Saturday, May 19, 2012

Gymnastic Meet

Aleena had her BISAC gymnastic meet today at Harrow International School. She was on the level one junior squad for ISB as they competed against four other schools. The ISB junior level one squad placed third as a team.

 Aleena, for her part, performed much better than she did at last year's ISB Black & Gold gymnastics meet. In addition to being better at the different events, she didn't stick her tongue out at anyone while she was being scored on the balance beam. It is still accurate to say, however, that she is there to have fun. I think that she enjoys socializing with her teammates more than actually performing. Still, as long as she is having fun, its fine with me.

 I took a lot of photos of the level one junior and senior ISB squads. I didn't have explicit permission to cross the barrier and take photos with the professionals hired to take photos for the event, but I stayed out of everyone's way and no-one asked me to leave. Between today's gymnastics meet and the two Panther Paw events this weekend, I am going to have a lot of photos to go through.

 While most of the photos from today have not yet been edited, I did make a first pass of some of Aleena. In some cases, I am going to go back and clean these up more.
_P9Z7902 _P9Z7873
_P9Z7480 _P9Z7472-Edit
_P9Z6913 _P9Z6741

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Father Daughter Dance

Saturday was the Father/Daughter dance here in Bangkok.  It's been a popular tradition as long as I've been here, but almost fell apart last year when the Girl Guides were no longer around to sponsor it.  The PTA took the reigns last year to save the day.  This year the Girl Scouts were involved with the dance, although it was not an official Girl Scout event.

Some of Aleena's friends, Nyla, Kaylee and Trinity came over for some photos before the dance.  Oh, and they brought their dates too.

This year's dance as hosted at the Dusit Thani hotel in Bangkok.  The ballroom looked nice and the food was decent.  For the girls, the stars of the event are not the food, the ballroom, and certainly not the dads.  They just really love dressing up and dancing and frolicking with their friends.

Once again this year I left my camera at home.  Well, I took a small camera, but only took a few photos.  I haven't even loaded them into my photo organizing software.









Thursday, May 10, 2012

Disney Sea

On our fourth day, we visited Disney Sea.  There are two Disney parks in Tokyo, Disney Magic Kingdom and Disney Sea.  We only had one day scheduled to visit Disney, and since we had visited Magic Kingdom in Hong Kong and Orlando (when Jacob and Nalin were little), we choose Disney Sea.  It was no surprise that the kids really enjoyed the park.






















Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Dancing

AP9Z0140 (1)-Edit

Out of the Frame

_MG_1742 (1)

Playing Around with Photoshop

aleena frame

Sunsoji Temple - More Photos

_P9Z4331
_P9Z4326
_P9Z4332
_P9Z4177
_P9Z4109
_P9Z4337
_P9Z4093

Sunsoji Temple

After we left Yoyogi Park, we made our way via JR line and the subway to Sunsoji Temple. Wet entered Sunsoji through the Kaminarimon, the thunder gate, and proceed down a two hundred meter shop lined street known as the Nakamise.
_P9Z3899 _P9Z3908
While the Nakamise was closed to auto traffic, it was packed with people.  We decided to skip shopping on our way in, and found a parallel side street that was much less crowded.  Proceeding through the Hozomon gate, we entered the main temple complex.  A five story pagoda and the Asakusa Shrine are also in the main temple area.
_P9Z3918-Edit _P9Z3919 _P9Z3973
_P9Z3987_88_89_90_91_92_93 _P9Z4036_ _P9Z4046

We explored the area around Sunsoji Temple for a while, finding more shrines and side streets with shopping.  One of the highlights was a shopkeeper wearing traditional Japanese clothing who was selling wooden toys.  He was teaching a tourist how play a game involving a wooden ball attached by a string to a small wooden mallet with concave heads.  The object of the game was to catch the ball on the cupped part of the hammer.  We stopped to watch, and soon Jacob and then Aleena were trying their hand at the game.  The merchant's son arrived, and he and Jacob played a game where they tried to knock each other's wooden ball off the mallet.

It is amazing what a little marketing and enthusiasm can do, as we ended up buying three or four things at his shop. We had walked by dozens of shops that sold the same kind of wooden toys but never stopped.

_P9Z4203 _P9Z4280
_P9Z4284

We stopped for a very uninspired dinner at a restaurant not far from our hotel in Shinjuku.  Like most restaurants that I have eaten at in Asia, they serve the meals as are ready instead of timing them all to be finished at once.  This works fine when you are sharing dishes family style, but I think it doesn't work so well when you are having individual dishes. This is particularly true when the waitress does not write down part of the order, as happened on this night.  She did not write down Jacob's order, but we didn't know for certain until everyone else was nearly finished.  Jacob and I waited for his lamb chop while the girls returned to the hotel.  While he said that it was delicious, I don't think that there was more than two or three ounces of meat on this cut.
_P9Z4343