Imminent Departure - Sushi Sendoff

Dear Followers of Bliss,

Juliet and I depart for Italy in the early hours on Monday. I will post my traditional Haiku post tomorrow and a little Italy surprise on Monday and then my wonderful guest bloggers will be featured for the next 3+ weeks.

For this evening I wanted to share just a few shots of Juliet's farewell dinner at Sushi Den to celebrate the end of her assignment.

This was our fourth trip to Sushi Den in the past 8 weeks and it may have been the best. The fish was something from the great handbooks of sushi masters and our chat with Chef Yasu was like being at home.

It is with a bit of heavy heart that I embark upon this journey. The closeness with so many of you in our daily comments will be missed sorely as I am many time zones east of home and likely involved in some serious sensory overload each day on the roads of Italia. I will miss you but TBA will live on in our guest posts and I implore you all to share your thoughts with these talented bloggers while I am absent.

Cheers to an enormously successful period here at TBA and I hope my occasional posts from the boot of Europe will be well received.

Ci vediamo amici

Michael

Hong Kong - Hipstamatic Tour

If you are arriving here from FRESHLY PRESSED - A Huge thank you and Welcome. I would be so grateful if you would follow me as storytelling and travel are my livelihood and if we share this passion you will have a blast here.

Cheers and Thank You!

Hong Kong is easily the most dynamic city I have ever visited. Alive, moving, walking, running, and most of all eating and all of this with great vigor.

I was charged to do a Hong Kong post by another lovely blogger and so I decided it was long overdue to take my Blissful Adventurers on a tour.

I fell in love with the Hipstamatic iPhone app last year and I enjoy how this $3 investment really forced me to look at Hong Kong under the surface and explore subjects that on my Nikon D90 may have seemed plain and ordinary.

Hipstamatic forces the user to function within parameters assigned to lens and camera type (electronically simulated) and shoots only in square images which are ideal for blog posts.

I hope you enjoy and let me know your thoughts.

LIFE AND FOOD

HK is obsessed with food, and that is OK because so am I. It was on every corner and at every time of day. I could easily stay here 6 months and not tire of the food but perhaps I would get a little sick of the hurried pace and the confining cityscape. Our photos of the traditional Cantonese Dim-Sum simply were not suitable for the post, but know that we ate this every other day till we could not move.

Notice the window unit air conditioners. There are so many of these in HK that the exhaust from them is said to warm the city by several degrees in the summer nights.

This amazing all-in-one meal includes rice, vegetables, and some form of protein served in this steaming hot clay pot. Adding lots of chili sauce and tall beers makes the meal that much more of a party.

I wanted to love this. I did not :-(

CHINESE MEDICINE

In all of my travels this was one of the most fascinating sites. Store after store, vendor after vendor hawking every kind of herb, sea creature, shark fins (fucking bullshit) and an array of dead stuff plucked from the planet to keep humans healthy. I want to know more.

THE MARKETS

I was simply blown away by what one could purchase on the streets. Fish, both fresh and freshly butchered. Meat, hopefully fresh, every kind of shellfish possible. Just walking around HK I felt like the oceans would be empty in less than a generation as I cannot imagine how much food we are eating as a planet.

STREET SCENES

Juliet and I walked for hours each day to simply immerse ourselves in the life of this city. My head was on a swivel as my camera was clicking non-stop

Haiku Sunday - Memories of a Junkpile

This i the first time I have prefaced a Haiku Sunday. Juliet and I were out on a walk in our new urban development when we happened upon a pile of things strewn about a street corner. It was quite hard to believe that the items had not been intentionally and very likely maliciously dumped right across the street from our apartment building. It set our imaginations aflame with supposition and intrigue. Here is our interpretation of the mystery.

living on samples

trolling the aisles trying to look

different from before 

In the early morn

the baker of dreams pulls off

the covers himself

she put down the book

as the last drop of the bath

turned cool and ugly

On a new street we

sometimes see the city guys

holding their paint cans

Mother was charged with

separating the new from

no longer needed

Botswana was his

only memory and still

she took it from him

the nape of her neck

called to him as he hoisted

what remained of his heart

into the pickup

while she laid there lifeless and

with nothing to say

trying them on was

always more fun than wearing

these clunkers she thought

her final hope clung

to her clutching hands as the

tornado touched down

Haiku Sunday - A Collaboration of Photos and Words

So much madness

in the streets of life and only

so little solace

(Photo by Juliet Housewright from her upcoming blog SCHMEE JOURNEYS)

Lace curtains could never

recover from what they have seen 

them do to each other

Photo by Mike Fiveson - photographer and author of the exceptional blog -

Mike's Look at Life  - Mike's work and talent inspire my work each day. Follow Mike's journey through life's doorways and be ennobled.

The day was opaque

before he burrowed through the pillow

to find her sleeping

In the most banal

of images there is a story

hiding inside us

they called him king Arthur

because he was the bravest wasp

and broke the glass prison

he left his pants on

the stairs as they loved in the

doorway and the floor

confessions of a priest

often fall on the ears of 

a faceless image

he always played close

to home but once he left the confines

discovering it was lies

For Cara today

he thought as he drew color

from the image here

Blue blue blue blue blue

he whistled as he pushed the levers left

leaving only the blue

Haiku Sunday - Easter Ingredients

Left or right hands can

bring the raw to the real while

perhaps not the same

color is often

how we decide and how we

judge food and humor

words are difficult

to describe the tastes and names

of life's blood and pain

imagery: a rotting

tomato at the bottom of a well, half eaten

on one side by worms (Dr John Alvis circa 1990)

flowers come in shapes

that often bear no resemblance

to anything aliveat the end there will

be only joy in the finish but

not in the leaving