Apple Photography

While I was bored out of my mind at the Bellevue Square Apple Store, waiting for her highness to pick out an iPad(more like iSad ya feel me?), I watched a class on iPhone videography. I was intrigued and am always interested in improving my iPhone skills, so I checked out availability on their website. I can't turn down a free class!

I found one that looked interesting at the University Village location:

Photo Tour: Framing Architecture

Discover a new point of view on photographing buildings, architectural details, and structures with your iPhone or iPad. We’ll head out and show you how to combine angles and lines to create perspective, add textures and shapes, and set the composition. Devices will be provided, or bring your own. Recommended for all skill levels.

The Apple employees that walked around with us seemed to be legit photography experts. One of them in particular was very intense and seemed to know a lot about both the theory of photography and the technical specs of the iPhone.

I was having fun on my photography class but Lydia was being a pill about it. There's no pleasing her.

Back at headquarters we learned some tricks on how to edit photos.

They then put our work up on the big screen. It was fun.

I worked so hard at photography we all agreed that I had earned a Hello Robin Mackles'more cookie.

Even the cars in the Tesla store had their Halloween costumes on.

Lydia has a bad case of Ernie belly.

Voting is very easy in Washington, and it may be my imagination but I feel like they ask us to vote more often as a result.

Maldivian Eating and Dancing

We spent plenty of time beach bumming around Meeru Island on this trip as you might expect, so meals were the main structure of our day. It was fun that it was a buffet so I could take more risks and try some weirder stuff.

The poor neighborhood. These poor souls had to walk numerous feet if they wanted to get to the beach. Life isn't fair, I don't know what else I can tell them.

Each of the overwater bungalows had a big pot filled with water and a ladle made out of a coconut shell on a stick in order to wash your feet.

I read a lot about how the water situation works here. I guess there is sort of a groundwater situation happening below the islands but that the seawater is also in contact with it, and maybe the two waters just don't naturally mix very well so there's sort of a natural protection for the freshwater below the island? It seemed like a precarious situation to me.

I feel like there's a shell ecosystem here where the snails grow the shells and then the hermit crabs wear them.

It was Maldivian night at the buffet so I was pretty excited to try some exotic stuff.

There is a lot of Indian influence in Maldivian culture. Here a guy was baking naan in a cylindrical tandoor oven. 

After dinner we headed to a nearby sand floored building to watch a Bodu Beru performance.

Bodu Beru literally means "big drums" in Dhivehi and there is plenty of big drumming to go around. It was less organized that I had expected, and ended up being drumming with a lot of random freestyle dancing. The tempo started slow and then grew faster and faster with dancing to match.

On the walk back to our Jacuzzi Water Villa the snails were having a little buffet of their own.