Euro Trip 2013, Part 5: Spain

About ten years ago, I took a trip to Spain with two of my friends. We capped the trip off with a few days in Barcelona, and on the way to the airport, I was robbed at a bus station, forcing me to stay there for an extra two nights. I left Spain with a bad taste in my mouth and had not been back until now.

Our plan was to visit Spain for ten days. We flew into Barcelona first and stayed at the Hotel Barcelona Princess, which was a really nice and modern high rise overlooking the Mediterranean. 

We scampered all over town for three days, checking out all the sights and eating as much local food as we could find. I kept a death grip on my gear and made sure I was especially aware of my surroundings. No thief was going to snag any of my stuff this time around.

After our fill of Barcelona, we hopped on a quick flight to Sevilla, where we were met with a massive wall of heat and humidity. Seriously. It kicked our asses. We came close to passing out during our first day there and barely made it back to our hotel room to cool off and rehydrate. I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever felt heat like that before, and that’s coming from a Georgia native.

We managed to suck it up and wandered Sevilla for a few days, but it felt like we had the city to ourselves. It was August and many locals were gone for vacation. It felt like a ghost town at times.

The final stop of our one-month tour across Europe was Madrid. One last three-night stay and we’d be heading back to Atlanta for a short break before taking off to Asia for another month.

While it may not be the most photogenic city, Madrid is still one of my favorites. There’s just something authentic about it that I like. 

We checked out some sights, wandered about, found an insanely amazing restaurant that served a foie gras risotto that just blew us away. And then one night we ended up walking straight into a massive festival that we knew nothing about. I can’t even remember what it was called.

So with Madrid finished, our tour of Europe came to an end. We were pretty exhausted after a month, but we were only halfway done. We headed back to Atlanta for a few days to recover, and to pick up my mom, who we then whisked away with us for another month… this time across Asia.

First stop, Singapore!

Euro Trip 2013, Part 1: Lithuania

As you may know, my wife is originally from Lithuania and still has family there. We try to go back to visit as often as we can, so when she got two months off last summer to travel, naturally it was our first destination.

We spent about a week in Lithuania before heading off to the rest of our European journey, which included Geneva, the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, and Spain. This was my fourth trip to Lithuania, so I’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see in Vilnius. But it’s always nice to walk around Old Town, especially in the summertime.

I had never been to Kaunas before, which is the second largest city in the country, so we took a day trip there. Here are some photos of Kaunas:

And it wouldn’t be a trip to Lithuania without the food!

I absolutely love visiting Lithuania. It doesn’t have the huge attractions or sights of Western European cities, but it’s an underrated cultural gem tucked away in Northeastern Europe that has a lot to offer. If you’ve already explored a lot of the major European cities, then you should definitely give Vilnius a try next time. You’ll be pleasantly surprised!

One Week in Seattle

Well, I was actually there for six days, to be exact. Stayed at the Woodmark Hotel & Spa in Kirkland, which is just across Lake Washington from Seattle. I had been to Seattle once before, but only for like a day, so this was basically my first trip there.

I used Google Maps to do some location scouting beforehand and created a customized map with pins of all the places I wanted to check out. Combined with an iPhone, it makes for a pretty handy tool for photographers in an unfamiliar city.

I also had a friend that lives in Seattle to show me around. Stevan is an old sushi chef that used to work for me back in my restaurant biz days. He moved out to Seattle four years ago and recently took up a job at Shiro’s Sushi. Shiro Kashiba is a former apprentice of the famous sushi master Jiro Ono from the Japanese documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Jiro also had another protégé, Daisuke Nakazawa, who is known in the film as the one who made over 200 trays of tamago before finally getting it right. Well, Daisuke has also recently taken a job at Shiro’s, and we were able to sit in front of him and sample his version of what he’s learned from the master.

My buddy Stevan!

Daisuke Nakazawa from Jiro Dreams of Sushi

In the following days, I visited Seattle’s main attractions, like the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, and Kerry Park, as well as some other spots off the beaten path. Stevan was kind enough to drive me all over town to get some amazing views of Seattle. He even took me to Bruce and Brandon Lee’s grave site at Lake View Cemetery, which was pretty cool to see.

We were definitely lucky with the weather while we were there. Six days there and I may have been caught in a total of an hour or two of rain the entire time. I even bought a Kata rain sleeve thinking I wouldn’t survive the week without one. Never used it once.

Definitely loved Seattle. Awesome city, beautiful scenery, great food. I hope to go back again and maybe do some fishing next time!

Here are some of the photos I ended up with. Probably have a few more that I’ll edit, and I shot a ton of time-lapse clips as well. I’ll try and put something together over the next few weeks. Enjoy!

An amazing little hole in the wall called Thai Tom…

… with some of the best pad Thai ever.

EuroLapse

So I finally finished my time lapse of Europe. As you may remember, Inna and I spent three months in Europe last summer, traveling to ten different countries while making Lithuania our homebase. I ended up shooting over 30,000 images to use in a time lapse, but I guess somewhere along, I put them all on the backburner while editing my “real” photos from the trip. So I recently got back to them and started the long process of putting it all together.

I did some initial processing in Aperture and then exported all the images as JPGs in their original size. Then I stitched each time lapse sequence in Quicktime and then brought them into Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, where I fixed any flicker issues I had and applied some pans and zooms.

It ended up taking me about two weeks or so to put everything together, but a lot of that time was spent applying adjustments to 30,000 photos in Aperture and then exporting them out, and also rendering in Premiere. (However, I do want to say that Premiere blows Final Cut Pro out of the water! Can’t believe what I’ve been missing!)

At any rate… here it is! If you go to the video’s page on Vimeo, you can read some more details about it. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for watching!

EuroLapse from David Smith on Vimeo.

Europe Trip 2011, Part Two

After our trip to London, Amsterdam, and Paris, we returned to Lithuania to relax for a few days and start planning our second side trip. We decided we wanted to see Scandinavia, so we booked tickets to Stockholm. We would spend three nights there, three in Copenhagen, three more in Helsinki, and then round out our trip with another three nights in Riga. We wanted to visit Norway, but we figured it would require a separate trip on its own just to see all the fjords. 

So off we went to Sweden. Now let me say, I’ve been to quite a few major Western European cities before. London, Paris, and Rome have always been my favorite. But I was completely blown away by Stockholm. The history, the architecture, the layout of the city, the people, the food… all amazing. I can’t say one bad thing about that city. Well, except for a really crappy Mexican restaurant called Taco Bar that we made the mistake of trying. (Yes, I know… but tacos sounded amazing at the time!) 

Regardless of our bad Swedish-Mexican experience, Stockholm, in my opinion, is the most underrated major city in all of Europe. It’s definitely a place I wouldn’t mind moving to. 

After three nights in Stockholm, we took a flight to Copenhagen. And much to our surprise, it left quite an opposite impression on us than Stockholm did.

Don’t get me wrong. Copenhagen is a lovely city. It just seemed a bit dirtier and didn’t quite have that “wow factor.” But we still had a blast and I got some nice shots of the Nyhavn waterfront, where a lot of cafes and pubs are located. 

Next up, Helsinki. We stayed at Hotel GLO, which was an amazing boutique hotel located right in the heart of downtown. Helsinki, in my opinion, was kind of right between Stockholm and Copenhagen. Not as “grown up” as Stockholm, but a lot more to do than Copenhagen.

We took a short ferry ride to Suomenlinna, an 18th century island fortress just ten minutes from Helsinki’s port, and spent all day there. Not a whole lot to do in Helsinki, but it was still a beautiful city to explore.

Our last destination for this trip was Riga. From what I had heard, I was expecting something similar to Vilnius, but with a lot less going on. But next to Stockholm, I think Riga may be one of the most underrated cities I’ve been to in Europe. 

We were blown away by the beautiful architecture in Riga. Old Town felt like some kind of fake city built by Disney. The food was quite good and the cheap prices made everything even better.

Funny little story: The hotel we stayed at (Opera Hotel) was right across the street from a movie theatre, so one afternoon we decided to see X-men: First Class. Now, Latvia’s second official language is Russian. So being that the movie was in English, both Latvian and Russian subtitles were provided. “No problem,” I thought. The movie’s in English. Well, little did I know, half of that damn movie is in French, German, and Russian. Inna ended up having to translate the Russian subtitles to me in English just so I could understand what was going on. 

Even better… once we got back to Lithuania, we decided to see Planet of the Apes. Same deal. Half of that movie is in sign language with Lithuanian subtitles. Awesome. 

 

One Day in Stockholm

Just put together a short video of a day in Stockholm during our recent trip to Scandinavia, swishblog-style.