thephotographed

a big part of writing posts for this blog is actually just selecting the pictures that should go along with and will best illustrate the story. the pictures are chosen to fit the text, and often the text is shaped by what pictures are or aren't available. fortunately, there are usually more pictures available for everything i'd care to write about than i could ever reasonably use, and we all know who's mad camera skills are responsible for this good fortune. on the flip side of that however, is that all too often her beautiful face doesn't get around to the front of the lens, and i'm not usually in photographer mode so i don't think to ask if she wants her picture taken. i've noticed recently that there are comparatively few pictures in our huge collection featuring just Jill, and while this is an oversight of mine that needs to be corrected, i thought i'd brighten up these pages with just a very select few pictures that i do already have of my girl.



very shortly after we met, in Taiwan, Jill and i became fast friends and visited all kinds of places all over the island. here Jill stands in a dry riverbed in Taroko Gorge with the Eternal Spring Shrine behind her. below, she graces the Singapura sign inside the Sentosa Island Merlion in Singapore.



there are more than just these pictures of Jill, which fact, though i have tended to favor pictures of the two of us together, will give me the chance to put up some more just of her in future. and it may remind me to invite her out from behind the camera a little more often, which you can see would be good for all of us.


okay this one i stole, as it was taken by one of Jill's sisters on our wedding day, but it's such a good one i couldn't resist.

themerlion

welcome to Singapore...

though once again it's been a while, and by now the story may be getting just a bit disjointed, the last time we left Southeast Asia we were skipping out on our tour guide Dr Nick's tip at the KL Sentral train station. this time we were going as far as it was possible to go by that method of travel, all the way down to Singapore. this ride was just a few hours but was even more jarring at its conclusion than the trip into Malaysia had been. as the sign above, taken in a subway car, demonstrates, Singapore can be a pretty strict place. don't get me wrong, it's a very nice place, a clean place, an orderly place; but upon stepping into a cool, modern train station to go through customs one is little prepared to be greeted by a phalanx of paramilitary-looking guys holding submachine guns and demanding... that you spit out the gum you're chewing and hand over the rest of the pack, evil foreigner! no fines for possession, just a volley of bullets from a teenage Rambo. a bit scary, but did i mention Singapore is clean?

other than the nagging terror of being an outsider in pretty much a police state, i really liked Singapore right from the get-go, it providing a welcome contrast to the clamor and bustle of all the other places we had been for the previous six months. i liked it for the same reason i liked Japan: that it was organized and quiet and people give you some space. not that there's much space to give, mind you, as Singapore sits on just 271 square miles of land, at least 30 of which are man-made or reclaimed from the ocean (to put that in perspective for the Utahns among us, Salt Lake county is just over 800 square miles). but people there speak English, just like in Malaysia, it being the most official of the four official national languages. the others are Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

but if one can't chew gum in Singapore, and it's small enough that you could spit a piece cross-country, what does one do, i hear you cry? fortunately, we had asked the same question before leaving Taiwan, to a young native of the tiny nation, a missionary of the LDS Church named Elder Merican. though he gave a long list of things to do during my hour-long conversation with him, i quickly got the point that Sentosa Island came at the top, so it was there we went first.



the Sentosa island Merlion, majestic symbol of the city-state of Singapore; and below, Jill beautifies the view from his crown over Keppel harbor. Singapore is said to have the world's busiest port in terms of tonnage shipped (or second busiest, behind Shanghai, depending on whom one listens to).



funnily enough we didn't see much of the island, which we thought small at the time but is actually rather large, with several five star resorts and long beaches made of white sand hauled in from Malaysia. a lot of the attractions there were also placed since our trip in mid 2005, but there was at least one important structure we got a very thorough look at. the Singapore Tourism Board explains what it is and why we went looking for it:

The Merlion has a lion head and a fish body resting on a crest of waves. The lion head symbolises the legend of the discovery of Singapura, as recorded in the "Malay Annals". In ancient times, Singapore was known as Temasek, a Javanese word for sea. In the 11th century A.D, Prince Sang Nila Utama of the Sri Vijaya Empire rediscovered the island. When the Prince first landed on Singapore's shores, he sighted a mystical beast which he later learnt was a lion. The Prince then decided to name the island "Singapura" which in Sanskrit means Lion (Singa) City (Pura). The fish tail of the Merlion symbolises the ancient city of Temasek and represents Singapore's humble beginnings as a fishing village.

beginnings indeed; Singapore has grown so fast and been so economically successful that it's considered one of the four "Asian Tigers" and even ranks up with the world's wealthiest countries. nevertheless, it's still a tropic with its fair share of jungle and wildness, which we decided to experience in a couple of very different ways. first, there was the incredible Night Safari at the zoo, which is just what it sounds like but even better. the problem with safaris in general is that most of the animals are nocturnal and so asleep when you're driving around to look at them. not so in Singapore, where they are awake, alert and on the prowl as the open sided bus conveys you around the park, stopping whenever Malayan tapirs cross the roadway or come to sniff the passengers. amazingly, when you're done with the motorized tour, you can wander almost the whole park on a series of paths that in many cases cut right through the animal habitats, all of them totally open and lacking any type of enclosure! and we're not just talking about tapirs and sloths either, there are lions, tigers, hyenas, elephants, giraffes; you name it, it's out there wandering around with you in the dark. awesome! it seems hard to imagine Singapore having lax liability laws, so we couldn't figure out how the safari keeps folks from being attacked. our best guess is that in addition to keeping the animals very well fed, there may be some kind of ultrasonic fence system in place around the areas of the scarier beasts.

well, even after all that we hadn't quite had our fill of dangerous creatures, so the next day we bussed and hiked out to the middle of suburban nowhere to try and find one of the most highly recommended attractions in our guidebook. it was a very odd thing indeed, and made me wonder about the zoning laws in Singapore; we had thought for sure that we were way off track when we finally got to the place as directed. but lo, to our astonishment, set back a little way from the rows of other houses in the neighborhood, was a sign for the grandly named but highly unassuming Singapore Crocodile Farm. they do have a website though, on which we read:

Six decades ago, not long after the end of the Second World War, an enterprising Chinese man, Mr. Tan Gna Chua, decided that he wanted to share his home with these unloved reptiles. With the help of his family, he transformed the one acre of land that surrounded his home at Upper Serangoon Road into a reptile farm, which was the first of its kind in Singapore. They started with only ten crocodiles. With careful breeding, the numbers grew rapidly. Being the entrepreneur he was, Mr Tan opened his farm to the public. Within its premises he set up a factory, where the crocodile skin was processed, made into various products, then sold at the gift shop as well as overseas. Visitors were free to come in to take a look around, without having to pay an entrance fee - and this is still the case today.

the Singapore Crocodile Farm, clockwise from top left: a house that ended up serving as offices and a shop for the farm, complete with all the handbags, watch straps and souvenir crocodile heads you could ever want; and at least there's more out back if you don't see something you like: a not very deep pool full of caymans is one of several that sit where other folks would have their back yard; this may be the industrious Mr Tan himself, who spent a good 15 minutes stringing these chicken heads onto some kind of wire before throwing it to the crocs at precisely 11am, just the time this last fellow likes to be fed, apparently.

despite its distance from everything, making the trek to Mr Tan's place was one of the most singular experiences i have had while traveling. it's totally surreal that in amongst all these very dull houses there are pools and pools of various teeming crocodile species, and that if you show up at just the right time you can see them snapping at each other to get to the food that is so unceremoniously tossed them. the folks there were indeed set up to receive tourists, but it was clear that this had never been the point of the place--we were the only visitors there at the time, and they carried on with their operations as if we hadn't been. truly remarkable.

as long as we're talking about wildlife, we should mention another kind that is prominent in this part of the world, one that despite its total inertness and vegetative state may be as potentially harmful as many of the creatures heretofore mentioned. i'm talking about the humble durian, a fruit that is banned not just from underground trains, as the first picture shows, but from most other public places as well. the lack of a specific posted fine suggests to me, rather sinisterly, that getting caught breaking the durian rules will net you an encounter with another squad of riot police rather than just a ticket for a few hundred bucks (incidentally, each Singapore dollar was worth around 60 US cents while we were there, to give you an idea of the magnitude of those fines). this is a very strange thing, especially considering that the cantaloupe-sized delicacy is extremely popular and can be had quite cheaply on any number of street corners all over the city. and it's really very good. so what gives? that it only seems to be sold in the open air is a clue: durian basically consists of a full-frontal assault on the olfactory system, each one containing the sulfurous pungency of a month-old crate full of rotten eggs. they also look a bit dangerous, as the picture suggests, but they really are very tasty. if you can get past the smell. and you don't get arrested for possession.

so as long as you can stay out of jail, there are a few other things you should see before leaving Singapore, one of which is actually a giant concert hall and performing arts center whose shape and design are said to be inspired the durian, belying a national love for the eggy treat. i'll leave you to check out the Esplanade website for an idea of what the center, which is also reminiscent of a pair of bug-eyes, looks like, and then i'll leave you with this cool picture of the sign in front of the buildings, one of the most entertaining bits of modern art we've come across in all our travels. and it's true:

theautumn

while we were anticipating the arrival of the Kusudas at Thanksgiving, Jill and i had to occupy our time with other activities. we had decided, as evidenced by our thrilling trip to Wendover, that we should try to get out and see as much of our hometown as we could, treating it as we had our foreign homes on our travels, like we were tourists. it seems as though you never really get out and see the sites when you are "home", even though you run around like a crazy person to cram every last thing into any vacation you're on. and there are plenty of things to see in Utah, and lots of awesome outdoors to discover, as i had done at Arches.


a very hazy view of downtown Salt Lake City, taken on a cool October day from Ensign Peak. the state capitol is fairly clear at the far left of the picture, and the silver domed roof of the Tabernacle is about the most prominently visible feature of Temple Square, approximately in the center of the picture.

we decided to start gently however, with the short and relatively easy hike up to Ensign Peak, above the Utah state capitol building in the hills north of downtown. the significance of the place historically, and especially to Latter-day Saints, may have best been described by Boyd K Packer:

On July 26, 1847, their third day in the valley (the second having been the Sabbath), Brigham Young, with members of the Twelve and some others, climbed a peak about one and a half miles from where I now stand. They thought it a good place to raise an ensign to the nations. Heber C. Kimball wore a yellow bandana. They tied it to Willard Richards’s walking stick and waved it aloft, an ensign to the nations. Brigham Young named it Ensign Peak.

Brigham Young was the second prophet and president of the church and was also the effective founder of the Salt Lake Valley and much of Utah.



the trailhead for Ensign Peak lies among a cluster of houses in the "Avenues" area of Salt Lake, and would be hard to find if it weren't for this bold entry marker. below, Jill and i stand in front of the monument atop the peak and prove that it's not just Chinese people who will cut off the tops of your photos for you.



the peak itself does boast a great view of the valley--when smog conditions permit, at least. it was a good introduction to some of the many other, probably more difficult hikes that we could undertake around here, though we wisely timed this one so winter would prevent us from having to do more for several months. but we did celebrate this small triumph with a good old fashioned Halloween party a couple of days later. Jill's class at school decided to celebrate that most wholesome of holidays with an evening of fancy dress, though for some reason they all showed up as pirates. Jill and i, on the other hand, threw together some costumes with the effects we had on hand and so went as Japanese people, or at least as people vaguely inspired by the Japanese.



Jill sticking out among the pirate girls in her class; here Lindsey, the hostess, Sharon, comprehensively failing to look as menacing as a pirate should, and Hailey, who may have been a little too creative with the boot polish. below, Jill and i look much more reasonable as dressed up people when there aren't any pirate types around. the facial hair was all me, by the way.



so the autumn of 2007 was a good time for us, if a touch slow. not that we weren't busy, however. i was studying hard for my licensing exams and Jill was going to to town trying to facialize everyone she could get her hands on. she's very good at her aesthetics, by the way, and i didn't do so badly on my tests, as it happened. and now that she's done with school and i'm all licensed and registered, we may just have the time and the weather to get out there a little bit more in thespring.

thevisitors

"are you dead?" was a question fairly recently posed me on these very pages, by our friends Katie and Billy. apparently it has been a while, because soon after that query was posted, another friend, Jenn left these remarks: "I second Billy and Katie, are you dead? It's been almost 5 months since you posted last. WHAT IS GOING ON?"

maybe not quite five months, but it's a bit difficult to answer since there has been quite a lot going on, but i'll give it my best shot over the next few posts. the first thing i want to cover was a pretty big deal for us, and i've been meaning to write about it ever since. now seems like a particularly good time to get to it and make my return to blogging. just after we went to the salt flats, we got the great news that we would be able to share Thanksgiving with our good friends from Japan, the Kusudas. Yuuto was my student in Japan, and a very precocious one at that: at six years old he reads and writes English better than many native speakers of the same age. through meeting them at various parent teacher conferences, i could tell that Yuuto's parents were responsible for developing and augmenting his natural gifts in the language arena; not only did they take a very keen interest an helping him progress, but they both speak very good English themselves. we had a great time getting to know them better than those conferences had allowed when they came to visit.



the Kusudas arrive at the Salt Lake airport on Thanksgiving: from left to right are Natsumi, Yuuto's cousin, Yumiko and Shigeaki, his parents, and in front the man himself, looking very amused because Mr Ball "spelled" Yokoso ("welcome" in Japanese) wrong on the sign. below, the same group basks in the fluorescent light of Mecca... er, Wal-Mart.



Yuuto's mother, Yumiko, his father, Shigeaki, and one of his cousins, Natsumi, all arrived with the big star himself in the evening of Thanksgiving day, having flown in from Los Angeles. Yuuto thought it was hilarious that i had left out a character from the Japanese word for "welcome" on the sign we made for their arrival, and after all the English spelling tests i had given him, was probably justified in not letting it drop all evening. we took them to a family gathering at my grandpa's house, where Yuuto and Natsumi played with the other kids and showed them how to do origami, while Shige and Yumiko very patiently answered lots of questions from curious relatives and doled out hordes of gifts to the hosts. they brought Jill and i some calligraphy scrolls and another amazing Kokeshi doll for the collection Jill started while we were still in Nagoya.

we managed to pack a lot into a fairly brief visit, and funnily enough the number one destination, first on our list the following morning, was a trip to Wal-Mart. apparently news of its fame and possibly its vastness has crossed the Pacific ocean, because Yumiko had specifically requested to go there, for souvenirs. unfortunately, Salt Lake City Wal-Marts don't tend to stock a lot of souvenir-type items, but there is a "Supercenter" not far from us, and we did at least get to make the trip a decent Kodak moment.



scenes of the city, clockwise from top left: Yuuto and Natsumi with the official Jospeh Smith Memorial Building Nutcracker; Natsumi and Shige help Yuuto along in his first ever ice skating outing; the chilly group in front of the Salt Lake LDS Temple, probably the defining landmark of the state of Utah; and then with the only slightly lesser-known R2-D2 mailbox. below, a little taste of our man Yu-chan as he busts out his favorite phrase for the camera:



the rest of that Friday was spent touring the bitterly cold downtown of Salt Lake City, including a very thorough visit to Temple Square, our town's best claim to fame. later on we watched Yuuto get into his first ever trip to the ice rink, this one outdoors on Gallivan Plaza. he made a really good go of it, but was often just content to hold a hand on either side and get dragged around on more or less locked legs. by the time the adults were getting wiped out from that he was starting to skate for several feet by himself, but then we had to go so we could indulge Natsumi's sporting pleasure. She is on a basketball team in Japan and Shige had been wanting to see some professional sports, so naturally we took them to the Jazz game. despite the altitude of our seats, it actually turned out to be a really enjoyable game, beginning with the Jazz trailing the New Orleans Hornets for most of the first half. just before halftime the Jazz came back in a big way to take the lead by just a point as the buzzer went. with all the excitement in the air, everyone in our party started gathering their coats before we realized there was still another half to go. this one wasn't quite as entertaining as the first had been, but the Jazz held on and extended their lead to comfortable margins by the time it really was all over.



the view from the top: is actually a lot better than the camera makes out, and at least you can see all the action. below, a little clandestine footage of Yuuto's reaction to the Jazz scoring:



the best part of the game may have been the reactions it got from our guests. we weren't sure how much of it Yuuto would understand, but he caught on very quickly and was soon cheering for the Jazz... as long as he thought nobody knew. Jill had to use her spy skills and handy camera to get some evidence of what would happen when the Jazz scored, at least when Yuuto didn't think we were watching him.

the next day was a pretty long one, but not as long as it could have been. we're used to large distances in the West, but sometimes it's so big out here it's almost unfathomable. the Kusudas had really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, understandable given that it's a relatively close Wonder of the World. unfortunately, it's still more than a ten hour drive each way, so given our time constraints we all agreed to head for the famous Utah site of Arches National Park instead, far more reasonable at just four hours away. funnily enough, it was also my first time there.



Natsumi, Yuuto, Yumiko and Shige stretch their legs at Arches after many long hours in the car (during most of which Yuuto was saying things like "there's a wocket in my pocket, there's a lox in my box" or singing the first two lines of a Spice Girls song "Stop right now/Thank you very much/I need somebody/With a human touch"). below, scenes of the red rock park, clockwise from top left: Shige, Yumiko and Natsumi in front of Balanced Rock; Jill looking radiant in front of Turret Arch; Yuuto and i basking in that radiance underneath North Window Arch; and another example of Jill's stunning photography at Turret Arch.



we spent several hours in the park and could have spent more if the drive home hadn't been ahead of us. nevertheless, we did make it reasonably close to the most famous arch of them all: Delicate Arch. made so recently by being the focal point of Utah's centennial license plate design, we had to see it and try to get some photos, despite still being quite far from it. below, Jill and i were trying to add to our collection of portraits taken at iconic sites, when Yuuto jumped in front of the camera with the precision timing of a master comedian. we were all laughing for ages and the picture below is still one of my favorites. Yuuto was actually pretty comical throughout. as we were coming down the trail from the vantage point of Delicate Arch, a runner came jogging past us and Yuuto just yelled out "Where you going man?" really loudly. the other folks on the trail were busting up as i was filling with pride at having helped with the slang.



Yuuto livens up the scene with some split-second hi-jinks. below, a nice portrait of the whole group in front of the Christus statue at the visitor's center on Temple Square.



Jill and i were fortunate to make a lot of great friends in Japan and we are so glad the Kusudas came all the way to Utah to visit us. we had a great time and we're looking forward to the next meeting. until then, we'll miss you!

thesalt

having seen a fair bit of the world as tourists, Jill and i thought it might be high time to see a little of our own back yard in a similar way. so one rainy Saturday in late September we headed out west along I-80 to see one of Utah's most unusual sights: a concrete tree. properly known as Metaphor: The Tree of Utah, it was erected for no apparent reason many miles from anywhere on the side of the freeway. Karl Momen, the Swedish artist who designed the tree claimed he was moved to do so by the "vastness and relative emptiness" of the area, and also that the sculpture "brings space, nature, myth and technology together". these thoughts, along with those inscribed on the tree's base--"A hymn to our universe whose glory and dimension is beyond all myth and imagination"--hopefully help to make the tree more meaningful.


sometimes known as the Tree of Life, Metaphor's six orb-like boughs are encrusted with rock and minerals native to Utah.

not much farther down the road, just a few miles this side of the Nevada border, begins the huge expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats. pretty much just what they sound like, they are enormous salt-encrusted plains which have been used pretty much since their modern discovery for about one thing and one thing only: the pursuit of speed. from bicycle racers in the early days to jet-powered cars in the late summer of each modern year, the Flats are somehow a speedster's dream. the salt is thick and will cake up on the soles of your shoes as you trek around, but altogether it provides a hard, and perhaps more importantly empty, surface.



the salt of the flats looks more like snow, and starts from nowhere, just emerging from the surrounding desert. below, the highway rest-stop marker at the Bonneville Salt Flats...


...and what that marker says:

WELCOME TO THE BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS

AND UTAH'S FAMED MEASURED MILE—SITE OF WORLD LAND-SPEED RECORD RUNS

Utah's famed measured mile is located approximately seven miles beyond this marker, well in front of the mountains you see on the horizon. The elevation along the course is approximately 4,218 feet above sea level. The total length of the course that includes the measured mile varies from year to year, but for recent runs it has been laid out in a path 80 feet wide and approximately ten miles long, with a black reference stripe down the middle. Due to the curvature of the earth, it is impossible to see from one end of the course to the other. Timing of world land-speed record runs is under the jurisdiction of the United States Automobile Club. World land-speed record times represent an electronically-timed average of two runs over the measured mile, within a one hour time period—one run in each direction. The first world land-speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats was set on September 3, 1935, by Sir Malcolm Campbell. His speed was 301.13 miles per hour. Craig Breedlove holds the honor of being the first man to go faster than 400, 500, and 600 miles per hour. His record of 600.601 miles per hour, set on November 15, 1965, was finally broken on October 23, 1970, by Gary Gabelich. Gabelich's new record is 622.407 miles per hour.
Both Gabelich's rocket engine 'Blue Flame' and Breedlove's jet-powered 'Spirit of America' were equipped with specially designed inflatable tires, pre-tested to speeds in excess of 800 miles per hour.

Erected by THE GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY June 1972

we went on to that measured mile, but didn't really think a run on it would be good for the undercarriage of the car, so we settled for a bit of a run on the deserted but paved road out to the salt. sshhh, don't tell...



Jill and i on the thick crust of salt at the Bonneville Flats. below, the thriving metropolis of Wendover, Nevada, the place where Utah gambles.



finally that day we decided to go the remaining few miles to Wendover, mostly just because it was there. frankly the nothingness of the salt flats was more intriguing than this place, which is like a tiny Las Vegas with all the entertaining parts taken out. a handful of trashy casinos and more Utah-registered cars than you could shake a very big stick at, it's pretty much where Salt Lake people who think that Utah constrains them too much go to feel cosmopolitan. and the good folks of Wendover gladly take their money, hand over fist, and who could blame them? they did get to build that huge neon cowboy, after all. on our very brief stop to use the facilities in a casino, we were quickly reminded why certain of Utah's constraints can be a very nice thing. the state clean air lawsallow for no smoking in public buildings, so you not only get to breathe free, but you don't end up stinking after going out to eat (or indeed to the restroom). so despite the opinions of the folks who flock to Wendover, Utah isn't such a bad place, and i think we'll be doing a little more sightseeing here before we move on to our next world stop.