottom of your feet. Ha! I didn’t get any photos of my feet, but here are my brother-in-law’s feet with the fish having a feast!
While visiting a Buddhist temple, I missed a step and came crashing to the ground. I sprained my ankle, pretty badly. So my ankle was very tender to the touch for a few days. This was me lounging by the pool the next day, trying to baby it! Ouch!!!
HEARING:
The sound of the Vietnamese language and lots of honking horns!
So I’ve tried something NEW and created this 5-senses portrait today! I hope you have a terrific day and do or learn something NEW today too!
And hello from Halong Bay, Vietnam. We’ve loved cruising around these awesome rock formations! So pretty. Here are a few more photos (the number of photos on my phone from just the last few days is insane). Vietnam is a NEW country to us, and we’ll be visiting many more NEW locations on this trip.
Have a terrific day, and I hope you get to do or learn something NEW today too!
The space between allows for a pixelated view of the powerful waterfall, but the distorted perception stops me from having a complete experience and divides me from fulfillment.
However, I appreciate these challenges for the kick in the pants to review my files for appropriate images to use. How about you? I haven’t been out shooting much lately (I’m basically a lame, fair-weather photographer, and it’s COLD outside!). I hope you have a terrific day and get to do or learn something NEW today!
Happy Thursday. I fell in love with all the layers in this photo, taken recently in Newport, Rhode Island. The sky…the horizon…the ocean…the waves (in all their various strengths and sizes)…the birds, the wet sand, the drier sand. Therefore, I would edit this quote just a bit… I’d add that we are the sum of all the layers and layers of our experiences. Because I believe one experience wouldn’t be quite the same without a previous experience. It’s the layers of experiences, not the individual experience that make us what we are. What we will, eventually, become.
I hope you have a great day and get to do or learn something NEW today.
Happy Monday. Wow…I’ve participated in 2 photo challenges within a week! (I must not have a time-consuming job anymore! Haha!) Here are my entries for Lens Artist Challenge #363. The rules were to go through our photo archives and find at least 5, but no more than 10 of the following: Zig-zag lines, something with green eyes, some cool jewelry, something circular, something rectangular, something with a design, something with a pattern, something with a bumpy texture, something with a soft texture, something with water in it, a set of keys, something glass, a zipper, shoelaces, or art supplies.
I took the challenge a step further and challenged myself to find any 5 from one trip. These all came from our 2017 trip to Europe. I chose the photo above as “something rectangular”.
Here’s something with a pattern:
…something zig-zag (does this roofline count?):
…something circular:
…something glass (do “glasses” count?):
…something with a bumpy texture:
…something with water in it (does the Mediterranean Sea count?)
That’s about it. I guess I didn’t take any photos of cool jewelry from the British Crown Jewels Museum that I remember going to on that trip (maybe photography was not allowed?). But hey, I found more than 5 photos for this challenge! Win.
That’s it for today. I’m off to find something NEW to do or learn. I hope you do too!
Happy Friday! It’s been a while since I joined in on a photo challenge. So, when I saw this week’s #362 Sports, Sporting Events, and Fun Games challenge at Wandering Dawgs, I thought of a fun event we recently attended and wanted to join the challenge. This baseball game was played at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The players dressed up in vintage baseball uniforms and played with rules from 1867. That means NO baseball mitts (they weren’t invented yet), and many other slight variations from current baseball rules. It was a lot of fun!
And other miscellaneous NEW experiences:
Thanks to reading Travel Means Life, I was “in the know” when we saw several Quilt Gardens in Indiana.
Then, in Genesee County, New York, spotting quilt blocks on barns, houses, or sheds etc. is a thing! There is even a website about it {HERE}. Are there any other quilt related I-Spy-type hunts that I don’t know about??? :o)
And lastly, I thought I’d list the random museums we’ve visited in the last few weeks….just so you know that we do more than hike to waterfalls and visit national parks, haha!
We’ve visited:
Jell-O museum! (Did you know there’s such a place?!?)
The Corning Glass Museum
The Safe Haven Holocaust Museum
The Detroit Art Museum
The world’s largest Christmas store! (Bronner’s)
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The Town of Stafford’s Historical Museum
The George Eastman Museum and House Tour
I think that’s enough for now. I gotta go research more NEW things to do, see, or learn about! Have a great day!
Happy Monday! Boy oh boy, if you want to visit waterfalls, the Finger Lakes Region of New York is where to go! We hiked to different waterfalls nearly every day last week! I’ve added 12 NEW waterfalls to my 100 Waterfalls Bucket List! Only 20 to go until 100!
To be clear, I’m not counting some we attempted to see. Some were duds – hardly any water at all (it is August, after all. Namely Aunt Sarah’s Falls, Hector Falls, and Shequaga Falls were the duds :o). But most were fantastic! Here are a few photos.
The top photo is Rainbow Falls at Watkins Glen State Park in New York. The best part of that hike is that you can see many little falls on your hike (something like 19 in a span of 2 miles), like these little ones:
Ithaca Falls near Cornell University was a good one:
A favorite is the Middle Falls at Letchwork State Park in New York:
Although the Upper Falls at Letchworth were great too!
The hike up Stony Brook Creek in Stony Brook State Park was a nice (and a good workout!). It is a well-maintained trail with rock or wooden steps placed at the steep areas. I Googled how many steps there were. Here’s what my friend Google told me: “Stony Brook State Park has approximately 800 stairs, though a specific count is difficult as trails are a mix of stone, wooden, and dirt steps. The trails, particularly the Gorge Trail and West Rim Trail, are known for their many steps, with the West Rim Trail’s section sometimes called the “thousand steps”. We hiked up the gorge trail and came back on the West Rim trail. Here’s a photo from one of the Stony Brook trail waterfalls:
I hope you have a great week and get to do or learn something NEW!
We’ve been visiting several NEW (to us) botanical gardens on our travels. I can’t help myself from snapping photo after photo of the lovely blooms or foliage! And if they have a butterfly or bumble bee on them – extra bonus!
This tree in the Cornell Botanical Gardens caught our eye. The tree had a rectangle cut out of it with a wind chime inserted in the trunk, but it was still growing! We asked a gardner about it, and she said a few years ago, they had to cut down the tree, because it was a safety risk, but this year, it is obviously sprouting new growth! If you saw my “New thursday thought” post from yesterday, this tree would also apply…where new growth appears, so does hope!
Here is a link to an article about cutting the tree and inserting the wind chime {Link HERE}. You’ll see the photo of the tree looks vastly different!
I have many more photos of blooms, but they might have to be uploaded another day.
I hope you get to do or learn something NEW today!
Explore Newness 