Lok Man in Germany

When my high school friend, Dzung Vo, said that he is coming to Munich with his new high spec camera, we decided that we would go to Koenigsee for the weekend. I learnt a few things from him about photography, and I took as many photos as my battery will allow. Which turned out to be about 210. I have posted a few photos here. You can find more on this Flickr set page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lokmanho/sets/72157594348965719/ On the Saturday we took the last electric boat cruise over the lake to St. Bartholomew, where there is a church, a hunting lodge of King Ludwig I, and an ice formation called the ice chapel (which I tried to reach but had to turn back due to shortage of light). When we arrived, we found out that the last boat trip back left almost immediately! Fortunately, we met another group on our boat that had a special booking to leave at 8:30 p.m. after dinner, and we had dinner and travelled back with them. They were quite an international group, and I wondered what kin...

A recent SAE brake conference in the USA has provided me with another opportunity to take a short holiday and visit some friends. This week long trip started with a visit to a resort / conference centre near Dallas, called the Gaylord Texan resort. It's a huge complex with an artificial river flowing through it and some other landscaped features, all under a giant glass house. I got through my presentation, listened to some others, and after 3 days I was off to New York. Coincidentally, that was the day when Yankees pitcher Cory Lidel flew into a Manhattan building. It worried me a little, but in the end it was the normal delays and bad weather that led to a late arrival. My high school friend, Ben Yung, allowed me to stay at his midtown apartment. From there I made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, took a tour of the New York Public Library (apparently the filmed part of the Thomas Crown Affair there since they didn't use museums), and got a bit closer to the statue of libe...

It seems like a distant memory now, but a month ago this was the only thing on the social calender. "Where can we go tonight?" "Let's go to Oktoberfest!" "Again? OK ..., but no drinking this time." I got up early enough to see the end of the opening parade, where horse drawn carts take beer barrels and some people (how do I get on those carts?) into the Oktoberfest grounds. The grounds and the subway station are officially called Theresienwiese, but it is affectionately known as Wies'n. When people first mentioned beer tents I thought of marquees that hold some hundreds of people. Actually, these so-called tents surpassed all parts of my imagination. There are 14 of these temporary beer halls structures that fit several thousand people each, with a live band plays in each of them. When they play one of the traditional German festival songs like Viva Colonia, something from the world cup, or Robbie William's Let Me Entertain You, most of them ge...