Aging + GPOY

I am another year older today.

(Heads up, this is a text-heavy post. My bad. But if you read through the entire thing you'll eventually get to an adorable surprise!)

Strawberries!

For the first time in eight years, I spent Chinese New Year at home with my family. Words cannot express how amazing of a feeling it was to finally not have to be alone during this very, very important family-centric holiday.

In any case, I ended up going strawberry-picking one of those days. Yes, it was the middle of winter, yes, it was freezing as hell outside, and yes, most of the better strawberries were all picked and eaten but hey, we still ended up picking three containers full of splendid, scrumptious, sweet, succulent strawberries... So good for us. And yum.

A Day in the City.

New York City is definitely one of my favorite cities in the US... Why else would I have spent every single one of my past seven Thanksgivings here? So when my grandparents wanted to visit, I was more than happy to accompany them and explore the city further.

Here are some photos from a day during our week in the city.


Battery Park is a fantastic place for squirrel-feeding. A lady there feeding squirrels was incredibly nice and offered us some of her almonds to feed them. My grandpa got a little excited and had squirrels climbing all over him... I know they are considered vermin to many, but come on... They're so cute!

Then we headed off to the 9/11 memorial. Very beautiful and peaceful place. It was also very cool to see everything being rebuilt around the memorial.

A picture of me taken at the old World Trade Center in front of the new 1 WTC.

After quite a few days of rain due to Tropical Storm Andrea, the weather was cool and walking around during that time of the evening was very comfortable. Hope the weather stays that way!

We ended up in Chinatown and went to Joe's Shanghai. Though we got there at 9pm, it was super crowded and the wait was really quite long. Food was decent... Not the best Chinese food I've ever had in the US, but good. During our wait outside we had some fun with my camera...

I simply cannot get over how wonderful the bokeh on my sigmalux looks... Favorite lens for sure!


I'm hoping to post some pictures from my trip to South America soon. Let's hope I have time to work on them!