Hostages in Oia

Day 3 in Santorini was our time to depart the Katikies Hotel and head on to the Canaves. We loved the first hotel so much by now that we waited until the very last minute to leave, reading by the pool until early evening.

When time came to finally depart, the hotel staff asked us about our "onward travel plans" and if they could assist: taxi, boat, plane, whatever. We explained that we would probably be fine under our own power since we were going just to the Canaves up the road. "Oh! In that case let us call them and have them send their bellboys to collect you and your luggage!"

There followed a terse telephone call in Greek, and then two bellboys from the first hotel turning up in the lobby and taking us and our bags to the street. By the time we got there, already there were two smartly dressed figures dressed about ten yards away... waiting. Wendy and I were pointed in their direction, and encouraged to walk with our bags the few steps towards them. Just like a hostage exchange, with orders barked in a foreign language we were passed from the custody of camp Katikies to camp Canaves.

The Canaves folk were very hospitable captors, though. We got a lovely mini-suite setup with (actually rather perilous) a stepladder from the main room to the bedroom above. Again a little balcony, this time looking onto the sea but also the town of Oia clinging to the cliffs. Wendy took this photo of me that evening:

A Greecey Breakfast

We woke up on day 2 of the honeymoon to a wonderful breakfast served on the balcony outside our room. Overlooking the Santorini caldera, and essentially a large mediterranean lagoon, it was a gloriously luxurious start to the day.

After breakfast begun what soon became the pattern of the vacation: reading by the pool, a little swim, a little walk, lunch, a longer walk, another swim, more reading, nap, a quick swim, shower, dinner, quick walk, bed. In that order.

Oh, and then wake up and have a delicious Greecey breakfast looking at the sea.

It's a long way to Santorini

It's a long way to Santorini. No, really. According to Google Earth, it's 6,930 miles as the crow flies from San Francisco (SFO) to Thira (JTR). That's one seriously dedicated crow! Somewhat surprisingly, stopping off in London (LHR) and Athens (ATH) takes you a mere 69 miles out of your way, for a total of 6,999 miles (clearly the Greeks and the Romans knew how to position their cities for optimal air travel from the West Coast). But enough said; it took us a while to get there.

On arrival, though, awesomeness. Sunday morning at 7.40am we arrived at the Katikies Hotel in Oia at the north tip of the island. We expected a roll of the eyes and a gruesome wait---after 15 hours of traveling---for a 4pm check-in or whatever. Not so! Sparkling wine, breakfast by the pool, a tour of the hotel, and imminent room-readiness were what in fact greeted us. We couldn't have been happier.

It's quite the place. Santorini rises out of the sea atop 700-foot cliffs, and the towns cling to the edges of the island spilling down said cliffs like a viscous liquid. The Katikies is very much a "spilling down the cliff" hotel, with 95 steps from our room (a little way down the cliff) to the lobby (higher up the cliff) and another 15 steps up to the streets of Oia. Makes for a great infinity pool, though, and some nice photos.

Day 1 we rather just hung around and took it all in. Honeymoon style.

Spent the weekend in New York, with Wendy a grateful guest at Craig and Hannah's wedding. Had a fantastic time, met new friends, and got a whole bunch of photos.

We had a lovely walk up Potrero this morning. We went to Aperto for brunch.

Busy weekend. We went to the Farmers' Market,

Wendy got a new haircut

and we bought flowers

Just posted another set of photos---this time from yesterday's walk in the Mission. What a super-colorful place we live in.

I found this pretty amazing: a video showing Walmart's spread across the States.

This weekend I was "tagged" by my mother, believe it or not. For the record, here are the rules:

• Link to the person that tagged you (in my case Sue)
• Post the rules on your blog
• Write six random things about you in a blog post
• Tag six people in your post. Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
• Let the tagger know your entry is up

the fourth of which I shall eschew in the true spirit of the shy and retiring isaach.com.

Six random things, though, I can't resist:

1. A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation through a Japanese interpreter
2. I've been married for six months
3. I'm a non-immigrant non-permanent resident of the United States
4. I listen to Any Questions whenever I can
5. I'm a fan of the phonejacker
6. I have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

In other news, I took this photo yesterday:

Wendy and I went to the Cesar Chavez parade yesterday. Or rather, we stood outside our house and watched it go by. A parade in the Mission wouldn't be complete without lowriders, and this one didn't disappoint. I took this photo:

Did you know...? I share stuff on Google Reader and you can

• read it too; or
• subscribe to a feed of it

I'm really proud of this one:

As if by magic, no sooner do I put a new Photoset on Flickr than the same shows up in the portfolio section of the site. I swear it's almost supernatural. As well as taking those lovely pictures in Yosemite last weekend, I also snapped this one from up on Billy Goat Hill not long ago:

So not only is the migration to Flickr now very much underway, I've spent a sad and lonely wifeless weekend hooking up the portfolio section of the site to Flickr as well. Javascripty RESTful goodness, people! What with the Python class I took at work last week, I've spent more time coding in the last few days than in the previous few quarters. I don't think I miss it.

Here's one I took, gosh, nearly six years ago. Now excitingly revitalized in Web 2.0 stylee:

OK, so I've finally decided on Flickr for photos. Finally. This time for real. I'm putting everything up there, including recent pics from Skipalooza.

OK, so waking up at 5.30am facing a 750-mile drive home isn't the most pleasant thing ever. But the experience? Especially for a Brit like me (in England you pretty much couldn't drive that far in a straight line without ending up in the sea) it's pretty breathtaking.

Departure from Park City, UT, 6.15am. Sunrise in Salt Lake City, UT (40-mile mark). Breakfast in Wendover, NV, just over the state line (150-mile mark). Gas in Elko, NV (260-mile mark). Quick stop in Mill City, NV (population 28, 410-mile mark), followed by lunch in Truckee, CA (580-mile mark) and more gas. Arrive home in San Francisco (766-mile mark) at 5.45pm local time, about 13 hours after we began.

And the whole way---across mountains and salt flats and praries and deserts and more mountains and rocky valleys and barren hills and finally to lush and glorious Northern California; the hugest and most unimaginable vast expanse of it---you simply cannot fail to be in awe of the pioneers who made the journey over months rather than hours, with no idea of what they might find. The romance and intensity is palpable.

Even being back here in San Francisco for just a few hours, though, I can fully appreciate why they were happy to settle here.

On vacation at the moment. Still switching. Still twittering. Now posting photos on flickr:

www.flickr.com

I've bought a Mac! W00t!

I'll be back here a lot, but see also my new blog Switchy McSwitchenstein.

I've been wanting to post for a while the reading which Andrea did at our wedding. It's from Corelli's Mandolin:

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

I've been madly busy (sort of) migrating my portfolio section to Picasa Web Albums. So far I've done

• London Eye
• Matt's Flat
• Home
• Autumn
• Hyde Park
• Fireworks
• Denver Buildings
• Borough Market
• Botanical Gardens
• More Botanics
• Cars
• Denver Abstracts
• Sedona

with more to come! Stay tuned.

I can't explain my finding lolcats so charmingly amusing. Here's a super recent one:

and actually I really like this early one too.

Back yesterday from a week in England, where it is surprisingly more sunny than it is here in San Francisco. Matt and Mary are in town this weekend; nice to have them back in California. Matt brought back from China an electric beckoning cat for us: in fact the exact model linked. Due to some inscrutable malfunction it doesn't work but it does helpfully explain on the box:

One NO.5 battery for praviding the power, enabling to automatically beckon the hand for months, setting it at any position, never be offected by the lights.

When it is in the initiative operation, please insert the fitted NO.5#1.5Vbattery into the bottom of the treasure-beckoning cat according to the inscribed polarities. Then it can work immediately. The hand beckoning will automatically enter the stable position for several minutes

Inside attaching poly luck-beckoning lyrics, sticking them for immediate realizations.

Inside attaching several self-filled out creative and catchy phrases' lable paper

If finding that the hand-beckoning stops swinging, please change the same battery with type number

Day 6, December 29, was our last full day in Puerto Rico. It started off with an early morning wake-up in The Great Escape, appropriately to make our Great Escape from the place. The method: light aircraft.

Very light aircraft, in fact: so light that they arranged the seating according to the passengers' weight, to balance the plane.

After landing back in San Juan we took a cab into Old San Juan to see what it's all about. Very nice, is what! Narrow cobbled streets and lots of colors; very colonial and very cool. We saw San Francisco, too.

Photos from the day are available online.

On day 5 in Puerto Rico we woke up at the Inn on the Blue Horizon and after breakfast walked along the beach to Esperanza.

After a while there, we wandered back to the Inn and hung out for the rest of the day before heading to our next stop, which unexpectedly turned out to be the Great Escape Inn up the road. That was a pretty extraordinary place.

Photos from day 5 in Puerto Rico are available online.

We woke up early on December 27 so we could wave goodbye to the evil resort and get a cab to Fajardo, where we'd catch a ferry to Vieques.

After a long wait, another long wait, wifely seasickness and then a crazy cab ride we ended up at the Inn On the Blue Horizon in southern Vieques, where I took this gem:

The rest of the photos are also available online.

Waking up on December 26 we figured that we'd plan an escape from the resort: where would we get to if we just walked and walked and walked up the beach? Turns out you that find no people, no buildings, no nothing apart from sand, sea, and big sticks. Here's me with a particularly attractive bit of bamboo:

More photos from Boxing Day in Puerto Rico are now online.

This is what Christmas night looks like on a beach in Puerto Rico:

We woke up on Christmas day in San Juan and went out for a walk on the beach. Beautiful! Warm! Sunny! Sandy! Not things one typically associates with Christmas if one's from England but Puerto Rico has a way of being different.

At lunchtime we hopped in a cab to Rio Grande, where we'd booked into the "Rio Mar Resort and Spa by Wyndham" on priceline.com (ie. we'd named our price and it had put us there). The room was super but I'm not sure a resort was really what we were looking for; lesson learned.

Photos from Christmas Day 2007 available online; boxing day to follow.

It was about 11pm on Christmas Eve when we finally arrived at our first hotel in Puerto Rico, and everything was shut. No dinner, no drinks, no celebration, but we did have a nice midnight walk along the beach to celebrate the advent. Here's Wendy looking all business-like while enjoying the sight and sound of the Caribbean sea:

We stayed the first night at the curiously named "At Wind Chimes Inn" (yes, the opening preposition is part of the name). The room was small but comfortable; the noise terrific but after our long journey not enough to disturb our sleep too much. And hey, we were a block from a lovely beach in Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico.