Received this 72mm polarizing filter from mail yesterday which I bought from ebay about a week and a half ago. It was the cheapest branded one I could find. I didn’t really want to get the unbranded ones even though they were like many times cheaper. Hoya is a pretty huge brand for filters I think. I think I got this one for about $40US. This filter will be paired up with my precious Zuiko 12-60mm zoom lens. What the filter basically does is to filter out unwanted light waves reflected from surfaces of objects so that the camera does not “see” annoying reflections from water, glass windows, etc. Also it gives bluer sky and greener grass. I can’t wait to try out the filter in a sunny day. Can probably use it a lot during the trip to Japan/Korea.

One interesting thing I noticed instantly was how the filter actually filters out the image on my LCD monitor! Look at the photos attached, when I rotate the filter it actually changes the visibility of the screen that’s behind the filter! This is pretty cool.

Have been SUPER busy planning my trip with Wendy to Japan and Korea (in about 3 weeks). SUPER time consuming, have been browsing through 9000 sites to look for travel guides, spent 8000 hours on Google Map Japan. Last time doing something similar would be 3 years ago when I went to Greece, I think I spent 1.5 month, couple hours a day, just to plan for the 3-week trip to Greece and Turkey. It was well worth it though. Somehow it’s much harder to plan stuff for Japan, maybe because of the language barrier (even though I know Japanese though not super fluent), also because of that Japan is extremely huge, cities like Osaka, Kyoto, are enormous and I basically have to study the maps, study the recommended tourist spots, see what’s worth seeing/doing…etc, and plan our accommodations around those spots. It TAKES time….>< and since Wendy is busy at work I'm all doing it by myself, even though it is fun, it's tedious. Hopefully the trip will turn out great after all this preparation (about 50% done now). I've spent the past week trying to secure all our accommodations by reserving online, and apparently I'm kind of late in doing this since at some of the busy cities like Jeju island in South Korea already have most of the hotels fully booked for our days...also some Japanese Ryokans (Japanese homestay / temple-stay) can only be booked by fax or telephone meaning I might have to call long distance and speak some Japanese, lol.

Anyway, here is a brief look of my itinerary:
Sept
13 - 18: Hong Kong, visit family, might goto Macau to see the newly built casino resorts
19: Fly to Beijing to meet with Wendy, then off to Osaka, Japan
20: Osaka - Shopping, goto aquarium (world’s biggest or something)
21: Koyasan - going to stay at some temple Ryokan!
22: Koyasan 2nd day
23: Shirahama - Outdoor open-air onsen! (hotspring)
24: Nara - Japanese’s ancient city
25: Nara/Kobe - Kobe looks fun. See this city guide
26: Kobe
27: Kyoto - one of the most well known cities. LOTS of temples
28: Takayama - a small town in the Gifu prefecture that has really cute looking farm house that were built long ago
29: Shirakawa - similar to Takayama. We’ll get to stay at some minshuku (Japanese homestay), going to be fun!
30: Osaka - back to Osaka, maybe do some shopping then off to South Korea tomorrow
Oct
1: Seoul - South Korea’s capital. Going to meet with my Korean friend Boom probably.
2: Jeju - popular island south to Korea. Lots of great spots for sight seeing. Going to rent a car.
3: Jeju
4: Seoul
5: Back to Beijing -> Vancouver

Schedule is really tight, especially in South Korea. Not sure how it’ll turn out, but there are LOTS to see so I’ll make sure I have my new camera all equipped and ready to go.

Oh I also got an International Driver’s License today at BCAA. Costs $15 and 2 passport pictures. Not too bad I guess, which will allow me to rent a car in Korea.

Went to Scotia bank today to renew my mortgage, was SO happy when the guy told me that I can get an interest rate of as low as 4.8%! That saves me about $70 a month on mortgage He told me that I’m lucky to be able to get it that low since I’m just in time for a promotion or something. Also I also realized from the guy (named Vincent actually) that he’s able to instantly approve me a line of credit of $17000 at the prime rate of $4.5%. This is great for me since I can pay off all my student loans right away. Student loans have an interest rate of 7.5% which is really gay. I got to call those guys up asap next week to pay the shit off and start saving some money!

Went for a 3 days 2 nights camping trip last weekend with a couple of my ex-bandmates and their friends. We’ve been to the Golden Ears before, it was an awesome experience so we decided to go there again. Unfortunately it turned out to be quite a bad experience… It rained for two damn days, almost like, non-stop. You would get 10 minutes of the sun, then it’d rain for another 30 minutes…etc. Luckily we did get SOME moment of fun for example at the stone beach (just like a beach but replace the sand with tiny pieces of stones) We hiked down some trail in dark around 12am, and reached this lake thing which was a very open area. The sky looked crazy with countless stars. We were even able to see the milky way, it was that pitch dark. We laid down on the beach, saw some comets, chatted for a bit, it was quite an experience. Plus the weather wasn’t cold at all and it was really comfortable.

The next morning we had SPAM lucheon meat and some noodle for breakfast. We then went down to another more sandy beach. It was raining (not pouring) and quite chilly, but then we thought we kind of have to do something instead of staying in the tent for the whole day. We brought two some inflatable boats, and paddle a bit out into the water. It was quite fun. We found a leftover turtle-looking inflatable boat near the shore so we had 3 boats in total for 9 people. We took turns to go out, some of us brought fishing rods to do some fishing out in the water but too bad there seemed to be not so much fish activity We picked stones off the beach for our stone-grill dinner for the night. We did stone grill again, placed some flat stones onto the barbecue stove and then put the food onto the stone. We did it at last year’s camp trip and we decided to do it again since apparently it miraculously turned ordinary food into the best tasting foods ever. We did a lot of different kinds of food this time, steaks, pork chops, sausages, mushrooms, eggs, beans, breads…..oh yea I was grilling a piece of bread right in the fire with a barbecue fork, it turned out to be SO TASTY for some reason This was really fun.

At night since it rained a lot our tent was soaked with water, which was REALLY messy. I had to use my towel to wipe off all the areas that got wet. I hate mess of wetness, especially when you are in the wild and all the gross muds and shit mixed with water go onto everywhere. The second day it rained even heavier so we thought we should leave a day earlier (we planned to stay for 4 days 3 nights). It was quite a bad experience prepping food and stuff under a water leaking covering. Most of our tools, food packages, and utensils were wet, even the folding chairs were soaked in rain. We had to cramp nine people into a really tight space to hide from the rain. Well, I guess even though it was messy still it was an experience. We got close together and it felt pretty cozy as we chatted and had hot drinks in a tight space in a really cold and wet day. Anyway, we had to pack up our stuff under the rain. It was extremely messed up and difficult to dissemble the tent as it was all wet and gross. I had the dirtiest hand and arms in about 5 years when I was taking the tent apart. We had to take the whole thing to the faucet near the washroom to clean it up a bit so we could put it back into the bag….argh, it was SO messy.

Overall I would rate this trip 5 out of 10. We did have some fun but still I just hate messing with the grossness when it rains.
Oh actually we did a little picnic trip the same day we were leaving. We went to another park in Golden Ears with picnic tables and views. We sat down and had some of our left over can foods and breads. After that we rented two 4-person metal row-boats for an hour and rowed out into the water. We had some races like trying to chase and hit the other boat, and splash waters to everyone on the other boat with our paddles, lol. That was fun, even though it got me all tired

More photos can be found here and here.

Picked up my new camera (Olympus E-520) yesterday at Point Roberts. I’ve been buying many different cameras during the past year, but I have a feeling that I’ll be settled with this one for a long time. This camera is pretty much the same as the one I just sold (the Olympus E-420) but with added image stabilization, and a way bigger grip. I’ve been struggling so much to take pictures in low light since the E-420 didn’t have image stabilization, a lot of the pictures came out to be blurry. I would expect that I’ll be getting a lot more keepers on the new camera. I have yet to test it out, will be doing a lot of shootings this weekend at the camp I guess.

I’ve been trying to sell my beloved Olympus E-420 camera and the Zuiko 25mm pancake lens for about 2 weeks and finally got them sold for $700 today to guy named Kevin! I’m extremely happy since the extra cash has pretty much paid for my new Olympus E-520 that I got from Cameta Camera (through Amazon.com). The camera is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow (Monday) and I will have to drive across the border to Point Roberts as usual to pick it up. Hopefully the guys at the border won’t be hassling me about paying tax and stuff, or to search my cars….etc >< Can’t wait to get my new camera ASAP, test it out, and carry it with me for camping next weekend at the Golden Ear Provincial Park!