sarah sosiak

Favourite Places - NYC

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I put together maps of some favourite places in various cities for friends planning trips, then heard that they'd found them useful and passed them on, so thought I'd share them more broadly. Click through to the larger maps for details. All are works in progress, I'll keep adding to them as a recall and discover more spots.

(Yes, most of my life in NYC was lived between Houston & 23rd streets, and revolved around drinking coffee and buying books.)

Update: See also Zoomdoggle’s Fun List NYC.

Favourite Places - San Francisco

View Favourite Places: San Francisco in a larger map

I put together maps of some favourite places in various cities for friends planning trips, then heard that they'd found them useful and passed them on, so thought I'd share them more broadly. Click through to the larger maps for details. All are works in progress, I'll keep adding to them as a recall and discover more spots.

Currently lighter on detail than London. Apparently, most of what I do in San Francisco revolves around eating, drinking and buying books. (Yes, that sounds about right.)

Favourite Places - London

View Favourite Places: London in a larger map

I put together maps of some favourite places in various cities for friends planning trips, then heard that they'd found them useful and passed them on, so thought I'd share them more broadly. Click through to the larger maps for details. All are works in progress, I'll keep adding to them as a recall and discover more spots.

One outing I'd recommend in London that's not on the map is a walking tour via London Walks. Yes, it sounds rather tourist-cheesy, but I've been on a few and found them really interesting in a geeky sort of way. Think: Live Discovery/History channel documentary, sometimes with a stop at a pub.

Another thing that's good to know about London is that most of the museums are free, so it's easy to spend an hour's downtime in a single exhibit.

Hungry? Pret a Mangers are everywhere, delicious, reasonably priced and offer fairly healthy breakfast/lunch/snack options. Most have free wifi. Bonus: The one opposite the Leicester Square tube is huge, great for people watching and open late.

Photos from Vancouver

Photos from my Olympic trip are up on Flickr. Some highlights after the jump.

O Canada

Standing for O Canada at a medal ceremony in Vancouver. Full post on the Olympic trip to come. (Best viewed large.)

Where I’m Going / Where I’ve Been

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A few weeks ago, friends and I were talking about how far north/east/south/west we’d each travelled. I started plotting places on a map to figure out my extremes, then continued until I had a relatively* exhaustive map and started adding places I’d like to go.

My NESW extremes (as measured from San Francisco) are:

• North = Gullfoss, Iceland (64° 19′ 34″ N)
• East = Helsinki, Finland (24° 56′ 15″ E)
• South = Xelhá, Mexico (20°19'2.22"N)
• West = Honolulu, USA (157° 49′ 34″ W)

Legend:

* Major-metropolitan areas are collapsed to a single city, I still need to fill out California, and I’ve not included every city/town/village I’ve spent time in in Ontario or stopped in while driving the Trans-Canada Highway. (That would make for a rather long (and tedious) list. Assume most of Eastern Ontario and the larger places between Sydney, Nova Scotia and Edmonton, Alberta along the TCH.) I’ve also spent a night in a small ski-town in Austria whose name I don’t remember.

29 000km later…

Update: It was pointed out that my photosets didn't capture some of the highlights of the trip, so now...with more words. (And a map.)

June, from just east of the Baltic to the middle of the Pacific, in pictures.

View Escape the Fog - 2009.06 in a larger map

Helsinki (on Flickr)

Where I fell in love with delicious cardamom pastries, experienced 120 straight hours of daylight, climbed a church to get to the park on its roof, visited the gorgeous Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, wandered the Finnish Museum of National Photography, ate a lot of great tomato-cheese-lettuce-on-rye sandwiches, and explored Suomenlinna, the Swedish-then-Russian-then-Finnish sea fort off the coast of the city.

Tallinn (on Flickr)

Where I fell into conversation with a local, and spent the afternoon wandering the off-the-tourist-track bits of the Old Town talking about heavy metal and life in Estonia.

The UK (on Flickr)

Where I spent quality time with good friends, went geocaching in the woods and accidentally found a film set, took a quick trip to Oxford, saw a Body Worlds exhibit, visited the Cabinet War Rooms, spent an afternoon in my favourite building in London (St. Pancras Station) and discovered the genius in using butternut squash to make a veggie burger.

Hawaii (on Flickr)

Where I spent more quality time with more good friends, climbed the rim of a volcanic crater tuff cone, celebrated Pau Hana on Waikiki beach, went for a moonlit swim in the ocean, visited a Buddhist Temple, surfed, body boarded and ate a lot of fish.

Kiasma

The ramp at Steve Holl's Kiasma (the Finish Museum of Contemporary Art) in Helsinki. More on the building here.

More photos of the building and current installations on Flickr.

Retro Futurism

In the thousand year old Old Town of Tallinn, Estonia.*

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* Via Helsinki, via London. More photos to come.

photos from big sur

 

At the end of last month, I drove down to Big Sur for a few days close to nature, and far from technology. (Need to be unreachable? A 150km long cellphone dead-zone starts just south of Monterey.) As anyone who’s been here will tell you, the area is simply stunning. Mountains, water, plants, wildlife, a fun stretch of Highway 1 and little else.

I stayed at an excellent family-run resort called Treebones, a collection of campsites and yurts nestled in the hills above the ocean. Highly recommended. The atmosphere was relaxed, the yurts were a nice compromise between camping and…well…not camping, and I met some interesting people* over breakfasts and dinners on the communal deck. The only downside was that coziness and amazing views made it hard to venture further afield. I did a bit of hiking around the south end of Big Sur, but left with a list of places left to visit on a return trip.

Slide show below (and on Flickr):

* Including a man from Scotland cycling from Seattle to Miami, via Los Angeles (and writing a great blog about the trip), and a couple I have a connection to via a friend from New Brunswick. Small world.

photos from seattle

A few weeks back, I flew up to Seattle for a long weekend of catching up with friends, eating fish and lazing in cafes waiting out the rain. I fell back into my habit of forgetting to take photos of people, but otherwise like this how this set came together.

Slide show below (and on Flickr):

72 hours in new york city

Full set on Flickr.

90 seconds in grand central

photos from toronto & ottawa

Oh, hey. I went to Toronto last month. And Ottawa. And ate a lot of waffles. And took some pictures.

More photos on Flickr.

rides rides rides

Ticket booths at the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto's take on the county fair.

descent

Escalators in a London tube station.

photos from nyc

Finally finished putting the photos from my trip to NYC up on Flickr, including a handful from the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMA.

bus stop

Digging deep into the archives for this one, it surfaced in my activity stream when someone favourited* it yesterday. Taken from a bus stop in Reykjavík. Graininess compliments of the by-today's-standards-super-low-res Olympus I had at the time. I'd completely forgotten about that camera until I looked at the EXIF data for this shot. (Full set of Iceland photos on Flickr.)

* Better word for this s.v.p.?

crowd sourcing my weekend

I'm in New York City until mid-afternoon Sunday. Save for checking out the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MOMA, doing a lot of walking (Urban Hike Sunday!), and taking a lot of photos I have no plans.

So. What should I do? I've seen next to none of the city. General travel likes: bookstores, coffee shops, architecture, modern design, neighbourhoods, public transit, things I can't get / see / experience at home. General travel dislikes: large flocks of tourists, standing in line.

Best suggestion wins a thank-you postcard!

photos from paris & london

Finally have the photos from Paris and London online. I really like how this set, from Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at the Tate Modern turned out. (Flickr)

the new year

New Years Eve was bottles of champagne carried through cobblestone streets. Old friends and new friends. Good food. Good wine. Crowds of foreigners huddled against the rain under the Eiffel Tower. Ducking amature fireworks on the Champ de Mars. Text messages bouncing across the ocean.

New Years Day was waking as others went to bed to walk empty streets. Drinking coffee across from Roman Baths. Not settling on resolutions. Lazing instead. Dinner with a dog that looked like a cartoon.

Now, to decide what to do on the last day before I head across the Channel for part two...