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.

Yay! Got my new digital camera delivered today!! It’s a Fujifilm FinePix F50fd 12MP camera and is not even available in North America yet~ Yea I got if off Ebay for about $400, which is not bad at all consider that it’s shipped directly from Japan (Japanese model). Usually I would prefer Canon (for their picture quality) or Sony (for their stylish designs), I went for Fujifilm this time because of its crazy good low light performance. It really owns Canon and Sony on low light performance while retaining a decent day time performance. Here is an article about it, another one, yet another one(in Chinese). I was going to get the Nikon D80 DSLR camera but gave up when I found out it doesn’t shoot movie! I DO want to take lots of movie when I travel, and this little Fujifilm will do it right.