Using about 500,000 tiny twinkling lights, Bellevue Botanical Garden once again were transformed into a winter wonderland in the evening.  It was absolutely beautiful…it would be more if there weren’t so many people and so many cars.  I was looking for my favorite Northwest creature, Willie the Slug (Yeah, right!), but couldn’t find it.  Still, it was a great festival and tradition here on the Eastside.

Thanks to Charissa, who will get married next March near Pasadena, Hellen and Peter also commissioned me as their wedding photographer later next year. In fact, Hellen will be one of Charissa’s bridesmaids. So I am very excited to be able to meet Hellen and Peter at Charissa’s wedding. And then we will shoot the engagement session the next day in that area. It’s going to be shoot, shoot, shoot, and fun, fun, and fun! Got to carry with me more cards for sure. I think I will get several 8GB cards to just make things simple.

Thanks again, Charissa!

Merry Christmas!

We had a great time in the Bahamas, overall, but there was an incident that made us kind of speechless…

We were inside the Atlantis resort and I wanted to photograph the aquarium so my wife and son stayed at a shallow, children’s lagoon with nice beach.  It was relatively late in the afternoon and there were a few people sitting around in the chairs.

Later I came back and my wife told me the following:

They played on the beach and on the way to their chair, my son Anton started getting cranky and made a lot of noise.  The guy sat in front of them jumped off his chair and yelled at my wife ‘Why can’t you sit somewhere else?!  We are trying to get some quite time and you had to site right behind us?!’  And then he offered ‘Stupid Asians!’    My wife was like ‘Excuse me?’ and the man said ‘You heard me!’  At this point, my wife was almost speechless, but she was able to offer it back to the man “May God bless your soul and consciousness for the rest of your life!”

The man and his companies had already left when I came back.  Then other people overheard the exchanges came around and said sorry we had to hear about it.  One woman said it bugged her so much she couldn’t read.

I guess we had been too naive.  Race is still an issue.  We just don’t see it until a guy who couldn’t afford a private beach got upset about an Asian boy.

A former bride, Marissa, left a phone message and she talked about the big flood happened last week in Washington state. I had no clue that it was very bad…fortunately for us, we were in the Bahamas enjoying a comfortable 80 degree weather and drinking their local beer Kalik and having a Conch salad.

To like it or not, the Atlantis resort was huge. As a family, we really like the aquarium…The Dig.  It was supposed to be the biggest in the world. Nassau, the capital, was interesting. The traffic was bad and of course you had to constantly remind yourself: left, left!