We used to do a photo of the day thing, but no longer. I had a thought for something that may work a bit better.

Taking a picture every day is cool and all, but it takes a lot of time (and luck) to get a decent picture daily. I think one of the reasons the old group probably fizzled out was because of the frustration of uploading 3-4 ordinary pictures for every semi-decent one.

My solution for this is to have a Picture Of The Week group. I think I could accidentally take one good picture every week, so the time commitment will be much lower. I do think there needs to be a bit more spice though, so each week would have a theme. Something like ‘Telephone’ or ‘Clouds’. Broad enough to be easy to capture, but perhaps narrow enough to allow the members to get a bit creative in the presentation.

Thoughts? This would all be done through Flickr. I’ve created the group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/1306272@N20/), so join up and post if you have any suggestions. When we get a few members, we’ll start it up, hopefully week 1 being Sunday, January 17th.

2 hours of sleep seems good enough for Koreans to climb a mountain.

Snow day in Janghowon

Waking up to a dead laptop sucks.

The Chinese blackout of my blog has ended, and we have arrived home in Janghowon. I’ll spend this weekend sorting through the ~2000 pictures we took (9gb). Hopefully I’ll have stuff up before Monday.

Another ridicuously straightforward and simple pre-flight process. The US needs to take a page from Asia’s book on happy flying customers.

Vic is out shopping with Christina, so I’ve got a chance to upload a few pictures.

This is Marcus and his family, Christina’s Aunt and Uncle. They were awesome, and we probably would have only seen a tenth of what we did without them. He was a super tour guide, and also bought me food and beer.

After a quick lunch and walking around a little party of the city, we went to our hotel. The Venetian is massive, with more than 10,000 employees at peak. The place has a huge casino, over 50 stores and 2 McDonalds, one for the employees alone. Our room was pretty nice, but I was disappointed with no free internet. The Venetian is on a road that was scheduled to be the Las Vegas Strip of Asia, but after the economic crisis, they ran out of steam.

As you can see, these hotels are still under construction, though Marcus said it’s been many months since anything has been done. Past the last building there is nothing but a line of palm trees and open fields. More like Loss Vegas.

Here they’re building a hotel that is roughly twice as big as the Venetian, called the Galaxy. I don’t know any specifics, but the place has fortresses on either side that could pass as a large-ish mall in the US. We were told that progress has slowed, but not stopped on it.

Downtown Macau is a place where China, Portugal and the West collide. The roots of Portugal are everywhere, but the city seems to share a an equal amount of Chinese heritage as well. Western influences are apparent in the richer parts of towns, the hotels and the styles of the younger crowds.

Macau had a lot less people than Hong Kong, but still a lot more than Seoul. When we were out in the smaller cities it wasn’t so bad, but downtown was crazy. Also the taxi ride we had in Macau was easily the most reckless driving I’ve ever been a part of. If I hadn’t had a few beers before we left back for the hotel I probably wouldn’t have thought it was so awesome. But I did, and it was.

Finally found Internet in the Venetian. This hotel is massive, and Macau quite a place. Pictures to come tonight.

The Ferry terminal to Macau is bigger than some airports I’ve been in.

So I found the strength to upload two.