On my last post we were returning to Phnom Penh from Bangkok. Some of the images here were of the scenes at the neighborhood we were staying at in Bangkok. Sukhamvit is known as the dead artists bars because they have several bars named after dead European artists.

My last week in Phnom Penh was filled with more photography sessions of the hotel. I ate the majority of the food I was photographing, including the desserts;) Initially I was planning on visiting Battambang or go to Vietnam for a couple of days, but I wanted to get things done for the hotel. Everything takes twice as long to get done there.

Through Ari, one of my talented flickr friends, I was introduced to a Khmer photographer and  3 of his friends 2 are photographers, the other a budding architect. We hung out on my last day there at a little fishing village that is just a few minutes at the outskirts of the capital. It was prahok season so the whole village wreaked of fish including all of us when we got done with shooting.

I flew back home to the States Saturday night, arrived in Chicago on Sunday morning and started work Monday! I spent the entire week suffering from horrible bouts of jet lag but the two weeks of vacation was so well worth it!

To see more photos from my trip please visit my Facebook page.

To see my other travel photos from previous trips, please visit my Flickr site.

There in Bangkok I visited and photographed the beautiful 1 day old baby Lisa with her family at the hospital. Rachel and I then spent the rest of the day roaming around the streets of Bangkok, shopping and tasting more yummy street foods. The next day I hung out with Gilles and his children in Bangkok and later photographed baby Lisa and her family at the hotel. Later in the evening we met up with my talented British fashion photographer friend, Tom Hoops and his friends to welcome the new year. It was an amazing evening of great conversations and laughter. We got back to our hotel just when our taxi driver was waiting to take us to Koh Samet at 6:00 a.m.

Koh Samet is an island with white sand beaches and of course more amazing food! We got lured to stay at a resort we thought would have accommodations that looked like the images we saw online. Instead we found ourselves in a very rustic looking bungalow meant for 6 people (that’s all they had available on New Year’s Day) right by the sea. Later in the evening we took a walk to the nearest resort and there I introduced Rachel to papaya salad with grilled chicken and sticky rice. We ate right by the sea with the sound of crashing waves and some obscure American music to entertain us. They had cabanas where you can eat right over the sea. It was so romantic and really pretty to see the moon reflected in the water.

The following day we went back to Bangkok and Rachel flew back to the States. I spent the rest of the day photographing the lively scenes before my eyes and continue to savor the street foods of Bangkok before returning to Phnom Penh with Gilles and his children.

To see more photos from my trip please visit my Facebook page.

To see my other travel photos from previous trips, please visit my Flickr site.

But this trip was my first trip to Southeast Asia (SEA) where I am not volunteering with any grass-root non-for-profit organizations. My friend Rachel flew in from LAX to join me at Incheon, International Airport in South Korea. From there we flew to Phnom Penh together where we were picked up and greeted by my wonderful friend Gilles and his beautiful children. We stayed at his lovely White Mansion Boutique Hotel in Phnom Penh and had an amazing first day there. Jet lag wasn’t as bad, but boy did I suffer my first week back to the States!

I took Rachel around Phnom Penh and showed her Tuol Sleng to give her a better understanding of the Khmer’s history and then from there on we visited the national museum, walked along the river walk and tasted some yummy foods from local restaurants as well as spoiling ourselves with more tastey food at Le Cafe at White Mansion and of course getting an aromatherapy full body massage done at the spa in White Mansion as well!

Our second day we hired a mini van to take us on a 5 hour trip to Siem Reap to see the ruins of Angkor Wat. Our driver was crazy. He was honking at anything and everything that was getting in his way. He had only one agenda in mind: getting us to Siem Reap FAST! We spent the day roaming around the heart of Siem Reap’s downtown area and continued to eat delicious food and spoiled ourselves with more full body massage. Our tuk-tuk driver picked us up at the guest house at 5:30 a.m and we got to Angkor Wat at 6:00. It was still dark and I felt a bit foolish for not bringing a tripod with me on the trip.

To see more photos of the ruined temples of Angkor Wat from my previous trips, please visit this link here on Facebook.

To see more photos from this trip and my other trips to Southeast Asia please visit this link and this link.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to nutrition, exercise and dieting but ever since I picked up the camera and started shooting professionally 3 years ago, I have pretty much abandoned my routine fitness schedule altogether. I kept on making excuses for myself and like everyone else, continued to pay my monthly fee at the gym that I would visit once a month if I’m lucky. After my move to the beautiful city of Chicago 4 weeks ago, one of my many goals was to get back into fitness and stop making excuses. It’s true that I am petite (joke was, I weigh 100 lbs. soaking wet, true to a certain extent) and people would ask me why I need to work out when I seem to be in a great shape. Seeming to be in great shape and feeling like I’m in a great shape are two different things. After joining pinterest and seeing so many motivational quotes, I am motivated to get back into shape. This is a very personal project for myself: Operation Fitness.

It’s about me trying to find that balance between my personal life, professional life (as a full time teacher and a part time photographer) and everything else life-related. It’s meant to encourage me to focus on what matters most to me. So far I’ve been working out 3 times a week (30 minutes on the treadmill or  stair climber (ugh, how boring I know!), 10-15 minutes with free weights and abdominal workout). It comes to about 45 minutes of me spending time to focus on just me!  Here are some photos of my progress the past 2 weeks.

Wish me luck and I will try to post every two weeks to not over expose my bare belly to the world!

On our way to LA from Austin, we drove through some serious weather including a dust storm in Arizona that made national news the next morning. I remembered trying to capture it with my 50 mm that I had and silently hoping that my companion would slow down just a bit for me to document this interesting phenomenon. After Randy drop me off in LA, he headed up north to San Francisco solo. I missed his road rage rants for about a week.

I had an amazing time in LA! My hosts treated me like I was family. I got to meet some long time Flickr friends, Jenn and her lovely daughter and very talented husband Pramin being one of them. They had me staying over at their place for a couple of nights with amazing conversations over coffee, food and everything else in between. Then I went to Santa Monica to stay with my good friend Rachel for the duration of my trip in LA. We biked and walked everywhere and life was good in Santa Monica. While Rachel played her beach volleyball, I would hang out at the beach and take photos of everything around me. When she works during the day, I roamed around Santa Monica and took photos of people and sited a celebrity (some famous skateboarder?) and of course I took a photo of myself with interesting random strangers too. We went out at night, ate (you have to try The Yard where the head chef is from the t.v show Top Chef), drink coffee and did some cultural stuff. She also took me to Venice Beach  where every corner is a picture in itself. I can honestly hang out there all week and get some great photos! Sometime in the middle of the week I went up to Ojai to visit another dear flickr friend Betina and her famous author husband, Richard La Plante. It was a day of nothing but seeing mother nature at one of her finest. Everywhere I walked on their property, I was getting a 360 degree view of the mountains! If being in heaven felt that great then I guess I was there for a day. We had amazing conversations over wine and beer and I felt nothing but peace and serenity.

Come later in the week…I took a train up to Emeryville then to San Francisco for the rest of the weekend to meet up with Randy. While he was at work, I got lost in San Francisco’s China Town with my travel book courtesy of my friend Jenn, my iPhone and 5 D MKII and met up with another good friend of mine, Nor of Naw Design over coffee. Randy and I did the usual stuff that we did in Austin…coffee, food, walked around the different neighborhoods of San Francisco and photography and the whole thing again for the rest of the weekend. We also visited Sausalito and walked around Lands End.

I don’t regret not going to Uganda for my humanitarian work and I am  grateful that I had the opportunity that I did to do something a bit different and out of the norm for myself. I met so many interesting people along the way and with each new relationship that I built, I learn more and more about the world and myself. Thank you everyone for following my trip:)

As far as my summer vacation goes, I didn’t go to Uganda as planned for a plethora of reasons, but was invited to go on a road trip, destination San Francisco and stopping over Austin, Texas. It was an amazing experience. The drive from Chicago to Austin was uneventful. But once we got into Austin, the fun began. I never ate as much as I’ve been the past 3 weeks.

Our stay in Austin was composed of eating at some of Randy’s favorite places (the list was pretty extensive), tasting high-calorie food from trailer trucks, visiting local coffee houses, eating more food, spending our free time drooling over homes we wish we can all have, eating again, swimming in the cool water of Barton Springs 3 days in a row, site-seeing gorgeous Austin’s downtown area, visiting the gorgeous campus of the University of Texas, engaging in gear talk, taking photos of food and of each other and all of this was done with amazing company of course.

Our drive to California was interesting. I didn’t realize how big Texas was until we had to drive through it. We got caught in rainstorm and dust storm and lived to tell our tales. In between our drive, stopping at a Starbucks is a must because one of us just had to have a Starbucks ice coffee venti. We got off the high way to take photos of things we thought were interesting too. To see some of those photos, please visit my Facebook page. In the mean time, here are some snapshots of the first half of my road trip.