Lover's Bridge - Love Locks Paris

In Paris, there is a bridge over the Seine where lovers attach a lock with their marks - initials, a date, or a quote.  After locking onto the bridge, the keys are heaved into the Seine. After a few months, when the locks have completely filled a panel, the panel holding the locks is removed and wood is affixed in place of the panel, until the new panel arrives days later.  Here we have a missing panel with some graffiti scrawled across the wood placeholder.  Soon this will be replaced with a new iron panel, and people will fill it up with locks again.

But a question, where do the locks go after they are removed?

Cloud Kingdom

Higher than Italy and surrounded by it, San Marino is a kingdom above the clouds.  31,000 strong represent the world's oldest republic.  How did it earn this designation? This happens when you build your country on top of a mountain and have an army with world class crossbow proficiency.

We earned San Marino after a butt clenching commute from Bologna. We ate six course meals and trekked its three towers.  I spent hours trying trying to get the perfect shot in the rain at the top of San Marino in the darkness amongst the clouds, and returned when I had misgivings about the shots that I got.  It is that kind of place, small enough to strain for perfection.

Boos in Paris with a long bearded bonus furmonster

Here we are in front of the gigantic metallic Asparagus.  We had a beautiful day in Paris.  I want to share all 700 pictures that I took, but with this internet connection, it would take 2100 minutes.

Here we have a long bearded Furmonster of the day - Jensen's wiser smaller and more affable cousin

Reflecting on a dark night at the Louvre

Puppies in boxes and supercars in Miami

We are now in Paris some 35 hours after our journey began. Adrenaline depleted, going to bed, but earlier today, when we were on South Beach for lunch, we saw a box full of puppies.

 We also saw supercars...

Sunset in the Bahamas

 Ah, the obligatory sunset photo.  Everyone likes them.  Everybody does them. Never gets old.

Kristin and I hit the Bahamas for a weekend last June.  We grabbed a pizza and ate it while the sun went lights out on us, reflecting off the glistening sand.  Perfect dinner.

Cloud City - Beijing has really polluted air

My wife and I argue all the time about where to raise kids.  I think Asia or Europe would be fantastic, and she totally disagrees.  One of my really smart buddies, who lived as an expat in Asia for some time, shared with me his reasoning on raising a family in Asia.  He basically felt that you want to give your kids the best opportunity to grow and thrive, and with certain external factors being unacceptable, they may not have as much developmental success.  In short, water and air pollution can have terrible effects on a child's development.  he recently moved back to the United States after starting a family.  It definitely got me thinking, and while Zurich still sounds awesome, maybe Shanghai not so much.  It made me realize that if I do have kids, then we will not live in any of the Chinese mega-cities - especially not Beijing.  Whoa, look at the graph.

What this chart is saying, basically, is that the air quality in Beijing is considerably worse than in a smoking room in a U.S. airport.  Have you ever been in a smoking room?  They are top notch depressing and make you smell like an ashtray for hours.  Even when I smoked, I would usually pass on those dens of reekdom.  Picture a bar that still lets people smoke, multiply the stench by 50, industrialize any sort of ambiance into the core function of smoking, and add glass windows so that outsiders can quietly judge on their way to catch a flight for Orlando.  That IS a smoking lounge.  And, Beijing's air quality is worse than that.  This has massive health implications for pretty much every person in Beijing, from pregnant mothers to kids to the elderly.  How do you fix something like this?  Is it the systemic reality of growing too much too fast too soon?

The other effect of this pollution is these surreal pictures (below and after break), which the folks over at Kotaku likened to Cloud City:

What Businessweek thinks about me

Businessweek did a write-up about me yesterday, and it was pretty flattering stuff (text below after break).  This kind of stuff always embarrasses me to some extent, but I am pleased to be featured and hope that I can continue to create interesting stories with my life.  In other news, my dog Lou looks longingly at Kristin out of the corner of his eyes as she cooks black bean burgers for dinner.

Shinjuku dreams

The clouds that hovered in Tokyo never seemed to lift, blanketing skyscrapers where Japanese corporate leaders once flew dangerously close to the sun.  Japan's culture pervades society in a way that encompasses even the most minute detail - even the reflections off of a damp pavement seem decidedly "Japanese."  It is a culture that owns its country, and a country that owns its culture.  Nowhere else is the visitor lead into the ephemeral quality of culture so obviously, and yet, when just mm away from understanding, it dissipates like a cool morning fog you can just barely smell.  That is Japan.

Now when I close my eyes, the lights of Shinjuku still linger like phantoms on the back of my eyelids.  So bright and yet to fade.

The world's most crowded islands

From an island microslum in Colombia to a haute enclave in central Paris, the ten most crowded islands in the world bear scant similarities in class or culture. In fact, every entry in the top ten comes from a different country. But being islands, each shares the common thread of scarcity - whether it be land, resources, or housing. In general, these islands are prophetical microcosms for an overcrowded earth - finite spaces where self sufficiency governs and demand pierces supply.

With the world's population racing higher and higher, and the "megacities club" accepting new members yearly, some day the earth could bear the traits of one of these densely packed islands.

Gallery: Most crowded islands on earth

The precipice on a rainy night in Sri Lanka

A storm approached the shoreline of Sri Lanka.  It was a dark and broody wall of grey that stirred up the winds, knocking around our window shutters at the Galle Face Hotel - an old colonial gem, seemingly built when time began.  Waiters raced around the courtyard below, making hurried arrangements with stiff arms and shouting in an unknown tongue.  There was a party later that evening, and the Sinhalese workers slowly built some sort of cover from the rain over a chessboard dance floor, however impermanent. Beyond the courtyard, Boardwalkers scampered to get to their destination in double time.  It seemed that everyone was bracing for an event - the storm.  We were too zoomed out to really notice.  Looking at the world from a google map view can make a storm seem insignificant.  From our perch, we could only see the future.  We had a long way home.

The time was June of 2011, we had just been married, and in front of us was business school, our first house as a couple, a move from Texas to Indiana, and whatever else the future may bring.  We had to find home.

Looking back, that rainy night feels like the last night of a different age, an age where I learned how to feel the earth under my feet, an age where I learned to shift slowly with the globe, an age where I dusted off all the failures and stupidity that had accumulated around me and realized - Hey, I am still here, and now, I plan to do something about it.

The Swiss countryside

Cities are humanity.  They are where we grab great dinners, check out storied art, meet other "cool" people, and stroll around while connecting dots and curiously peering in windows.  When "we" travel, especially in Europe, it seems the city is the institution that we visit.  Sure, the countryside races by on rolling train rides between Europe's great centers, but it is the city that grabs the traveler.  Paris, Barcelona, London, Prague - the city is the reward and destination, the places we write home about.  But to know the whole story of any country, one must read passed the opening chapter.  One must travel beyond the city walls.

The edge of the city does not announce itself, and through years of travel, I have grown appreciative of the subtleties of reaching open space, which is both dramatic in relativism and quiet in introduction.  After days of bathing in humanity and the shuffle of urban life, I find myself looking longingly at maps for quaint places that I have never heard of, picturing peace, simplicity, and adventure.  Rivers look curious, lakes have a sort of splendid solidarity, and national parks invite the traveler with a promise of wild edges and marooned corners of ecological decadence too wild to birth civilization.

The world's creepiest abandoned cities

I wrote this piece right before Kristin and I married, almost 2 years ago.  Over a million people read it, and I just noticed that I never published it on goboogo.  So, here it is.  Here is the original run.

Some cities die. The people leave, the streets go quiet, and the isolation takes on the macabre shape of a forlorn ghost-town - crumbling with haunting neglect and urban decay. From Taiwan to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, these abandoned cities lurk in the shadows of civilization. Their histories are carried in hushed whispers and futures stillborn from the day of their collapse. Some have fallen victim to catastrophe while others simply outlive their function. I think we can all agree on one thing - they are all very creepy.

Pripyat
Location: Pripyat, Ukraine - 100km from Kiev
Story: On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl reactor began its tragic meltdown. The incident was a huge blow to the viability of the nuclear energy platform, and still today, the town of Pripyat is an abandoned shell of a city frozen in a 1980's Soviet time-warp. While the failed reactor has been entombed in a an appropriate sounding casing called a "sarcophagus," the area remains unsafe for human life. The town has thrived in one aspect though. Wildlife has returned to the area in droves. Wolves silently hunt among the towering apartment buildings, and boars forage for food in the abandoned amusement park - which strangely opened the day after the reactor explosion in the midst of evacuation.
Abandoned since: 1986