When the word “beautiful” just isn’t enough!

… yesterday’s class was the end of my first week back to school at Chulalongkorn University. Going back to school for my Master of Architecture is amongst the best things I have ever chosen to do thus far. Getting to know new people, exploring our differences and making new friends is just fun. The class was about the Methodology for Research that will help under understand how to do research properly. Aside from that, we were taught and asked to be more of a Grad-Student rather than an undergrad-Student by using vocabulary that are suitable for a Master Degree candidate.

Therefore, it seem that I may not be allowed to simply use the word “beautiful” to describe the scenery of the Zen garden and the serenity pool at Arashiyama 嵐山 – Kyoto 京都. As a result, I find the garden and to pool to be very …

admirable, alluring, angelic, appealing, beauteous, bewitching, charming, classy, comely, cute, dazzling, delicate, delightful, divine, elegant, enticing, excellent, exquisite, fair, fascinating, fine, foxy*, good-looking, gorgeous, graceful, grand, handsome, ideal, lovely, magnificent, marvelous, nice, pleasing, pretty, pulchritudinous, radiant, ravishing, refined, resplendent, shapely, sightly, splendid, statuesque, stunning, sublime, superb, symmetrical, taking, well-formed, wonderful  

Even though the list are made of synonyms, it is very amazing to see how many words are out there that can also describes the meaning of “beautiful”. Just like in nature, there are so many things out there for us to appreciate and the Japanese have done it superbly, indeed!

The walk along the path to the Bamboo Forest 竹林 in Kyoto 京都 – Arashiyama 嵐山 isn’t an easy one.

I believed that the paths were created to make it harder to access the Bamboo Forest; not to test the visitor’s endurance but to allow them to enjoy the beautiful scenery that Arashiyama has to offer! If we were to walk a straight path from the parking lot to the Bamboo Forest, it would probably take us about 10 minutes to get there. The path has instead detoured us for perhaps an additional 40 minutes, but it made it a walk to remember.

The path lead us along a river with colored autumn leaves on the hillside across the river. Enjoying nature’s serenity amongst the simple and peaceful local lifestyle made the walk extra memorable! Every step, every turn, and every view we had along the walk is simple, yet very stunning. The selection of the materials used along the walkway and the colorful autumn leaves have made the walk akin to strolling in a work of art.

Sometimes enjoying life isn’t all about getting to the desired destination as quickly as we can… because getting detoured… isn’t always just a detour!

Live life! Be lost… and enjoy the detour!

Weather and seasons in Japan are a great lesson to everyone when one pays attention to it. The seasonal circle of Spring – Summer – Autumn – Winter… is just an amazing life lesson. Japan’s weather and seasons may be seen as a life cycle or a moment in life where there are moments to begin, moments to enjoy, moments to remember and moments that end. As long as the moon still rises, the sun still shines, and the planet earth is still spinning around…

…we can be sure that the moments to enjoy and to remember will be return.

Same goes for life, so don’t sweat it!

Life is all about perspective and viewpoint. Once I came to understand the concept of the differences in perspectives and viewpoints of people, it became so much harder for me to be so judgmental towards others. Because everyone has their reasons to do whatever it is they want to do, some of us may never understand because we are not in the situation they are in. But sometimes, we just do whatever everyone is doing without knowing why we are doing it too!  Yup, this is life and there is so much more to discover.

Sometime I think that everything in life can be seen as Newton’s laws of motion as follows:

Newton’s laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces. They have been expressed in several different ways over nearly three centuries, and can be summarized as follows:

First law: The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.

Second law: The accelerationa of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the net forceF and inversely proportional to themassm, i.e., F = ma.

Third law: The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear.

Counting down, 12 more hours… goodbye Osaka, goodbye Kyoto and goodbye Japan. Till we meet again!

It is currently 2:00 am here in Osaka, Japan but I would like to stay awake as much as possible to absorb all the Japanese’ness before it is too late!

The trip is part of the Masters of Architecture of Chulalongkorn University field trip; visiting Osaka University to exchange ideas and research topics on architecture. Let’s skip the academic stuff because… you know how technical and boring it may be! But because of this academic discussion between the universities, we get to explore so many aspects that Kyoto, Osaka and Japanese culture have to offer!

The experiences are priceless! Many of the places that we visited were on my “places to visit before it’s too late” list! The Bamboo Forest is definitely on the list along many other places that I have unexpectedly visited these passed few days.

Life is just amazing, a journey to take, places to discover, cultures to explore and memories that last.  Simply PRICELESS!

Dear readers…

Tomorrow I’ll be going for 6-months to boot camp. The boot camp has been waiting for me since I was 21.

I haven’t had much time to write or any chance to take many photos these past months due to “things” that had to be handled prior to me departing to boot camp.

Hopefully this boot camp will help me get fit & firm up my aging body.

The boot camp schedule includes 10 weeks of basic military training, 1 week of rest and another 13 weeks of working “somewhere,” as they see fit. Hopefully, I’ll have some time off to update www.TwoStepsBehind.com now and then.

The hardest part, in my opinion, is the basic training that includes running, sit-ups, push-ups, digging a hole, climbing fences… etc. Yup, that is a real challenge for me, a person that hasn’t been working out for years.

Well, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do!

That’s just how life is… just like a tree that has to withstand anything that comes along.

Just a few weeks ago, my friends and I went on a trip to Kanchanaburi, a province  2-3 hours away west of Bangkok. Our main goal was to go visit a temple that allows for an amazing tiger experience! The destination was “Wat Pa Luangta Bua- www.tigertemple.org” where we can spend our time with TIGERS up close, REALLY CLOSE! I mean, you can literally hug, pat, take pictures or anything with these tigers. I won’t get much into detail of it because… we were 15 minutes too late and the gate keeper wouldn’t let us in. Oh well, maybe next time.
And for that, we went to the Elephant Village nearby instead. The 30 minutes ride was very down to earth… it felt much longer than 30 minutes and we were glad that we didn’t take the 60 minutes tour ride. It wasn’t bad, but it was very tiring to hang on to the seat on the elephant back. The tour started of with a walk through a small jungle, then to the elephant rider’s village and to finish the tour off by a dip into the river near by. A very fun trip indeed!

Try it for yourselves!

C’mon, I’m serious! These are flying foxes.

A one day family trip (about 120 of us!) last week was truly exhausting from simply eating, taking nasp on the bus and taking photos from time to time. For this trip, we went to Chaochoengsao, a city about an hours drive east of Bangkok.

We went to so many places in the city that by the end of the day I thought it was a 5 day trip! As for today’s post, one of the most interesting places that our family visit is at the Temple, Wat Pho because it is where theses flying foxes have resided for years.

I vaguely remember some of this information provided by our tour guide.

Full grown flying foxes can weight up to 800 grams and will fly for miles to find food, particularly fruit.  The legend goes that these flying foxes are really intelligent and sensitive (or so they say that these flying foxes can understand human language) as there was one time that the temple were trying to hold a 9 days festival. The villager kept saying that who would come to this temple with all these flying foxes since their smell is unbearable! For some unexplainable reason, these flying foxes flew away a day before the festival began, allowing the temple to clean up the place and returned to the temple a day after the festival ended. Not one of them was present during the festival time.

Another story is that, the flying foxes are very emotionally sensitive and attached to the abbot of the temple. During and after the funeral of the abbot, these flying foxes start to drop dead without cause. The story was told that the abbot invited these flying foxes to reside here in the temple years ago. So they believe that the cause of death could be… grieving to death.

When I heard that we are going to see the flying foxes, I thought of just a few of them hanging around the tree. But I couldn’t be more wrong, there were hundreds of them! Another interesting phenomena is that, these flying foxes will only reside within the walls of the temple. This place is just so cool!

More info about the city, please visit http://www.chachoengsao.go.th/th/

As a tribute to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic, here is the collection of some of my photos taken in Vancouver 2009
Also… check out the embeded youtube video by www.HelloBC.com

In celebration of the 1 year anniversary of TwoStepsBehind… I chose this Panorama that was taken in Phang Nga Bay, Thailand. The island also known as the Nail Island. The picture was taken on Christmas of 2009; the same day that I was reunited and met many of my long lost family members. It was the family trip that I must have mentioned on previous posts.

Looking back a year to date…  there are many changes in the way I process pictures, which hopefully have improved greatly. A year ago, I believed that there would be a day that I could take a nice landscape shot, a panorama of some sort… as my very first post at TwoStepsBehind, Hello Planet Earth, Welcome to Two Steps Behind!, was a panorama of the Vancouver Bridge, Canada. That belief… brought me to where I am today… with the photo which I am really proud of. To me it’s a really big step that was made of many small steps.

A year has passed and I couldn’t believe how much things have changed… or at least just me.

There was so much to learn in a year, and I can say for certain that life is…

to Live and Learn…
to keep going forward…
to give and to love unconditionally

and most important of it all…

to never lose hope.
because I do still believe strongly that, hope achieves the impossible.

In celebration of 1 year anniversary of TwoStepsBehind… I am going to make a slide show, when I have time, to see where has TwoStepsBehind has visited. I know that Apple has those cool programs, iMovie, iDvd… etc to make the globe spin from one place to the next. Let us see how would that turn out!

But first things first… I must thank you everyone for visiting this website…
First of all, my mother for making me realize that I should write a blog so that she could keep up with my where abouts.
Secondly, Qi for gifted me with “HALF” of the Canon Rebel XSI for my Bachelor of Architecture graduation present.

Thirdly, SCI_Arc for exposing me to the world of APPLE and MACBOOK PRO

Forth, WordPress + Flickr + Facebook + iPhoto… for making it so easy to blog.
Last but not least… is Trey, the god of HDR for sharing his tutorial at www.StuckInCustoms.com which became a great inspiration for me. Thank you to all of my reader to continuing reading many if not most of my non-sense posts!

THANK YOU!!!

Cheers… on to the next and many more year to come!

Photos taken at Phang Nga Bay, Nail Island, Thailand on December 25, 2009

A year ago…