The PhotoBlog
Here you'll be able to find some spur of the moment photographs from tours, nights out, and other events as well as a description, explanation or my thoughts associated with the pictures.
On the last one of these, I said I would write more later. Data shows that was a lie. Also didn't end up writing anything yesterday. Kinda forgot, kinda didn't have anything to write because I do the same thing pretty much every day. Once I wake up, I eat, do some exercises, and then watch movie and play games all day until I can force myself to go back to sleep. Its a never ending cycle of staying up all night and sleeping all day. Really nothing better to do. So far the best part of today is sitting by the window and letting the sun keep me somewhat warm since its absolutely freezing where I'm staying. I've been sleeping in sweatpants, a sweatshirt and socks it's that cold. And I hate sleeping in socks. Big highlight of yesterday was subscribing to NY Times' daily crossword puzzles. Hopefully today's puzzle will keep me occupied for a while. We'll see.
Woke up from a nap around 8 p.m. so it looks like I'll be up all night again. Fantastic. And I didn't even finish my crossword puzzle. Ill
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If you've been following along, you'll know that yesterday was relatively uneventful. I lied. I forgot some of the stuff I did yesterday. During the few hours that I was awake, I played Monopoly online with some of my friends also in quarantine. Lost terribly by landing on Boardwalk, but I'm not upset. It's fine. All fine. Try again today maybe. I also started my own form of Stonehenge. Except it's being being made of used water bottles. They're harder to balance than you'd think. Probably because they're round. More to follow on that project later.
For today, I woke up around 5:30 am, did some stretching, and now am patiently waiting for breakfast. As patiently as I can wait anyways. That's it for today so far. More later. After the spectacular nap I had yesterday, I don't know if I can really call it a new day yet since I haven't been to bed. It is after 6 am which is a reasonable time to call morning so here's some new content. It's just before 7 right now and I'm waiting ever so patiently for breakfast. I spent all night watching Netflix, working on a little multimedia thing for the pictures I took in December, and playing cell phone games. Super productive, I know. A little bit ago, I rolled out of bed and did my first random workout app workout of the day. Might get a yoga app, sitting in bed all day is painful. Figure that out when I wake up later this afternoon. Until then!
Never got around to posting this yesterday because unexpectedly, I was able to fall asleep last nigh at a reasonable hour and sleep most of the night. To sum up yesterday, I went to bed at 8 am, woke up at 3 pm, watched some Netflix, did some crunches, showered and went back to sleep at 10 pm. Suuuuper exiting, I know. Come back tomorrow (or later today) for more! It's only 8:15am and I've accomplished pretty much everything I set out to do today. And by that I mean I woke up before 6 (unintentionally), did one of them workouts on this app I downloaded specifically for this purpose and took a shower. The only thing that could make this day more complete is breakfast. Which is supposed to show up by 9. We'll see. If anyone wants to play trivia crack, words with friends or any other cell phone game let me know. I'm going to throw a couple of pictures I had on my snap story on here just to share with the boomers who don't have snapchat. Note that this is just my bedroom. There are more common spaces. I have a small kitchen with a fridge and a little sitting area. More later when something happens hopefully. Evening update. I had both lunch and dinner which were once again surprisingly good. Dinner even included a small salad, which should be in the picture down below. After the last little blurb I wrote, I took an approximately 4 hour nap. I've slept more in the last day than I have in the last two weeks combined. Feels pretty great. After my nap, I did another prison workout and shortly thereafter dinner arrived. My roommate also requested a microwave, which is a definite improvement to both my Navy provided meals and my instant mac and cheese situation. Since dinner I've been watching the latest season of Ozark (highly recommend) and catching some shooting stars in Animal crossing and I plan on doing that until I fall asleep. Check in tomorrow for day 3 adventures (or non-adventures)!
Hey everyone, I've just been moved into my home for the next two weeks, so I'll try to keep up with everything (or the nothing) that's going on. This is pretty much going to be a boredom tracker.
Day 0: Woke up super early because the bus to Yokota was scheduled to leave at 5:00am. Should've know that the navy never does anything on time. At 6:30 there was an announcement that there weren't going to be any more buses until 12:30. When 12:30 finally rolled around, mustered and all that jazz and had some guy rifle through all of my stuff to make sure I didn't have any "forbidden substances," ie. anything that could make you happy.Got on a bus and made the two hour trek to Yokota sharing a Japanese sized bus seat with my sea bag and backpack. Then I had to sit on the bus for another hour while whatever khaki is "in charge" figured out how to divide 5 people into rooms of three. Super frustrating. Moved in. Got two queen sized flat sheets for a twin sized bed so I'm basically just living in a nest. I was lied to about having a microwave too. No idea how I'm going to make insta-mac now. The next great adventure. Dang so apparently it's been over a year since I've written anything for this page, so buckle up for a long post. So much has happened in the last year, I'll just try to summarize as best I can. I'm going to skip the part from December to April because there wasn't anything super exciting that happened then, at least that I can remember. Either late April or early May I went underway for my first full deployment. It wasn't as bad an anticipated; it was just a lot of work and long hours. The highlights were by far the couple of port calls.
The first place I got to visit was Brisbane, Australia. Technically when we pulled in, it was the middle of winter, but it was still relatively mild. Australia is just upgraded America, really. Except they still drive on the wrong side of the road. It was refreshing being in a country where everyone spoke English, even if it was difficult to understand at times. While I was there, I got to pet Koalas and Kangaroos (see the FB profile pics for proof). Definitely a good time. Next place the USS Ronny RayRay pulled into was Singapore. Super bougie, at least the couple of places I had a chance to go to. Marina Bay Sands and the associated gardens were super pretty. Hopefully I'll be rich enough to stay there someday. I was also supposed to get to go to Manila, PI, but weather canceled that one. Whatever. Not mad about that one at all. Got back to Yokosuka right before Thanksgiving. Still relatively warm, thank God. Had a friends giving with a bunch of people from work. A few weeks later, my family came out to visit for Christmastime. It was great to see them after over a year. While they were here, we traveled all over the bottom half of Japan. We started in Tokyo, then visited Fuji, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima and Yokohama. Highlights include Fuji (obviously), the thousand torri gates, deer that are right out of your hand, and the best steak I've ever had in my life. I'm sure there'll be a thousand pictures of that on the internet if there isn't already. Thanks, mom. I had to work New Year's day, so no crazy stories from that this year, try again 2021. In February, I had the chance to go to the Sapporo snow festival with a group of friends. The snow sculptures were cool and all but the best part was by far just dumping people in snow for an entire weekend. Sapporo had more snow in that one city that I'm pretty sure I've seen in my entire life. Snow banks 10-15ft high, 4ft of snow pretty much everywhere. The roads were snow packed, but everyone actually knows how to drive here so it wasn't even an issue. Weird. Good job America. Anyways, these are the highlights over the past year. I'll attach pictures as I sort through them and get them all uploaded, but a handful of the good ones are already on Facebook. I'll try to write more often so people know what I've been up to. I appreciate feedback and will talk about Japan for hours if you want. Sayonara for now! So I haven't posted anything on here in a while, so be prepared for a few updates over the next couple of days to a week to cover these last 2 months. I checked onto the boat with a little more than a month left in the underway. Two weeks after I checked on board, we pulled into Hong Kong. This post should cover both. Anyways, I flew onto the ship early November. This was scary given the plane feels like it's going to crash for a couple of miles before hitting the flight deck and stopping in a grand total of 4 seconds. I checked in, did some boring paperwork and almost immediately started working on qualifications (quals for short), which I'll be doing for at least the next year and a half. It's interesting but relatively boring: learn some stuff, go talk about it, take a test, talk about it some more, be qualified. A week or so later I started standing under- instruction watches (U/I's). Again, interesting the first go-around, but boring over time. That's what I'm going on the ship for the next few months work wise. Living on the ship is different. Privacy is basically zero, you sleep on top of a coffin, and are scared to touch the floor or your foot might rot off. If you get lucky you might get a warm shower. I can expand on all of this more, if necessary, but not now. Covered the negatives. One of the coolest things I've ever seen is going out onto the fantail around midnight and watching the planes line up to land. It's so dark, you can see almost all of them lined up all the way to the horizon. Or at least the little blinky lights on the wings. The ship rocking can put you to sleep real fast; that's another thing you can't get too many other places. Just laying in your rack hoping you don't roll out onto the floor but also being the comftiest you can on the boat. However, whenever we ended up pulling into Hong Kong, I couldn't walk in a straight line from compensating for the rock all the time. Hong Kong itself was pretty unexciting in and of itself. Very westernized. I did take a couple of tours to see some of the sights that ended up being pretty interesting. Going to go second tour first. The second day was a trip to Lantau island. After a short bus ride, I took a cable car from Hong Kong to Lantau. The prime attraction was a giant metal Buddah and some sacred cows. See pictures for more details. The first one was an evening tour to a couple of places around Hong Kong and Kalhoon. The first stop was an observatory overlooking Victoria Harbor and Hong Kong. Pretty good views. The next stop on the tour was The Temple Street market. It was just a market with knock-off merchandise but something I had never experienced before. The highlight of this tour was the food. Real, traditional, Chinese food. Served in the same restaurant where James Bond: Midnight in Shanghi was filmed. Absolutely delicious. Didn't even know what most of it was to be honest. I don't question food that tastes that good. For the conclusion of the AOB/ICR (Area Orientation Brief / InterCultural Relations) I was dropped in the middle of Kamakura around 10am and told to be at work the next morning. This was a little intimidating we had ridden the train to get there but had had a lot of assistance. Getting back would be a pain. That's a later problem, not a now problem So we headed out into the city towards the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine along the way we stopped for Japanese pancakes. Unlike American pancakes, they are not usually a breakfast food. They are served with a meat, as well as vegetables, eggs or cheese depending on what you order. Nothing bad. Back on the road to the shrine. On the way we stopped at an owl zoo. I was able to pet a wide variety of owl species, including the one that played Hedwig in the Harry Potter series. After that, we finally made it to the shrine. Tsurugoaka Hachimangu was beautiful, though many people treated it as a tourist attraction rather than a holy place. Maybe that's how shrines are supposed to be. I don't know enough about Shinto. After the shrine, we hopped on the train for a few more stops to get to Hase. There we visited the "Great Buddha". Again, to me it felt more like a tourist attraction than place of worship. It was interesting however to go inside the Buddha statue to see the construction and workmanship from the inside. Definitely a fun afternoon! 19-21 October 2018 - Ate some more really good food. In addition to another Sushi-Go-Round place, I ate at a cook it yourself kind of place on Sunday. Think of a cross between the Melting Pot and a Hibachi steake house. No idea what the name of the place was, I can't read any of the 3 Japanese writing systems. While we were there, I had both Jo Rosu (chuck roll) and different vegetables. Nothing I didn't like. 10/10. Friday night I tried habu sake. Literally disgusting. Never drinking it again, there's a snake in the bottle (Imagine that with the same phrasing as toy story). 2/10 would recommend (only people thay dislike you). 12 October 2018 - Friday night out. Who would've thought the Japanese can make some of the best Italian food I've ever had. That pasta was delicious. Followed up by a ChuHi. This picture is actually terrible because the stand we bought these at were so tiny I couldn't pick my glass up and use my phone at the same time. Anyway, if you've never had one, its like Jolly Ranchers and fruit juice tasting. |
AuthorJessica Perry is an Annapolitan and aspiring photographer, lighting designer and nuclear operator. Archives
April 2020
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