lao-ocean-girl

The Nines is a luxury hotel in the heart of downtown Portland.  It houses two restaurants – Departure (modern Asian fare) and The Urban Farmer (a modern steakhouse).  As part of Raswan’s last hurrah in Oregon, we had lunch at the Urban Farmer, an atrium restaurant with a seven-story skylight.  Check out this link for even more beautiful pictures inside the restaurant.  I loved the urban farmhouse feel.

Group photo on the cow couch

Warning: Food porn ahead

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These are pictures of Cannon Beach from Saturday.

Above: Panorama of Cannon Beach

The Oregon Brewers Festival was this past weekend.  I attended with my brother and his friends Johnny and Jeolida.

My brother and I.  I lurve him!  [In one of the Facebook photos of us, he captions: "At least I'm the second best looking person in my family."  Awww...]

$1 = 1 token = 1 taste = 1/3 of a plastic mug.  $20 package = 1 mug and 14 tokens.

We tried to follow Gandalf through the crowd, hoping he’d lead us to the good beers.  Unfortunately, we easily lost him.  He is a wizard, afterall.

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I found this photo of a polaroid I took exactly one year ago today.  It’s a picture of Kristy and I at Courtney’s birthday in Gunpo, South Korea.  Ahh… good times.

(I figure that if you can read Korean, you can know my real name.)

Speaking of the lovely Kristy, I got a care package from her today.  She knows me well because it was stuffed with lots of yummy stationary.  I do miss all that cute stuff in Asia.  And I miss her.

Quite a few people on and offline have been asking me why I don’t blog anymore.  It’s not that I don’t blog anymore, I just stopped for a really long time.  These were a few reasons.

1) Twitter: I’m twittering a lot instead of blogging because it’s so much easier to send out a quick thought than to write a complete blog post.  For anyone who has a blog, you’ll know that the intention to write a quick post will eventually turn into a couple hours of work.

2)  School life: I’ve started my classes for grad school and its been a complete whirlwind of work.  For the last month, I’ve been getting up at 5am, driving 40 minutes each way to school, in class from 8:00-4:30pm, and then studying/doing homework from 7:00pm-midnight.  I was surprised at how successful I was at operating on five hours of sleep every night.  Then when the weekend came, the last thing I wanted to do was be inside on a computer.

3)  Quality vs Quantity: I feel like I should be writing something of significance.  Recently, I’ve been putting photos on Posterous, with small captions and no story behind the pictures, then tweeting it out.  Somehow I felt that I couldn’t do the same thing on this blog.  I thought that everything I wrote here needed an explanation because that’s how all my previous posts were like.  So instead of putting something small out there, I chose not to put anything at all and realized what a shame that was.

So, I’m back on track, evolving and changing but returning to what I’ve known and done for the last six years – blog.  Yes, its been six years!