Four Twenty

In Ottawa, the gath­er­ing takes place today on Par­lia­ment Hill and Major Hill. When the clock on the Peace Tower strikes 4:20, bam, light up your spliff and enjoy—just make sure you don’t burn a pass­ing RCMP Offi­cer with your lit joint (guess what, Par­lia­ment Hill is not exactly cop-free).

The Best 3 Photography Tips I Was Given

When I first got into pho­tog­ra­phy, I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t read any book, didn’t take any classes. I sim­ply lis­tened to my instinct, try­ing to cap­ture moments, more or less suc­cess­fully. Most of what I learned was by trial and error. I trained with a small Kodak Easyshare and even­tu­ally allowed myself to grad­u­ate to a DSLR when pho­tog­ra­phy became a true passion.

Back Online!

And… I’m back! Gee, being off the grid for a day was strange.
For those who haven’t vis­ited lately, I took the blog offline for a day for a much-needed spring clean-up.

28

Happy birth­day to me!

Still no white hair (although it got bleached by the sun dur­ing our last trip).
Still no plan other than the usual—writing, tak­ing pic­tures, trav­el­ing.
Still freez­ing my butt off in Canada, the coun­try that adopted me.

The Professional Worrier

Feng calls me a “pro­fes­sional wor­rier”. I do worry a lot. I worry about the past, the present and the future. I mostly worry about the future though. And time. Time is my biggest issue. I don’t have enough time to do what I love and I spend too much time doing stuff that I don’t like. There are never enough hours in the day except when I’m bored, never enough time to accom­plish everything.

The City Swap

I occa­sion­ally take part in var­i­ous blog­ging events, such as con­tests, memes, pho­tog­ra­phy hunts etc. It had been a while, though.
This time, I heard of the City Swap on Expat Traveler’s blog. This year, it was orga­nized by Laura. The goal was to: “Swap some thing(s) that, in your opin­ion, best rep­re­sent the place where you live, and what you think makes it unique”. Laura patiently assigned each par­tic­i­pant a “city swap buddy”.

Mornings

Maybe I’m sub­con­sciously try­ing to fit in: Ottawa is a morn­ing city. While in France, noth­ing was open before 10 am, in Ottawa you can have break­fast at 5 am, an hour-long yoga les­son at 6 am and be at work by 7 am. Freaky. Peo­ple love being up early in that city, and by early I mean long before the sun rises.

500 Articles And Four Years Later...

Almost four years of blog­ging later, today I’m pub­lish­ing my 500^th post.
It all started in Octo­ber 2006. At the time, I had been a per­ma­nent res­i­dent in Canada for exactly a year (and I had been in Canada for already two years) but I was still get­ting com­fort­able with my new coun­try. I had no idea what I would do with a blog nor did I have any idea how all that (all that being me in Canada, work­ing as a teacher) was going to turn out.