Yesterday as I was returning home from work I saw a familiar face locking up a bike outside my apartment. It turned out to be a friend of Seyoung’s who lives here in Copenhagen – Chyi Chyi!.
After meeting with Seyoung for the first time in person, Chyi then proceeded to treat us both to dinner and a long tour of East Copenhagen otherwise known as Frederiksstaden.
It has been just about a day since I completed my first international flight and arrived in Copenhagen.
My flight took me from Portland -> Seattle -> Reykjavik -> Copenhagen.
Two of my goals for this year are to finally get a passport and to work abroad for 2 months. I wasn’t one of those fortunate kids who got to tour Europe out of college or high school. After graduating I immediately began working and aside from a trip back to Hawaii a few years ago I haven’t had the opportunity to leave the main land – let alone go to another country.
In May I was hired on by a very hot company called Unity Technologies as a web developer. I had been contracting with them for about a month prior to being hired. They also flew me down to San Francisco in April to be their official photographer and to document their time at the Game Developers Conference. Unity has long been a competitor in the middleware game engine space with a company I used to work for – GarageGames. While GG shifted their focus over the last few years to other things, Unity focused on improving their core products and have steadily gotten better, and more profitable over the years.
One of my requirements for working with them was that I have the freedom to continue living in Portland, rather than move to San Francisco where their North American office is based. We agreed that I would occasionally (about once a month) work at the office, but the rest of the time I would be free to work anywhere else. It has worked out for the most part except that their primary office (and where the rest of the developers work) are actually in Copenhagen, which is about a 9 hour time difference to Portland.
My project(s) are for the most part independent of what the rest of the developers at Unity are working on. I focus primarily on web related projects (store, site, etc), while the rest of the Unity is focusing on engine and tool development. Still our paths do occasionally cross so it makes perfect sense for me to become better acquainted with them. The solution then is to fly my girlfriend and I over for at least a month, set us up in a hotel, and force us to enjoy Copenhagen during the summer.
A co-worker has a vacation coming up at the end of July so they wanted to make getting me out there a top priority so that we would have plenty of time to work together. This gave me just the excuse I needed to get my passport, and also gets me half way through another goal of working abroad for 2 months.
On July 6th I will be taking my first international flight to Copenhagen where I will be working on-site for at least 3-4 weeks.
I had always entertained the idea of getting a passport whenever I went to the post office. When I finally did go that purpose though the place was packed with people had the same idea. Thankfully I was 2nd in the line, because it took the guy almost an hour to process me alone. We got the fastest processing time possible and my passport arrived in just under 2 weeks.
I ended up getting us one way tickets to avoid having to commit to a departure city and to keep our travels open ended. There is just way to much of Europe that I would like to explore but I have neither the time or the money to do it right now. We would like to see some of the near by countries like Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I also wouldn’t mind being able to stay in a single awesome city for a week and just explore the heck out of it. Either way we have the month in Copenhagen to figure it out.
My plans are to be more active on this site in terms of documenting my experiences with traveling – beyond my photography, though I promise there will be plenty more of that. In preparation for my trip I finally graduated from my flimsy $35 aluminum tripod that I got years ago to a nice, light, travel-friendly carbon fiber Manfrotto tripod.
Expect lots of panoramas and HDR like shots in the future as we tour around Copenhagen and beyond.
It isn’t very often that I get shots of myself, thankfully my girlfriend was willing to help me out. Her parents are visiting from Korea and love to hike as much as I do so we decided to give Dog Mountain a chance despite the promise of wet weather.
Dog Mountain is 3.8 mile trip to the top, and it is all up hill. When we got to the top it was enveloped in a cloud so there wasn’t much to look at. Eventually there was a break in the clouds which revealed a spectacular view of the gorge covered in wild flowers.
Located about 2 miles into the Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia River Gorge.
The water level is so high this time of year that you can’t view these falls from the lower level without getting really wet and I didn’t want to risk my gear. This is unfortunate because the falls looked amazing. The last time I had a chance to get out here it was right before winter, so the water level was much lower.
Eagle Creek in general is fantastic right now and is a Waterfall Wonderland with tons of beautiful tiny waterfalls pouring out along the trail.
