someone had to be the last one back on the ship. and since you – not you, not you, –  YOU, were being paged four times for the on-time departure of your aircraft through the entire domestic terminal building five minutes after our scheduled departure time, and ended up delaying me going home by five minutes at the end of the night, it was my turn. except my name wasn’t paged. and i didn’t delay our ship. and it was five minutes PRIOR to departure time. plus, i remembered watching that discovery channel special on the brand new oasis of the seas ship – the part where a millionaire delays the ship by six hours or something ridiculous. so you know what, m/s prinsendam, you weren’t going anywhere without me for a while yet ANYWAY. and frankly, since you charge $.70/minute for internet on your ship (that’s why your emails weren’t returned ;) ha!), i was going to milk every last second out of the free wifi at the only starbucks i saw on our entire three week trip.

in any case, this post is about the most amazing haircut, shave, and ear hair burning, not why i was the last of 800 something people to board a cruise ship in a small city halfway across the world where english isn’t really spoken. sounds fascinating, i know. but hei, you must think so because you’re the one here reading about it. that, or most of you are just too loyal to this space on the web.

so, after i finished having a brief conversation in turkglish with a lady who was watching me take a photo from her home of her locked-in-a-glass-stand-day-old pretzels, i decided not to purchase one and that the image wasn’t even worth keeping on my camera anyway. scruffy – way too lazy to shave, and in need of a haircut (and a good facial hair trimmer for that matter) – well not really about the haircut, but it’s fun to try and negotiate a new hairstyle with someone whom you don’t communicate through words isn’t it? plus, for 20 turkish lira, how can you go wrong for an experience like that. i think i wrote to jen that night – write an email on my iphone, save it as a draft, and log-in to the internet to sent it and log out immediately after i’ve downloaded all my incoming mails to read them offline. because if you think i’m going to sit there and compose an essay while i pay $.70/minute for the connection, you’re… i can’t say those words on my blog. but if i could find that email i wrote jen that night, i would copy and paste it because i enthusiastically described in detail the best hair cut of my life, best shave of my life, and one of my favourite travel experiences so far in life. complete with a new hairstyle, clean shave from just a single razor blade, having the hair burnt off my face by flame, and a hands on experience of having my head dunked under a running tap WITHOUT plugging my nose, i was ready to take on kuşadası, turkey. one of my favourite ports. (photos of my hair in greece is up next).

moonlight aviation photography anyone? spot the aeroplane and vapourtrail!

i have moods when i travel. they’re a frequent thing, and they’re pretty unpredictable. back in february when i was in tromsø for a week, i was having one of those moods. it’s my favourite place on the planet, and i really didn’t feel like taking any photos. the weather was gorgeous, albeit fifteen below zero, but the weather was gorgeous and you just couldn’t motivate me enough to take a photograph. one week, and when i wasn’t chasing the aurora from dinner time to the early hours of the morning with kjetil, i took less than fifteen photos. not even three a day. i just didn’t feel the need to, i didn’t want to, and it felt to me like everything i wanted was complete in the moment i was living it. i remember feeling the shivering cold walking the twenty steps outside from kjetil’s basement suite to his living room for dinner. i can recall their accents, and their kids giddiness of having a canadian guest stay with them. my senses of it all are so sharp, so complete, and with no images to help bring the experience to others.

i walked off the ship in sinop, turkey. it felt good. really good. the sky was pretty overcast in the morning as we started out, and i gravitated to some street cats. of COURSE i did. if i didn’t feel like making dilapidated buildings look interesting, i could photograph a cat and feel like an accomplished travel photographer. what’s that magazine in the movie notting hill? horse and hound? yeah, maybe they’ll see my work and HAVE to have me employed with them. i’ll travel the world and photograph street cats. how could i ever go wrong in my thinking. so taking some images of cats, holding up my aunt and brother from continuing through a sleepy turkish town on a sunday morning. what’s your hurry, everything is closed anyway, guys. apparently a man parked his car next to the wall there and began to talk to my brother and aunt. i had other priorities. but the cats ran away, and i engaged in some conversation. what were the odds of running into someone who speaks better english than i do in a town of a few thousand people on the coast of the black sea. one hundred percent.

a few minutes go by and we’re laughing and joking. well, the turks think i’m hilarious so i’m never leaving now. he yells up to his family through their apartment window. they would love to have us into their home for breakfast with them. rustic. authentic. surreal. it’s perfect. their home is beautiful. there is fresh breakfast baking all over the kitchen. coffee. tea. amazing conversation. it was all making sense. i didn’t need some photos of the outside of their building, or of a colourful parked car. i had the exact moment right in front of me. all the smells, all their accents, all the translating. the playing with the iphones. it was perfect. and later once we had said goodbye exchanging an email address or two, i found those photos of buildings, cars, and people anyway. ohh, and the sunset. the best sunset ever.

ohh, speaking of turkish hospitality. how’s this for some. our ship had made a local paper in one of the previous ports. dozens of photos. a few interviews. it was exciting stuff, it definitely wasn’t the everday. they wanted so much for us to have some of these papers to keep and take home that these folks came screeching up, literally, in a beautiful mercedes, jumped out of their car, tied up some papers in some string and tried to throw them onto our ship which had already pushed off the dock. the papers missed and are on their way to the bottom of the sea. they call over some guys PERSONAL boat, get on it with more newspapers, speed off toward our ship and tie up the papers in one of the guys’ sweaters. well they make our ship, a cheer goes off from everyone watching and so long, sinop – you have been incredible.

georgia. a lot of people don’t even know it’s a country. infact, i didn’t either up until a few years ago when i still watched the news. it’s one of those countries that when people find out you’re going, they beg to ask the ‘why would you want to go there? you can go anywhere you want, why would you go there?’ question. what is georgia anyway? i don’t really have a beautifully articulated answer of why i was there, or what there was to experience. it was just one of those experiences. it wasn’t a comfort country. it wasn’t a norway, or a france. english isn’t spoken, and locals aren’t accustomed to travellers. local folks curiosity peaks increasingly with each block walked from the marketplace, but we’re really all the same.
they pause for cover from a passing rainstorm under local business awnings just like us, and they pack themselves into make shift public transportation much like us. they get out to their beaches with friends in the afternoon, and they hang their laundry dry over their balcony. people are not so different, and it feels pretty awesome to realise that conclusion in a place so far away from ‘home’.

don’t ever change for anyone, georgia. you’re unmistakably amazing, and i know you’ll keep evolving into more.

and so by the early evening, we were back onboard heading in and out of sun showers and thunderstorms. sail on for the next.

It didn’t at all matter for what day we booked tickets for the ferry over to Tallinn because the forecast is entirely useless this time of the year here. Well, it’s not that it’s useless – it’s just that the weather is constantly changing, it just doesn’t stay still. So Wednesday it was, and as we pulled into port, it was raining insanely hard to the point I didn’t want to get off the ship. By the time the bridge docked, the sun was out in full. And it carried on like that for the entire afternoon, so there was a fine balance of dodging into alleys & hiding the camera to purposely getting lost in the old town.

I will say everything about today was perfect. Everything. Every little detail. Every fine ounce of creativity that flowed, and still is flowing, re-discovering the coffee house from two months ago, rendezvousing with so many right people, appreciating magnificent displays from mother nature and everything in between. See, the wonderful thing about life is as something is active within me – it follows me where ever I go, and with a little fine tuning, all those things are wanted & deliberate. What is more perfect than that?

Fortunately, this was the payoff of winds that blew me down the deck on my feet & near freezing temperatures.

Cute little video inside my favouritest cafe on the planet!   Think I heard them say they were from Nova Scotia!

Remember I said my previous post was my favourite in a long time? I think I lied, big time. Scrolling through these, and taking a look at some of what I have to come for my blog sitting in Lightroom right now… I love my photography, and it’s been a while since I’ve said that and felt it so it feels good, indeed! I have a lot of cathedral photography from Helsinki, and wanted to save, what turned up to be only some of them, for a separate post because I really feel they all click well with one another here, and I’ve narrowed them down quite a bit – hence all the collages, because there’s so much!

Okei, so Helsinki Extreme Day may not have been that extreme, but I was just really cuing up for this post because it’s probably one of my favourites in some time. While Helsinki may not get the midnight sun, it really wasn’t far from it and I wasn’t even there during the longest days of the year. The sun sort of set, well it set, but the sky never darkened because the sun never sat too far below the horizon which made for some of the most phenomenal twilight skies I’ve witnessed, and compared greatly to my Winters in Norway – except on the opposite side of the scale, and instead of the sun never rising – it nearly never set here. So a lot of these photos vary from 22:30 into the wee hours of the morning!

Here’s just a little sample of how easy it is to stay charged all through the night with unbounding energy because everytime I looked out the window, the sky just became more and more beautiful filling with every deep blue & purple imaginable all through til the morning sun! The image on the left was taken at 02:58, and the right image at 00:03 both on 21st July!

All three of my upcoming posts are going to be a little photo heavy, a lot Helsinki heavy, and probably a little extreme. There’s more than enough in this old Northern capital to keep things fresh, vibrant & exciting while living here for the better part of July & August and the challenge lies in keeping it exactly that through the eye of a camera lens. So to build off a little helsinki extreme laundry, get set & go!

I just don’t heart the ferry ride over to Tallinn, at all.  It was perhaps the most uncomfortable total of six and a half hours I’ve spent on a ferry in my life.  What kind of company buys a people & car ferry… without seats and an air conditioning system that made it feel like I was back in the ice hotel!  Kudos to the Eckerö Line though, I did very much enjoy the €10 buffet breakfast (at 7:20am) on the way over, and stuffed my face silly with all sorts of delicious fruits & foods I haven’t been up early enough for in months.

Tallinn was really enjoyable, and I’ll gladly say I fell willingly into the tourist cycle of really staying within the old town for the half day there.  Organic old buildings still boasting vibrant colours & rugged brick, gorgeous orthox cathedrals standing tall on hills over the city… it’s about as picturesque as I could’ve been able to imagine.  The only thing that could’ve made it better is the sun making an earlier appearance in the day, but we enjoy it as the afternoon carried on.

What an absolute gem of a cafe this is.  There was no one else in here, and the exposed brick on the inside with wonderfully comfortable chairs lining the walls of the cafe was perfect!  If not for heading inside there while it was cloudy, and about ten minutes later the sun poking through – I could’ve spent the remainder of the day there without a doubt.  Right on the main square in Tallinn too, and it was just the most peaceful little Oasis.  Ferry ride back – how could I resist a little lip syncing to Jump For My Love by the Pointer Sisters?!  I mean, come on!  Thanks to Anna for wanting to embarrass me with these photos, but I’m afraid that doesn’t happen!  She does have a video though, if you dare ask.

New York – Helsinki – Stockholm.  I only wanted to go as far as Helsinki, and I would just ask the check-in agents at Finnair to short tag my bag for Helsinki, so it and I would just end our journey there.  Apparently, wanting to save the airline a little money isn’t as generous as it sounds.  The scene at the check-in desk at JFK:  I’m standing there with my 27kg backpack, being assured I need to travel all the way to Stockholm or my return flight would be cancelled.  I don’t have any accommodation there, nor a flight to get back over to Helsinki.  Mmm, very convenient indeed.  So I finish the check-in process and can feel my heart racing a little faster than I ever remember it doing so before.  Another little bit of information for those travelling through JFK – they have no computers with internet access.  I remember I have my iTouch tucked away in my bag – ahh excellent, I’ll just book a flight back over to Helsinki this way – done, taken care of, all is well.  Not quite.  Apparently I forgot to charge it the night before, so as I now go through the 28 step process to get signed up for paying $8.95 for an hour of Wifi – my battery life is flashing red with 20% remaining.  Bollocks.  Scramble over to flysas.com, and find a flight back over to Helsinki from Stockholm – last flight of the night …$327.23 later.  US dollars.  So instead of arriving into Helsinki at 1pm, I arrive into Helsinki at 22:40pm.  The following hour wasn’t my finest, but thankfully the money was there, and things still happened to line up to get me to where I needed to be and sometimes, that’s really all that matters.

A little side story here if you’re still reading, and haven’t skipped ahead to the photos… After I clicked ‘Confirm’ on the SAS website, I felt my body sank into the airport chair knowing I’d just gotten myself to where I wanted to be, but more because I’d just unexpectedly spent $400 Canadian.  I sat with probably the most blank face of anyone in the boarding lounge, and my thoughts seemed to just pause.  I leaned forward in my chair, and just released a quiet thought ‘Universe, I just need a sign… I just need a sign things are well’.  I felt so non-resistant finally.  Thirty seconds later, I picked up my camera bag, picked up my tripod and walked almost automatically toward a nice looking restaurant tucked away near the middle of the corridor called O’Neals.  Seated myself to a booth with a view of the terminal.  I picked up the menu, opened it… French onion soup, closed it.  A waitress spots me, walks slowly over… “You all ready there, sweetie?”  The rest of the story doesn’t really matter, it’s just sometimes when we think we couldn’t be more alone – there’s always something to point us in the right direction.  Ask, and it it given.

I’d planned to end this post here, but this evening I got a little inspired when I saw there were to be thunder-showers in just a few hours time, so I headed on out to a place I plan to go every night for twilight from this day forward.  The sun isn’t setting here until about 10:30 pm now, and twilight lasts well into 1:30 am – it’s incredible.  So the forecast says thunder showers & lightning, and what do I do – keep on my linen shirts & capris.  Walk out the door, the summer wind blows nicely and the rain starts.  Get to the cathedral – rain continues, harder now but not without getting the shots intended of course.  After taking refuge inside the cathedral for a few minutes, literally instantly as we walk out the door – lighting!  Not just a little bit of sheet lighting, but full on sheet & fork lighting panoramically across the entire sky!  Absolutely phenomenal!  And by the time we get back inside by about 1am, my clothes are now glued to my body, it’s like I’ve just taken a shower with my clothes on.  But ohh, I’d do it again in a heartbeat!

Thirty-six hours in New York City, and yet another posh hotel.  I knew New York would carry a certain sort of… energy, but it wasn’t anything like I was expecting.  You see, the beautiful thing about travelling is we create our own experience and there’s no one in the world to tell you what you should be doing.  The most beautiful part of it all is discovering those gems of restaurants hidden behind back side streets, quiet little cafes & the lesser spoken of parks nestled away from every other Canadian tourist living out of a Lonely Planet guide book.  Naturally, taking a walk through Central Park to watch a kick ball game and sitting in the middle of Times Square at twilight have their own particular charms as well.

I am incredibly embarrassed to say that my backpack now weighs a very solid 26.6 – 27 kgs, depending on how gently I set it down on the airport scale at check-in.  I’ve always sworn I’d never be that bastard backpacker with the disgustingly heavy backpack because I know first hand just how ridiculous that is, however, because I went to New York and single handedly helped to end your recession by spending more cash than I’d like to admit down Broadway & 5th Ave within six hours – I’m entirely entitled to how heavy my backpack now weighs.  I told you I had a thing for posh hotels & shopping.  I wasn’t kidding, I don’t just make this stuff up – and now you know for sure.

Goodbye to New York City for now, and while I’ll be back someday, it’s once again time to move on.  Finally that flight overseas awaits me, and not without it’s challenges of an incomplete booking to my final destination and no internet access to book that last leg on but my dying iTouch & expensive airport wi-fi.  I love spontaneity, but this may just be a little to…

Of course I did eventually get outside in the city and strain my poor little body on some of the steepest sidewalks I have ever walked.  Ridiculous!  The previous post was my hotel the first night, and this is Hotel 1000 the second night I was in Seattle.  It felt like the exact same experience at the hotel – incredible staff who were genuine, caring & helpful who upgraded my breathtaking room for me – I had two baths in one night.  Previously, I haven’t had a bath for over five years.  I’m filled with such appreciation for all of these experiences which… don’t seem to ever stop flowing into my experience.

Seattle is definitely a city I’ll look forward to coming back to, especially if the people I met are any indication of who else is out there in that city.  Even the weather seemed to keep it’s best interests in it for me – experienced some more phenomenal thunder showers in the city, and that’s not where they ended either.  But like always now, I must carry on – and so, if you’ve even flown before or seen a boarding pass – you’ll know where I’m headed next!  See ya there!

Not long ago, I would’ve said the odds of designing my own blog & website were about the same chances of it getting down to -11°C in Vancouver this Winter – oddly enough, both have happened! It’s incredible the way snow lights up the city, and the spirits of people within it. And so I’m equally as chuffed to present my blog, and my website as I am with the snow on the ground!