photoaday 10th

with so much traveling around texas this week and the last it seems fitting that today's picture should be my NZ car circa when i was sleeping in it. all that crap! i moved most everything to the front seats when it was sleepy time. wow! look at all that crap i had. when i left NZ i had next to nothing.
things to notice:
the clothes line/curtain line
the crate of returnable beer bottles
that really comfortable brown blanket

i loved sleeping in my car. it was free! so free! and like camping, it sets the tone of when you go to sleep, when you eat, when you do your leisure activities. reading. mostly reading.

photoaday- gotcha!

today isn't a picture, but a movie!! woot!

does anyone know if this is a real phenomenon? or was the $2.something "tip" i gave the guy for nothing?

photoaday 6th

when i was in New Zealand my best friend came to visit me! Katie Hart came too. they only had a few weeks in the country, but we made the most of it with yachts, hiking, good food and beer.

today's picture was taken on the Abel Tasman trail where we did some hiking.
i'm picking this picture, because i'm visiting Hart and Katie in arlington! we've had a great time and we are currently watching our mutual favorite show, arrested development, and enjoying a food coma courtesy of Hart's porkchops. tomorrow i'm going to visit Karl in dallas, and then back to austin where i have lots of friends to see there that i couldn't squeeze in before i went to visit friends in nacogdoches. being back is great for more reasons than just cheez-its.

yay for friends!

one of the most important things about my time in the world was that no one would ever be able to emulate me. well----- it turns out that that isn't true. sometimes you have to JUST brush your teeth. (in the words of bob dylan, "sometimes even the president of the united states of America just has to stand stand naked" that's a lot like REAL life. but not too much like REAL LIFE. sometimes things matter, and sometimes they do not.

it's been a while since i left the states, and like most people i often remember NZ as my first destination, but it wasn't. FIJI was!

the beaches weren't as nice as some in NZ or some places, but seriously, i'm not going to be talking bad about Fiji.

what i remember is the best about my time on the islands is opening a coconut that i saw fall down. it took a few hours, but hey- its not like i had anything else to do.

photoaday monday 1st!

today's picture might seem lame, but there is a story behind it. when i left NZ, i sent my laptop home and that meant that i couldn't transfer pictures from my camera to the laptop. that was a little scary because i had to get through Australia, Malaysia, the whole of Africa, Germany and Ireland without backups of all my awesome to be photos. luckily i avoided losing or deleting all my photos. it turns out that an 8 gig memory card and thousands of photos/videos is a lot for my camera to handle.

usually when i hit review it shows the last picture taken. at one point my camera couldn't handle the amount of pictures on the card and started showing the same photo no matter what. that was fine when i only had to scroll down 10 or 20 pictures to get to the relevant one, but when i hit review and was in the middle of thousands of photos, it would take a minute to scroll all the way to the current photo. luckily i found out that if i took a picture and immediately hit review, it would show the latest photo. that's what today's picture is, a quick snapshot taken to avoid having to scroll to the ones that i really wanted to see. sometimes i deleted the quick snapshots, because they were never pictures of anything, but sometimes i didn't. now they're as much a part of the story as the "real" pictures i took.

gripping storytelling again from the wide world of sean's trip.

photoaday

today's photo is simple. this 1 liter pot and i spent a lot of time together. from hostels in New Zealand to remote wildernesses in Africa, i've eaten out of this bad mama jama more times than i can recall. this photo was taken in Zimbabwe at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins. i think i made noodles with onions and carrots. maybe there was a sauce that went with it? i want to say it was an extravagant two course meal.
the secret is to keep super hot coals directly under the pot and to recycle them when they burn out.

photoaday

first- the greatest mustache in the world.
second- my sweet tanzanian visa.
third- the best jersey!

this photo was taken in arusha, tanzania. my friends and i were just driving through saying hi to a friend's friend who worked in the city. since where we were going was very remote, we decided to get some cash out of the ATM. there are not many ATMs around, so we waited in line for a 1/2 hour, and even then our host could only get a few dollars out of his new account, something about his card not being fully activated or something. anyway, once the 8 of us were finished at the bank, we headed back to our van. crossing the main street i noticed someone talk to my host, and didn't think much of it because people talk to us all the time "hey, give me money, give me your shirt", stuff like that. but he looks like a local so it was a little strange that this guy was hassling him instead of me. just as i thought that, the guy turned to me and said- "show me your passport".
"hahahaa" was my response. i mean- do i look like i fell off the hay wagon yesterday?
"no, really, show me your passport. i'm with immigration".
"ahhahaaha. show me your papers then dude."
but astonishingly he did have some papers. they were legit, but they were crappy looking. after my host talked to these guys, he said i should show them my passport. so i flipped it open to my visa, which you see above you, and put it so he could see it. he reached for it and pulled, but i didn't let go. i looked at him and said "no one has taken my passport from me, and one is taking my passport from me bro."
he got mad at that and started talking big. to make a long story short, he and his friend just wanted a bribe and while i told them that my visa was in order and that i had no business with him. he kept yelling at us and saying that we needed to "come down to the office and have a chat." i kept telling him flatly "NO!"

so that went on for a while and they wouldn't let up. everyone in the street was telling these two guys to leave us alone, which was really funny.
in the end, my host went with them to a police station. my friends and i felt terrible, and didn't want him to go, but he said it would work better if he did. i knew it was a mistake, but oh well. they threatened and pushed him into giving them the $40ish dollars that he had on him to pay some "fee" that they completely made up.

that day sucked. we got asked for a few more bribes which we laughed off successfully, and i think the same thing happened the next day too. white people are targets for bribery, but if you just laugh at them and tell them to move along, it usually works.

photoaday

today's picture was taken in Moshi, Tanzania. that's Mt. Kilimanjaro there in the middle. the tallest point in Africa is up there. i didn't climb it, because it costs $1,000+. but i will next time.
i liked Moshi a lot, i had some good times up there. it is very touristy, but at this point i had been in Tanzania for a month or more and i was getting pretty decent at Swahili, so i didn't get harassed by the "ticks" as much as your average white dude in Moshi.