NYFW: Favorite Looks

Admist the blasting cold blizzards of the NE, fashion continues on! NYFW is in full swing. I've been following them on Instagram. Here are a few of my favorite items, the ones that really caught my eye. More to come! What are your favorite looks thus far? As you can tell, I really really like gowns.

Carolina Herrera

Raphael Cennamo

Raphael Cennamo

Zac Posen

Zac Posen

Pamela Rowland

2011

Over the past year, I've been to 6 different countries, 3 continents, met people from all over the world, shared tears and laughter, experienced many EDM shows and grew as a person. I rang in 2011 at Route 66, a popular club in Bangkok, with new friends. I also got the chance to meet up with my former high school teacher, Brian Hartenstein.

January

In this month, my friends Lea, Sylwana and Ranu took a vacation after midterms to Koh Chang. On this little island, we stayed in beach side bungalows and swam, ate, danced and got really tan. We met lots of great people; Marko from Finland and Sylwana still keep in touch. As for myself, I met an amazing man named Mark. We keep in touch and skype when we can. Busy lives and time differences have proven themselves to be quite an obstacle in setting skype dates.



February

Midway through February, I moved out of the university's dorm rooms and into my very own studio apartment. I'd never lived on my own before. This was quite exciting for me, especially because I shared a building with my friend Lea, an exchange student from Germany. Our friend Sylwana lived in the complex just across the street, so soon we became inseparable.

At the end of this month, my debut track with Cressida (Matze) was released on Euphonic Records. It received all kinds of attention from big name DJs such as Above and Beyond, Armin van Buuren, Ferry Corsten, Sied van Riel, Rex Mundi, etc. A friend said he heard it played six different times during Miami Music Week. I was so incredibly happy that people were enjoying my music and singing along to lyrics that I wrote. It was all so whimsical. I'm currently still working on some new tracks, and hopefully a couple will be released early 2012.

March

March was quite a sad month. It was the month that marked the end of Sylwana and Ranu's exchange trip, and they would soon leave us and return home to Europe. This was the month we frantically began checking off lists of everything we had intended to do in while in Bangkok. Shopping trips increased, as well as sightseeing. We all made it to a Thai kick boxing match as well. Toward the end of the month, Lea and I were able to score cheap round trip tickets to Kuala Lumpur. We planned our trip so that we could catch MGMT live in concert! The trip was only two days, but it was a blast.



April

In April, I made the decision to move back to the US. The university I was attending was not meeting my standards educationally. My classes were incredibly easy and I hungered for something more challenged. I also decided that I should stop over in Germany before heading back to the states. My good friend, Matze, was to turn 30 and I wanted to be there in his country for all the birthday celebrations. April also marks one of the hottest months in Thailand, and the three day water festival called Song Kran. Lea and I visited many art galleries during this month because they were generally indoors and air conditioned. We saw many, many amazing works of art. The structure below was created by a senior art student at Silapakorn University, Bangkok.



I took a trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia toward the end of the month. I wanted to see the world renowned, Angkor Wat. Some say it is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I spent three days walking through temple after temple after temple. The ancient city was enormous and old and incredible. I was absolutely astounded that people in the 1100s could build such a thing. They say the most beautiful buildings and structures in the world are dedicated to Gods, and I agree wholeheartedly. The photo below is of the famous "Tomb Raider Temple" where the film was shot. The Cambodian people are very proud to have their heritage brought to the big screen via Hollywood. Our tour guide said that Angelina Jolie was to return to Angkor Wat to shoot another film in 2012.



May

May was incredibly exciting and sad for me all at the same time. I was to fly to Germany that month, but it also was time for me to start saying my good byes to friends and family. Lea and I had a farewell dinner at Bed Supper Club, a very cool place with unique performances. The club/lounge is shaped like a white tube. The interior is all white. This club has hosted the likes of Kelis, A-Trak, Boy George and Above & Beyond. The food was good and the ambiance even better. If you ever make it to Bangkok, this lounge is located toward the back of Sukhumvit Soi 11. Amazing place. The night we went, they were having a circus performance!




June

Alright, let me back track to the end of May/beginning of June. Touchdown Frankfurt am Main airport! My lovely friend Matze came to pick me up. Flying can be a pain, especially when you're in 5 inch dominatrix style platform shoes, but HEY I didn't have any room in my luggage so I had no choice but to wear them! I received many funny looks in the airports I went through but did I care? Nope! And so began my road trip throughout Germany. What a better way to explore a country! First thing that happened to us coming out of the airport on the autobahn? FLASH! Speeding ticket! I would like to take the time to debunk the myth that there is no speed limit on the autobahn. There are in certain areas (mainly when passing through more populated areas). This is how the road trip went: Frankfurt to Mannheim, to Hamburg, to Berlin, to Calw, to Ludwigsburg, to Fraiburg, to Winterthur (Switzerland), to Zurich, back to Winterthur, to Munich, to Calw again (where Matze's parents' live) and then back to Frankfurt airport. I spent a total of three and a half weeks travelling Germany and Switzerland. It was amazing. I'll have to write a separate blog about it another time because there is just too much to tell, but I can say that I met wonderful, wonderful people and had an experience of a lifetime. And I cannot wait to go back again!






July & August

Since being back in the states since mid-June, everything's whizzed by in a huge blur. I started working again, and reunited with friends and family. I slowly but surely got back into the old groove of things. It was great to have my old room back and my car as well. It is quite funny how your perspective of the world changes, the more of it you see. Portland is home to me, but I also began to appreciate small things more and more; things that I might not have thought twice about before. For example, the efficiency of the Tri-Met transportation system. You might not think of it as something efficient or convenient, especially if you own a car, but after living in Bangkok and attempting to take public transport a few time, OH MY is it a world of difference (literally). Third world vs. Developed World. Here's a tip: don't take the bus in Bangkok unless you've got time to spare.

September

September marked the much anticipated month of my 21st birthday. Finally. I can buy alcohol and drink like any other person in the rest of the world. Oh and school started the day of my birthday. Did I still drink and go to class? You bet. You only turn 21 once!



October through December

I am lumping the last few months of the year together, because quite frankly, after all the excitement and travelling I did in the first six months of the year, I have nothing else to offer. I was in school for the last few months, and working as well. I haven't gone on any big trips. I went to a couple of great concerts in Seattle, but other than that, my life has been relatively... normal. I'm hoping for great things and more travels in 2012! Cheers to a new year!

The world is changing rapidly

It is easy to forget about things that happened in the world, especially when they didn't effect us directly. But we must remember to open our eyes and open our minds. There is a whole, huge world out there, and it is changing rapidly. We are living in revolutionary times.

Koh Phangan and Koh Tao

Koh Phangan; you may have heard of it before. It's where the famous 'Full Moon Parties' are thrown on the beach, once every twenty eight days, on this beautiful island in the Gulf of Thailand. My friend Lea and I had meaning to head there for a few months, so finally, just a couple weeks ago, we made the trip. After a grueling thirteen hour over night bus ride, we arrived in the south. From there, we took a ferry, on which we slept. The duration of the boat trip took two and half hours. The islands of the gulf were experiencing amazing weather that week, and we were quite lucky! Friends of ours who had gone south before and after us all experienced rain and gloom. After meeting up with a few friends who were already on the island, we laid out on a beautiful white sand beach. The cliffs, jungle and mangroves look absolutely magnificent under the burning sun, the water clear and warm. I turned many shades darker that weekend.

In the evening, we headed over to the Black Moon Party. Since it was a new moon, there was no full moon, but it was quite a party anyway. Phangan also throws half moon parties, so there will always be a party for you to visit no matter when you go. The entry fee was 500 baht with one free drink, though I have heard that for the Full Moon Party there is no entry. The music was decent, they spun electro-dancey music. The decorations were really quite awesome, everything was neon and glowing in the dark. People were stumbling around drunk with the famous buckets... buckets are literally a mini bucket of mixed alcohol that you're supposed to share with a couple of friends, but those who are looking to get really drunk just have a bucket to themselves. It looks cooler than walking around with a bottle of booze in your hand anyhow. There were food carts set up near the entry, so when the drunk munchies kicked in, one could grab a bite to eat without leaving the premises. It is really hard to estimate how many people attended since the premise was so large... at least one thousand.

Unfortunately, when Lea and I returned to the home of yet another friend we were supposed to stay with, our host became slightly strange, and we felt really uncomfortable sleeping there. So, we called a taxi at five in the morning and went to sleep on our friend's bungalow's front porch. What an adventure! The weather was good, just sweatpants and a hoodie, sleeping in a chair by the beautiful beach... it could have been worse!

Lea's German girlfriends (there were three) were so surprised to find us on their front porch in the morning! We told them about our adventure over breakfast, and then they convinced us to head to Koh Tao with them. Tao means turtle in Thai, but we didn't see a single turtle the entire time! Koh Tao was about an hour and a half's ferry ride away. When we arrived there in the late afternoon, most of the bungalows and guest houses had filled up already. We settled on a really nice room for 2,000 baht per night (about $70), which is quite expensive for Thai prices, but considering we slept on a bus one night, and a porch the following night, we really just wanted to get some zzz's. After checking in, we hung out on the beach until the sun went down, showered and took a power nap, and then headed out for some seafood barbeque on the beach. I ate barracuda for the first time, and it was delicious!

The next morning, we decided to go snorkeling. We took a boat which dropped us off at six different destinations, for about forty minutes each. Unfortunately, I forgot how horrible of a swimmer I am. When we were dropped at the first spot, shark bay (mini sharks, mind you) we all scrambled into the water with our snorkeling gear. Somehow I started swimming in a different direction as everyone else and found myself ten meters from the boat, with no one around me, still getting used to the snorkeling gear and not even near where the fish were supposed to be. So, I panicked. I had never had a panic attack before... I can tread water, and I can swim, very slowly. But the fact that no one was around me and that I was kind of far out really freaked me out, so I took off the snorkeling gear and had to talk to myself, and dog paddled back to the boat. Wow that was a horrible feeling, I felt like I was going to die. The rest of the snorkeling trip I wore a life jacket, but I managed to get back in the water like a brave, big girl and saw some amazing fish and coral reefs. I had an underwater camera as well so I snapped some cool shots.

Lea and I had planned and budgeted to leave the following morning. The other girls were going to stay one more day, and convinced us to stay in their room for one more night. They could help us with expenses until we got back to Bangkok, and that way we could all travel home together as well. So we stayed one more evening. We had dinner at an Indian restaurant on the beach, where there was a live acoustic guitar man singing and strumming. I requested 'Santeria' by Sublime, which he played for us. Something about Sublime and acoustic music really just screams 'beach' to me. After he finished up, a DJ came on and played electro, while fire dancers spun fire and received tips. It was quite spectacular. It was an early night to bed, seeing as the snorkeling trip had really drained our energy. And then the following afternoon we headed back to Bangkok!

Overall, it was quite a fun trip with some strange happenings and possible misunderstandings with our would-be host on Koh Phangan. We had great weather, great food, great drinks and a great time! The southern islands in the Gulf of Thailand are a must visit, but be sure you check the weather!

Til Death Do Us Part

Have you ever owned an item or two that you absolutely loved to death? As in, you used it or wore it so often for so long that it was literally falling apart before you had the heart to finally put it in the bin? I definitely have. While I am somewhat of a material girl and have a large collection of stuff (as in everything), I still make the most of my things! That's why I have no problem splurging on expensive shoes every once in a while; I wear the heels down on my shoes, to the point where I've had them replaced so I could continue abusing them. I photographed a couple pairs of shoes that I have worn down, and also an eyeliner that I use every single day (pictured next to a full length, unused pencil). The solid black shoes I purchased as my choir shoes from Nordstrom Rack when I was fifteen (I am twenty now). They have served as my work shoes, at Nordstrom and Seattle's Best Coffee, where they took the most abuse in the form of coffee and milk spills. The snake skin (or rainbow trout) print shoes are from Urban Outfitters and have (and still are) my trek to class and wear-at-work shoes. Those I purchased two or three years ago. I still won't let these shoes go to the grave and I wear them at least 3-4 times per week. I love them so much I can't bear to part with them! Call me a pack rat, call me cheap, but I love my stuff.

Robots & Writing

Goodness, time flies when you're in college! I haven't written for quite some time now. This past Saturday, I took an IELTs exam (International English Language Testing). Though I am a native English speaker, I attend an international university and require passing results from said exam to be exempt from English courses. Now in the school system here in Thailand, there are very few opportunities to write essays, most of the grade you receive is exam based (35% midterm, 45% final, the rest on quizzes and possibly small assignments). While doing the essay portion of my IELTs exam, I realized how much I missed writing. I pretty much wrote a satire, and I hope whoever it is who grades my paper enjoys reading it. The prompt was something along the lines of, "Robots can be important in the development of human society. Do you think they are a good or bad thing, and why?" I will do my best to recreate what I wrote, and I had quite a good sense of humor about it despite the fact that I was freezing in that exam room for a good three solid hours.

Robots are an interesting creation, and fantasy. There have been many recent films made about robots, such as Wall-E, iRobot and Transformers. Now in all of these films, the 'good' and 'evil' sides of robots come out. But first things first, if robots are not human and therefore have no emotion, how can they have morals defining what is 'good' and what is 'bad'?

As a society, humans seem to have become lazier. Obesity levels are sky-rocketing all over the world. Sure, this can be attributed partially to diet, but also to the fact that with all of our tools and technology, our lives are not physically grueling as our ancestors were (not in developed nations, anyway. I am well aware that life in many third world is a daily struggle for survival). The introduction of robots into society for the purpose of doing mundane, every day tasks would make humans even less active than we are now. I mean come on, we already have dishwashers, car washes, washing machines, automatic doors, etc. Isn't life easy enough as it is? If we had more time in our day to do other things because we weren't throwing clothes into the dryer, would we actually be more productive? Doubtful. We'd spend more time in front of the television, eating or playing video games, or sitting at our computers. Most likely being inactive.

Worst case scenario, think about this one for a minute. If a seventeen year old computer nerd can create a virus that disables millions of personal computers worldwide, what could Steve Jobs do? Robots run on programs, they do what they are told to do, with no thought (because they don't think) as to what is 'right' and 'wrong'. Like I said earlier, a machine can have no morals, no emotions. So maybe Steve Jobs has a secret army of iApple-bots hiding underneath his garage, just waiting for the apocalypse, or just the right moment to launch a military attack on Bill Gates. The robots may not turn on you, but someone can program them to do their bidding. Okay, this is all a bit far-fetched, but like I said: worst case scenario, like in the movies.

Au contraire, utilizing robots to do tasks deemed perilous or impossible for humans to do is absolutely logical. How many mining accidents have there been in 2010 resulting in the loss or suffering of human life? 3 major ones I can think of off the top of my head: the Chilean miners trapped underground for three months. Three months! The mining explosion in New Zealand, in November, which killed every single person in that mine. And don't forget the blast in West Virginia back in April. Robots were sent in to mend the exploded pipes in the Gulf of Mexico (what a disaster, thanks British Petroleum*). Funding for research and development should be high for robots with such uses. Same with robots for scientific purposes, such as exploring Mars. Humans can't just pop over to Mars and take a stroll, so we send robots. Totally justified.

Overall, robots are great to do work that is deemed dangerous for human beings. But the R&D for robots and technology for convenience (how the hell are the Jetsons in such good shape if they don't even walk across their living room?) is a frivolous waste of time and money. What do you think about having robots as part of your every day life?

*The IELTs exam is curated by the British Council, I hope they got my joke and weren't offended for taking a stab at BP. Hey, they deserve it, to say the least.

Last but not least, I can never bring myself to write without posting photos as well, because I am such a visual person. Photo one: It's me! On the balcony of my dorm room. Photo 2: the bracelet I was wearing. Photo 3: My obsession, Ferrero Rocher! Delicious.

Allergic to the counterfeit, impartial to the politics.

Actually I'm not impartial to the politics at all. I won't say I'm up to speed on everything happening, but I do cast my vote when my civil duty is requested. Unfortunately, as I am not currently in the U.S. to sign my ballot, I won't be able to vote for Kitzhaber for Governor. I was raised a democrat, though my grandmother is a right wing, Rush Limbaugh kind of lady, along with the rest of her sisters. I am young, and a lot of young people are liberals. In the German film, the Edukators, one of the characters talks about how he used to go to protests when he was young, hot headed and rallying for change, truly liberal. But, he got a job, got married, had children, and the next thing he knew, he voted conservative. I think age has a lot to do with political stance. Older people are set in their ways, they don't want change, they want to keep all the money they've worked so hard to earn in their lifetime. Young people could pack up and move away to a foreign country and not have obligations such as mortgages, and elderly parents to care for, or children or even high paying jobs they'd be afraid to leave. (Okay, I'm saying most young people, not all.) Just some food for thought I suppose. Oh and the Edukators is a brilliant film, watch it.

A few images I found entertaining posted below. Just because.