Samomatic

Interesting house….the neighbors must really like each other.

Mini Scarecrow!

Union Station, different feeling in different weather.

Work work work…

Continuing from the first Day, day 2 was spent wandering through the different neighbourhoods of Montreal.

Walking through the Parc La Fontaine in the morning.

A pigeon sits on the fence. I really like the exterior staircases and multi-story building in the downtown region.

Wandering through the Plateau district. The streets are filled with local shops showing new styles/ideas. In the side streets there are garage sales.

A community of orthodox Jewish community along Rue Saint-Viateur


St-Viateur Bagels, established in 1957 and each bagel is still baked with wood-burning oven. Delicious!

Tam Tam Jam on Sundays in Mount Royal Park.

Both visitors and locals are encouraged to participate in the music and dancing.

People bring in their own instruments and start jamming.

Reminds me a lot about Kensington Market in Toronto.

At the other end of the park, people gather with foam-padded weapons & shields to fight mock medieval battle. I was itching to jump in.

People size each other up and pick their match.

The battles would last for several minutes, then the 2 sides would reset and charge at each other again.

There is no limit to age, though I didn’t see any ladies join in the battle.

Definitely need to go back and spend more time in Montreal!

I hope you enjoyed last week’s April Fools on the details of D-SLR images :)
This week I am going back to January, on a trip with Paddy and his wife, Maggie, to the Eastern Shandong region in China.

We flew from Hong Kong directly to Qingdao, a major city in eastern Shandong province. From above the city is packed with construction, high-rise residential units, and industrial complexes.

We took a shuttle bus from the airport to the city centre where we lined up for train tickets. There was a long line-up at the ticket booth and it took us a while to realize that people were preparing for their annual Chinese New Year trip back to their home towns. But inside the newly built train station it was not busy at all.

Vendors that offers everything outside of the train station.

We took the ‘Harmony’ (express) trains to Jinan, a major interchange of 2 major rail-lines and also a city heavily developed in the high-tech industries.

We followed the guidebooks and stayed at a hotel near a local quiet park, in the morning people gather for morning exercise and stretches.

On the express way on the outskirts of the city where construction cranes fill the skyline, a common theme in Chinese Cities.

At the Thousand Buddha Mountain, rows of lanterns have been strung up for the Chinese New Year Celebrations.

Inside the Myriad Buddha Cave (Wanfo Dong), a 500m long cave with around 28 000 Buddhist images in various forms.

The 28m long lying Buddha, the largest statue in the cave.


Climbing towards the peak are temples for different Buddha.

View from the top of the mountain overlooking Jinan. See the scale of the buildings to the Giant Buddha!

Walking along the streets, vegetable vendors keep their goods under blankets to prevent them freezing.

Doing good deeds in the New Year – in this case setting fish free. I think they just go catch them again downstream though…

Modern Technology is quite impressive. It is amazing to think that consumer cameras nowadays can have 16-20MP resolutions. To illustrate the resolving power of a modern DSLR I have taken a photo from my recent trip to Havana, Cuba. Starting with this image of 3 classic cars.

Focusing on the front tip of the bumper. Photo was taken with Pentax K20D and DA 18-250mm.

Zooming in on the fortress, which is across the bay.

Zeroing in the lighthouse.

After some filtering to extract the final details, you can make out the individual people on the lighthouse!

EDIT: APRIL FOOLS :)