Old Western

The Saloon

Today is the first time we've left the office when it was still light outside! I even had a chance to snap a photo of the town saloon. Rumor has it that this place serves the best steak and ribs in town and is pretty expensive too. I don't care much for slabs of meet, but I wouldn't mind trying one of their baked potatoes.

Speaking of food, I don't think I can stomach another sandwich! During my two weeks vacation in Europe, sandwiches were common fare. After 2 weeks of that and then more sandwiches this week, I'm yearning for some soup and noodles or at least more variety in my diet.

Here in Small Town, I'm staying in a hotel on Main Street, which is just a couple blocks away from the place where I'm working. Everything is so quaint here. It would be nice if I had time to explore the town more with a real camera, instead of just a camera phone. Weatherwise, Small Town is not for me because it's still snowing this time of year despite the fact that we're almost in May! It snowed lightly when I walked to work and it snowed again this afternoon.

Small Town

Main Street, USA

Talk about baptism by fire. I arrived Sunday afternoon in a small town in the US that I'll call Small Town, USA after only a couple hours of sleep the night before because I just landed from my flight back from Germany. I had to take 2 planes to reach Small Town. One was a regular sized plane, but the second one was a tiny Embraer plane. I was originally seated in the front row, but the flight attendant had to reseat 2 of us in order to "balance out" the plane. That was kind of scary. In total we had only 10 people on the plane approximately. Plus, because the plane was so small, I could feel the turbulence much more. By the time we landed, I was gripping the arm rests and making sure my seat belt was on as tight as possible.

Anyway, I landed quite jet-lagged, tired and cranky and checked into my hotel. That same Sunday I found out from my manager that we would have to work until 10 PM that night as requested by the client. Can you imagine that? Jet-lagged, coughing and extremely tired, I suffered with the rest of the team until 10PM. They did not even arrange for dinner! We were all starving.

The past couple of days, they have been more realistic about all of our needs and have arranged dinner orders. However, because they eat so late, I just go and buy something from the supermarket earlier. The hours have been pretty long. Yesterday we worked 14 hours approximately. That's why I haven't been able to post much. Check out this picture though as taken from my cellphone camera.

Must stop typing and sleep now!

Daffodil Hill

Today's photography adventure entailed driving to Daffodil Hill in inner California. In fact, I've never been this far into the interior of California.

A friend of mine rented a car and drove 2.5 hours to reach this location and invited me along for the ride. Yay! I really should have brought my GPS device because it was somewhat tricky getting there. We were following mapquest directions, so we had to keep our eyes peeled at every green highway sign that showed up on the side of the road. At some point we must have made a wrong turn because we ended up in a corporate business park area. However, after using an old fashioned atlas, we found our way back on track.

This being a long road trip, we chatted about this and that, shared stories, etc. She brought some CD's along for the ride because radion reception would be poor at some point. The first CD we listened to was the soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire. It was pretty cool. Not sure if I'd buy it though. Then came Rihanna's CD "Good Girl Gone Bad," and then James Taylor.

When we finally got to Daffodil Hill, the first thing on our minds was to look for the restroom. Unfortunately all we found were portable toilets. Being desperate, I used one of these toilets for the first time. Actually, I was surprised that it didn't stink as badly as I had expected.

Happy yellow daffodils were sprinkled all over the hill. Interspersed on the hill were these old wooden shacks. I was anticipating more daffodils, but it was nice anyhow. There were many families there and people with cameras enjoying what the area had to offer.

Overall, Daffodil Hill is pretty, but I think it has to be much more compelling for me to want to drive that far to see it.