Things tagged with travel:

I continue to be tested in a variety of ways. The following is one of my more recent crisis/opportunities but not the most recent. Virgin Blue’s check-in counter at Melbourne Airport is ridiculously understaffed today. Two open counters for a line of maybe 30 people for bag drop-off. Three open counters for a line of…

You know, Southern California ain’t so bad. I spent an enjoyable July 4th weekend down there with the in-laws (they are technically my girlfriend’s family and not my in-laws but it’s just so much easier to say that and I don’t think it is a big deal but everybody else on Earth gets weirded out…

Taken on May 27th, 2009; good timing and an unusually sunny day during the tourism off-season brought us the following shots from Bondi Beach. While I’d love to say this sums up our entire vacation, time on the sun and beach accounted for roughly 5% of our time in Australia. The rest of the time…

Air travel is already pretty emasculating. You shell out hundreds of dollars to sit in cramped seats being told exactly what to do and when to do it. Meal times are the only highlight and you can’t go to the bathroom when the carts are out. You watch the tiny seat-mounted TV screen like a…

I’m playing tour guide this week. It gives me an insurmountable amount of joy to show my good friends from Australia, Lachlan and Geraldine, around Seattle. I drove us to Leavenworth on Saturday; a two hour drive east through the mountains. We cruised through misting fields and tree-lined mountain roads, glowing with the swell of…

The two of us napped on the sand at Chrissy Field. We were surrounded by all the magical goodness you could want from life: deliciously fine sand, the sun beating down, a cool ocean breeze and an abundance of happy dogs out with their owners. The Golden Gate Bridge watched over us, quietly counting the…

I have this crazy fetish for covers of songs. Please tell me I’m not weird. None of my friends seem to share this love but I totally dig it when either I hear an artist reinterpret songs in their own crazy way. Off the top of my head, here are some that I love: Nouvelle…

I was going to enumerate every single thing I ate on this trip but I realized I didn’t take photos of it all. So instead, I’m just going to post photos in chronological order and write a little bit about each. Eat with your eyes and whatnot. Note that I don’t know the Korean names…

I am back in Seattle. There’s a whole bunch to say but I’ve been saying it to friends and I feel like I’m repeating myself sometimes and, oh, I don’t know. I’ll upload photos instead. Keep an eye on my flickr stream. Basic run down of the days: Arrived, ate huge Japanese dinner and fell…

Freedom Bridge at Imjingak It took a little bit of cajoling to get Diana to agree to take me on the South Korean DMZ tour. I couldn’t understand why, I expected the tour to be this huge insight into the tensions that exist between North and South. I expected to find something there. Really, when…

The scene: a little pocket of shopping nestled in Insadong, one of Seoul’s many busy districts. In front of us are some food stands selling Korean sweets. Locals and foreigners are milling about, watching a man with a large mallet take huge dramatic swings to pound some dough. Around the perimeter are four floors of…

I will refrain from making any Seoul-related puns. Unless it’s really really good. I have arrived in Korea and I don’t think the reality has sunk in yet. I’m just kind of puttering around. The flight was great and the folks at Asiana Airlines kept trying to feed us and take our cups away. I…

Well dear blagoblag, I leave for the airport in approximately 5 hours. This time tomorrow, my bestest friend, Diana and I will be in Seoul. After a week of seeing a few of the touristy sights, eating the food, butchering the language, fumbling the customs and perhaps seeing the DMZ, I will be in Hong…

Where was I? Right, the strip club in Vegas. So here we were at Olympic Garden on a Friday night. It was my first time in a strip club but I’ve seen enough crime dramas to know what one looks like. There’s the stage where the girls slide around on poles and there are the…

My head hurts and I’m tired. And I want to snap at everyone. My shoulders feel weak, my eyes are blurry, my face itches with a mild sunburn and I have just no energy. I’m all bitchy and whiny and here am at work and the boss is all, “Are you doing the stuff that…

Jack is dead. Or very close to it. I am, er, Jacque. ‘ere to post ze bloggings in a very racist French accent! Mais oui! Ok, I’m lying. I’m heading to Vegas for the first time this weekend. I skipped out on buying a ticket to the Cirque du Soleil show with all the naked…

Ok I seem to be not enjoying blogging as of late. There are a few things going on right now that I’d rather not blog about. Instead I just tell anyone who will listen. Also, I’m thinking too much about comments. I whore myself out for comments and maybe if one of these hobo jokes…

During our last afternoon in Japan, Marlene and I were in one of the basement floors of the huge Daimaru department store in Osaka. We were shopping for food and managed to land in a group of about 10 or so stores that sold so much deep fried food that it would be better suited…

Japan has pretty sophisticated public transport. In Kyoto’s bus system, we enter via the rear door (stop giggling) and we take a ticket that proves which section/zone/whatever we boarded at. At the front of the bus, there is an electronic signboard that tells you how much you should pay depending on where you got on…

Here are Jack’s vacation photos. There are a lot of them. So, I have finished uploading all the photos that I took in Japan. After trimming all the blurry photos, I have about 450 photos left. Yes, that’s still a lot but it was a two-week trip so you’ll have to cut me some slack….

Three of us had left at an earlier stop to check out the hot springs. Studds, Marlene and I remained to ride the bus back into town and head on home to a warm lodge full of blazing heaters and Beatles songs on loop. Studds and Marlene road together in a seat, I sat on…

I am back home in Seattle. The skies are clear, the temperature is just above freezing point, the omnipresent drizzle says hello and the city is lit up like Christmas. At a distance, the fluorescent lights of offices glow warmly and the street lights spew orange. The trip was great; so unexpectedly great. We all…

Riding the bullet train between Tokyo and Kyoto, the sun starts hitting me in my eyes. I pull down the blind. At the next stop, a young-looking man in a red sweater starts crouching to peer underneath the blind. Across the aisle from me, the boy says goodbye to his father through the window. The…

So, umm… I think it is Thanksgiving right now? Sure, why not. The last few days were spent in Nikko (日光). We were lucky enough to catch the last few days of the brilliant Autumn leaves and the first snow of the season. At the top of the mountain, we watched as the town cleared…

So as it turns out, I do have internet access. And dear blog, I just couldn’t stay away. (Note that the apostrophe on a Japanese keyboard is achieved with Shift+7, this is kind of awkward so I am going to stop using contractions.) I am currently in the Kansai region, in a place called Oji…

“Kissu shite.” There’s actually a pocket phrasebook for umm… courting lovers in Japan. Lamentably, I bought the book next to it. Either because a) I am already such an accomplished lover that language poses no barrier or b) I won’t be getting any. Anyways, I’m off to Japan soon. My cab will come pick me…

So I’m checking the times of my flights on the United Airlines website and NOW I find there is a tool to allocate your seats online. Less than 2 days before I fly out. Great. I bought these damn tickets in June, gosh darn it and the travel agent understood that I wanted window seats….

This morning I have errands to run. It’s fucking ridiculous but ever since I moved out and started living on my own and being all independent, I have to “run errands”. It’s not even a euphemism for masturbation or something, I literally have to go out and do things like banking, exchanging purchases, and other…

I’m cranky today and I shouldn’t be. This morning I was actually having fun. I woke up early, got to work very early and got more stuff organized for my Japan trip. I was also planning to leave work a little early so I could rush home into the arms of Guitar Hero 3. But…

One month. Then I’m off to Japan for two and a bit weeks. I was so obsessed with planning my surprise trip back to Australia that I totally forgot. Here’s the outline: Nov 09: Fly United Airlines from SEA to SFO, then United again to KIX (in Osaka) Nov 26: Fly US Airways from KIX…

Ergh, so many things I want to blog but I can’t really gather my thoughts for the 10 minutes it would take. The flight back to Seattle was easier. I slept for half of it, then I watched Die Hard 4.0, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Evan Almighty. The action scenes…

No blogging. I flew in secretly to Melbourne on Sunday morning. I left on Seattle’s Friday night, spent 17 hours and 45 minutes in the air and I’m in Australia now. I’ll be back in Seattle on Sunday morning (October 7th). It’s a quick trip but its enough to catch up with family and uber-friends….

This photo makes me all sorts of sad. New York by michael_hughes There’s a long weekend coming up and I have no plans. I thought to myself, “Would it be crazy to fly to New York by myself? Fly to one of the world’s biggest cities and just do nothing for three days?” I don’t…

So what’s buzzing around my mind at the moment? I will tell you! In sentence fragments! Girls …and the inconceivable lack thereof. That’s not a “oh my god I need to get laid” complaint. I merely prefer the company of women because in the correct settings, I get to make sexist jokes and do all…

So I’m back from an exhausting weekend in the Lake Okanagan area of British Columbia, Canada. I guess you could say it was a camping trip but really, we stayed in a touristy campground with toilets and showers and we didn’t do any hiking. It was more like a beach vacation but with cheaper accommodation….

Just a heads up that I’ve dusted off my passport (not that there’s been much time for dust to settle) and I’m heading across the Canadian border this weekend. Blog updates won’t happen again until next week but hopefully I’ll have some photos to make up for it. I’m following some dudes up there to…