Walkabout 1998
IT'S been a while since I crossed the pond -- the July 1996 stay at the Niemann Foundation and Harvard Business school seems like a lifetime away. I'm in my second job and second city since then. I lost my dad in between. My visits outside the country in the meanwhile have been to other parts of darkest Africa -- Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland. I had promised Byron that I would visit him in the Netherlands earlier this year, but had to can that because of work. Byron left the Netherlands to return Stateside to San Francisco shortly after.
AN invitation from the German government to join a team of African journalists to observe their elections came out of the blue and I grabbed onto it greedily like an addict getting his first fix after weeks of cold turkey. I hauled out the Powerbook and prepped it for travel along with a Sony Mavica digital camera and my camcorder. Practical insanity then came along with the idea that since I was in the neighbourhood -- i.e. the Northern Hemisphere -- why not hop across from Deutschland to the US left coast and see Byron after some... ten years?
In the meanwhile, I had renewed contact with a bunch of friends from my high school daze (Freudian, that) in India. Many of them appear to have found their way over to the US in search of truth, justice, and the American Way®. Jai happened to be out in Cupertino, Sunil volunteered to fly in from someplace that has lots of potatoes. I packed an American Express card (in case I needed to force a locked door). So...
The folders down below hold pictures from various places along the way in more or less chronological order. Most of them were shot on the Mavica, slightly colour corrected in Photoshop, and then saved as medium-quality JPEGs for the benefit of those of you who have to wait for the Trans-Atlantic hookup to Sprint in Virginia that connects this website with the rest of the world. I've split them into folders so that downloading the thumbnails doesn't drive you spare. Each thumbnail is flagged with the size of the full picture to give you an idea of what you're letting yourself in for, timewise. There's going to eventually be more meaningful commentary added to each folder, but I figure that if I don't do this piecemeal, I'll never do it.
The background picture on this page, by the way, is a composite of the sky over Yosemite rippled to create a pond effect and superimposed on a Cancun sunset with my face thrown in too. (Yes, but is it art?)

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