Travel is a strange thing. The way I do it, it's work. You get up early, go hard, eat exotic foods because they are exotic, stay up late and sleep in less-than-desirable conditions. And you drag your husband around on your agenda because you are the planner. It's rewarding in quite indescribable ways. I'm a different person than I was a few years back before we started traveling constantly. Seeing the world gives you new perspectives, new ideas. It's enlightening. And exhausting. And sometimes delightful. But also sometimes miserable. It's a big world. I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to see some of it.
Every year for the last three, George has gone to Oxford to work with his colleagues there. I went two years ago and we also hit
Belgium. We fell quite in love with Flanders, so we decided to try just a tad north and this year went to The Netherlands before settling George in the old university for several weeks.
Of all the places I've traveled, and it's been a few at this point, The Netherlands strike me as the place I might most like to live. The people are refreshingly direct and simultaneously mind their own business. I've operated my entire life feeling blunt but not so in The Netherlands. I think I might fit in just fine. And there are bicycles everywhere. And the air is really, really clear.
We started the trip in Amsterdam, which is a logical place to start. We were there for five days and could easily have doubled that time. Amsterdam is packed to the brim with museums, historic sites and activities. It's an incredibly active, engaging city. We rolled in off a red eye bleary and exhausted, and so spent most of the first day wandering around in a stupor. The following day, the first activity we did, before stepping foot in a single museum, was a cheese tasting. We promptly bought 20 euro worth of cheese, that we had to cart all over the damn world. Now that it's in our fridge, I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Cheese anyone?
One of the wisest moves we made was purchasing Museumkaarten, cards that get you into all state-run museums for free (once you pay the 50 euro fee). These cards were good for basically any museum we stumbled across and they were an
amazing deal. Highly recommend to anyone spending more than just a few days in the country! They're not marketed to tourists, so you won't find any info in English, but you can buy them at most of the big museums.
Here we're at the end of one of the museums... I don't know which one. We went to all of them, because admission was included with the card, but it was a lot of checking off boxes. Yes, we went to the Van Gogh museum. No, we don't really give a rip about Van Gogh.
But what we do give a rip about, obviously, are windmills! These things are every bit as adorable and neat as they seem. George and I took our first bike trip out to Zaanse Schans during our stay in Amsterdam. It was a beautiful ride. Our butts hurt like crazy. And the windmills were super-awesome. A couple of them were operating, grinding spices or making paint. They used to be a huge industry in the region but industrialization, etc. etc.
We took a walking tour of the Red Light District, which was considerably campier than the regular walking tour of the old part of town. The guide (on the left) insisted we go into the Sex Palace. It's one of those places where you put in coins and then can watch the "live show" in a tiny booth, in a circle of other tiny booths looking in on a spinning bed of sorts. It was a unique experience.
Amsterdam was awesome and the country is so small, you really could stay there and day trip everywhere else. But it's also the most expensive city I have ever seen. Our (sort of crap) private room in the hostel was way more than I wanted to spend for a ten-day trip. Our wallets lighter, we headed to Utrecht.
More examples of stores in Europe selling just one thing.
This is Amersfoort (or Amber's Fort, if you will). We biked here. My butt hurt. The city has really, really cool old gates.
The city of Leiden has more than 100 poems on the walls of various buildings. Quirky and charming.
Upon arrival in Rotterdam, George immediately fell ill and spent the next two days in bed. I felt a little guilty, but I wasn't about to pass up on Den Haag and the other sites nearby. These are a bunch of people protesting Israel's military actions. It was a strange protest because they were pretending to be dead and it was really quiet. There were just all these people lying on the ground and probably just as many taking pictures of them.
The Escher Museum, where I was willing to drop serious, serious coin on some gift shop action. Thankfully they didn't have anything really good.
Sculpture show in Den Haag. I think I've seen this cake before, in Paris.
The beauty of the Museumkaart is that I could go in all these 15 euro museums and go straight to the highlights, without feeling I needed to "get my money's worth" by looking at a bunch of other stuff I don't care about. Art museums are cool and all but
every single city in Europe has a "world class" art museum. You can only look at so many portraits of rich people from the 1700s. It was also really fun to go into the Rijkmuseum or the Van Gogh museum and go check, check, check and skedaddle for some kebabs. Yes, if we're being realistic, most of travel is just finding something to do between mealtimes.
This is the port where some of the pilgrims sailed for America. Some left from England, others from Rotterdam (though they were also English). The pilgrims who sailed from here came to The Netherlands because they wanted to practice their religion and England was not having it. But the Dutch let everybody practice their religion, so they got all huffy about all the different practices and were worried their kids wouldn't be Protestant enough. So they hit the road for America.
Checking off more boxes, though the modern art museum in Rotterdam was really, really cool.
George maintained illness and decided not to see Adorable Windmill Town #2.
And then, George left to go to England. Because I am me, I decided to stay on and see some more of the country. After some train misery, I finally made it to Deventer, where they were having their annual book sale. The entire city was filled with book vendors. Apparently people in The Netherlands actually read.
Naturally my eye goes to wedding things.
This was my hotel. Because of the book fair, all the cheapie accommodations were booked up, so I stayed in a former convent. It was still cheaper than the hostel room in Amsterdam.
My second day in Deventer, I took a train to a bus to a bike to hang out in nature at Hogue Veluwe National Park. It was really serene and lovely.
I took this photo of dead rabbits as something of an illustration of Dutch sensibilities. Why
wouldn't you demonstrate how a dead rabbit decomposes?
For my last Netherlands stop, I dealt with some more train travails and made it to Gronigen, one of the best cities I saw. Compact, students and bikes everywhere, great modern art museum. None of which I photographed. But weird model heads in yellow shop windows? I'm all over it.
I'm not much of a biker. Actually, I've always sort of hated biking. Slumping over, wearing a helmet, huffing it up hills and trying to avoid getting run over - not fun. But biking in The Netherlands was truly wonderful. Cars
give you the right of way, there are wonderful bike paths all through the countryside and the area is flat as can be. I biked something like 10 miles to get to the sea.
The Wadden Sea, as it were. This is the very furthest north I got. You can see what looks like mud in this photo. That's because it is mud. And it goes on and on and on. When the tide comes in, it's shallow water.
After my ten miles of biking and hoping to dramatically reach water, I came to this cattle gate. The bike path just ended and I was looking at an embankment. So I hopped the gate and walked up the hill to the scene above. It wasn't quite the "I've arrived at the ocean" thing you get on the East or West Coasts of the U.S., but it was satisfying. Then I turned around and saw a bunch of baby seals at the baby seal rescue shelter. It was awesome.
And then, as these things go, it was time to move to England, reunite with George, and shoot a wedding.
The always-lovely
Kari Bellamy had me over to the Cotswolds for a second round of second-shooting in the English countryside. (Round one
here - one of my very favorite weddings ever.) The guys were doing their typical shower-five-minutes-before-leaving thing, so I just wandered around the incredibly, massively, unbelievably cute village next to their hotel and took eight million photos.
More from the wedding some day. Here's George at Stonehenge!
To be perfectly honest, the Stonehenge day was pretty miserable. We spent way, way too much money on a car rental, drove two hours to get there and as we did, some kind of horrific mid-August cold front came in, with super-gusty winds and big-time chill. We took a quick loop, tried to be interested in our audio guides, then just gave up and got hot tea in the gift shop and got back in the car. But we've now seen Stonehenge!
Turns out they don't know what the heck these people were doing with these stones. Lots of hypotheses but nobody seems to be able to come to a consensus about the stones, or all the burial mounds and things nearby. So it's a lot of "here's some big stones and where they're from - isn't that neat?" All of the "so why do I care?" questions are left quite unanswered. They're big old rocks - from far away - arranged in a circle! Inherently interesting.
Oxford tourists doing incredibly dorky tourism things. In case you can't tell, those kids are all dressed as Harry Potter. They filmed part of it in Oxford so it's a big, big thing there.
A trip to London to sightsee and visit with former clients. This is the Natural History Museum. It's a pretty great museum.
They even have Dodos.
On my last day in Europe, I took a long walk through Oxford's countryside to The Trout. You pass through Port Meadow, a large grazing land that has apparently gone untouched (been continuously grazed without tilling) for four thousand years. Or so they say. The cows and horses are incredibly chill and you can get really close to them before they start making "seriously, fuck off" noises.
At The Trout, they have at least one peacock who begs and tries to steal food off your plate.
And that is that! I'm way more excited than I thought I could be about
not having any more big trips planned. We're doing a bit of Amish country on the way to a wedding in upstate New York next week and then we'll be in New Orleans for Halloween, but other than that, we actually get to stay home for a good long while. Do laundry. Take walks. Get bored. Cook. The homebody in me is thrilled and the world-traveling, anxious, cabin-fever me hasn't quite caught up yet.
Two other photo-related things I did in June: a nekkid photoshoot for me (ostensibly for George but who are we kidding) and a "couple shoot" with the both of us. Sarah Williams from This Rad Love did both and I couldn't love them more.
(There's literally no other photo from this shoot that doesn't have some of my ladybits showing. Rawr.)
George and I brainstormed for weeks about things that we enjoying doing together that could be "documented." At the end of the day, most of it was eating-related. We literally had lunch at Founding Farmers and Sarah took pictures. She hung out with us for an ungodly amount of time, bless her heart.
That's all I've got from June, man. David, Carrie, George and I rolled over to West Virginia to hang with good friends in their sprawling, mansion-like home. Amazing food and good times were had by all. Other than that, lots of weddings and things.
I wish I could say I nipped that June no-personal-photos thing in the bud but it's not true. I have only a handful to show.
I found myself in Louisville in July with a couple days to kill. I'd never seen the city before. It's got some fun spots but really it's quite sleepy for a major city. Not much going on downtown and such. I thought about this one for a while before I made my choice. Before I die... nothing? I feel pretty good about life. I don't particularly feel the need to check anything else off a list. But if there's one ambition I have, it's to taste more things.
Also in July, Aziz hosted a scavenger photo-hunt from the Leica Store. We were given a list of 12 or 14 things to photograph around the city. Some of these weren't actually part of the hunt - I just took them during the six (!) hours he gave us.
I did not win the scavenger hunt, but I did meet Mike who was carrying around this sombrero on his bike.
The July DC photowalk was held at Fort Reno.
I photoed one last wedding in July, and that night scooted off to meet my husband in Vienna... where I immediately fell ill and spent a day in bed. I did my best to spend my last half-day doing stuff, so we toured the opera house. My phone took this panorama - yay technology!
It was just a couple days in Vienna, then we headed on to Prague. The city is really beautiful because it didn't get bombed much in the wars (unlike basically every other European capital). Here are a couple more panoramas from my phone, from the Clock Tower.
I liked Prague quite a bit, but it's nowhere near my contender for "best city," as many friends assured me it would be. It lacks a feel of authenticity in much of the city center - the same way Rome does. They both have an artificiality to them, as though everything is done for your (the tourist's) benefit. I much prefer a bustling place like NYC or Amsterdam that makes things easy for tourists, but also has its own thing going on such that tourists are not the primary thought.
All that said, Prague was a very atmospheric locale to spend five days. I particularly enjoyed the architecture, if not George's compositional skills.
And then! We went to a church decorated all over with bones!! This is the Sedlac Bone Church about 45 minutes from Prague. The priests used the bones of plague victims to remind parishioners about mortality and fleeting-ness of this world and also something about how we're all equal in the eyes of G-d. It was mad awesome.
We also toured Terezin, a very strange concentration camp that the Nazis used for propaganda. This was a more pleasant place than almost anywhere else in the Third Reich but nearly everyone that came to the camp was later sent on to their deaths.
A Cubist coffee shop back in Prague.
Tourists waiting for the famous Astronomical Clock to chime.
I thought this spider helped illustrate what an awesome view we had from our hotel room. I splurged in Prague because it was cheap ($100/night!) and because the rest of the trip our accommodations were covered by George's work.
And with that eight-legged dude, I leave you. We had one more destination on this year's European gallivanting, but that is a story for another day.
In March, I traveled to Charlottesville for a friend, took the Northern Virginia Short Course in Photojournalism, spent a few quality days in NYC, and juggled many things for a styled shoot last week. It feels like it's been crazy and Spring has barely broken through.
But, truth be told, I love to be occupied. Gaining new skills makes me feel useful and travel is always on the agenda. I have a really big announcement to make but you're probably going to have to wait quite a while to hear it. My mental energy feels like it's split right in thirds: clients, side projects and enrichment, and "the news". I'm being vague on purpose. You'll have to deal. Or talk to me in person.
Without any more rambling, photos from March:
Just a quirky wine display in a store in Charlottesville. A friend passed away. Someone I hadn't talked to - really talked to - in years. Someone I was honestly never very close with to begin. But someone who has had a presence in my life for the last seven years - through mutual friendships and stories and memories. Somehow this person is entangled in my life, like when all of your necklaces are at the bottom of a drawer and you can't just fish out the one you want to wear. And somehow it's all related to growing up and living in the real world. (I met him when I first came to DC and lived in a room in his house. I still talk with every person that lived in the house at the same time, and a bunch of related folks to boot.) I didn't really know him, not for a long time anyway, and I can't really say that I miss him, since I didn't talk to him these last years. And even though he was sick, his death was still jarring. I mostly try not to think about it.
I turned 31 at the very, very beginning of March (my birthday is Feb. 28). As a present from the Universe and a reminder (as if I needed one!) that I'm getting older, I threw out my neck on said birthday. I spent the next week on the couch and eventually had to get a muscle relaxant from the doctor. I've since gotten back into a daily yoga practice. It feels good, though of course sometimes it's a slog. While my neck was out of commission, my hard drive decided to crap out. When it rains it pours, as they say. I shot this while I waited for a repair at the Pentagon City Mall.
Then I spent three days attending the Northern Virginia Short Course in Photojournalism. It was half-good. The other half was a bunch of stuff that just wasn't relevant to me. I spent half of these days mentally pacing thinking I should be getting all my work done. On the other hand, I got really jazzed about video at this conference. So many possibilities...
This was a first: an image of mine was selected for a juried photography show. The 
George had a big conference in NYC last month. He gave a talk and as far as I can tell, did really well on stage and off. He's going to be a big-shot physicist man and I'm along for the ride. I only stayed in NYC two nights out of the optional four in order to make my Jewish class. That should tell you something about how much I enjoyed the Jewish class - just five lectures / Q&As on Jewish history, culture, spirituality, food. Hebrew always sounds so intimately familiar, even though I have no idea what they're saying. I'm deeply conflicted about my relationship to Judaism. According to the rabbi, that's pretty typical, so I guess I shouldn't feel down about it.
Anyway, this dude was playing a huge piano in Washington Square.
That's Carrie and this is her partner, David. I have known David for more than a decade. He's a weird dude but I like him. David, Carrie and I spent the whole day doing street photography in the City. New York has a vibrancy that is unparalleled in places I've seen. It's an exciting place with tons of character. Ideal for street, which is why so much street is produced there.
Our hotel had one of those weird NYC rooftops whose door is open but you get the feeling you are not meant to be out there.
Characters in a Chinese coffee shop.
Carrie shoots on film. I find this both admirable and ridiculous.
And, as these things go, I didn't pick up my personal-shooting camera again until I hosted the third #DCPhotowalks Photowalk. Shortly after this day, I made up a 
So much easier to shoot outside, with a bright sun and throngs of people around Gallery Place.
And that wraps up Stray Frames for March. Until next time. (February Stray Frames