Welcome to TigerSalad
I built this website for sharing pictures, sounds and writing about travel, cooking, music or anything else I think is worth documenting. I wanted to have somewhere to do this without the distraction and noise of popular social media. Please take your time here: read, look at the pictures and listen to the sounds.
I have been a professional chef for most of my life and for the last decade I have been studying Korean food, language and culture. I have traveled to Korea many times to eat, explore and practice language. Cooking posts will mostly focus here.
There are a lot of pictures in these articles. Good photos are important to me so I have sacrificed some loading speed in order to post the highest quality photos my host site will allow. Please be patient while things load up. This site will work on your phone but, I recommend looking at it on a bigger screen. This is especially true for travel and photography posts. The site will look better and operate faster on a laptop or desktop.
I am always happy to hear from you so please leave comments, ask questions or start discussions if you like. It is the only way that I know you have been here. If you like what you see, please subscribe. I promise to never share your email with anyone and only send updates occasionally about new posts.
p.s. to leave comments, click on the title of specific posts and scroll to the bottom
Amsterdam
Bicycle Kingdom
The first thing you learn as a tourist in Amsterdam is to watch out for bicycles. Bicycles have unconditional right of way in this city, followed by public transportation then pedestrians and lastly, cars. There is a strong and well established bike culture here with separate bike roads running along every single street and bridge and park. There are bikes everywhere. Everyone rides. And FAST! So, if you should walk across a bike road without having a good look both ways, you will cause an accident. In 2 days here I have seen near accidents a few times already. Usually an unsuspecting tourist wanders into a bike lane and gets yelled at if they are lucky or run over if not. With locals, it is understood that bikes go first.
Canals and Bridges
Amsterdam has around 165 canals with a total length of around 75km. And, there are over 1500 bridges crossing the canal systems to keep people moving over the water.
Central Amsterdam Buildings
Although all of the buildings have unique details and architecture they all share a few similarities. Most are quite narrow and tall with big windows and very steep staircases. There are no tall buildings here. The tallest of these houses is probably four stories plus a small attic.
Old and New
With it’s narrow streets and bridges, tight corners and swarms of bicycles, there is no room for large cars. Instead there are lots of interesting tiny vehicles (many electric) that you do not typically see in SUV obsessed North America.
Travelling Partners:
I am lucky to be travelling around the city with my good friend and his parents (who have no issues with walking non-stop 20km/day) …as long as there is a coffee and snack break here and there : )
Rain, Sun, Rain
The weather here changes FAST. It can be roasting and sunny for 10 minutes and then it clouds over and pours rain for 10 minutes. And then back to blue skies just as fast. It has been raining quite a lot with grey and gloomy skies so it has been a little challenging getting any good pictures.
Our Apartment
Public Transportation
There is a well organized and user friendly system of subways, trains, trams and busses running between every point you can imagine. Amsterdam is a very easy city to explore on foot or by train.
First Impressions of Amsterdam
Amsterdam is a clean, efficient and functional city. There are people EVERYWHERE : pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. It is a busy and crowded place. But, it all seems to work. There are almost no traffic lights here but everything runs smoothly. The Dutch like to hustle along and they are good at it. Cyclists, pedestrians, cars, and trams all weave in and around each other through intersections at top speed and everyone seems to know and respect the system. It is a little dizzying but also awesome to watch during the rush hour.
Even though it is so busy, it is also very quiet. There are very few private cars in the city centre as there is very little reason or incentive to drive here. Bicycles outnumber cars by a huge margin. The city is noticeably quiet and the air is noticeably fresh and clean. Many cars are electric and the government has even mandated that all boats using the canal system must have electric engines within the next 2 years. Blasting music out of your store or boat is against the law. Police boats on the canal make sure that everyone complies with the rules.
The overall effect is that central Amsterdam is a city where people can enjoy being outdoors together with almost zero noise or air or water pollution. I can spend hours walking through crowds on busy streets in the centre of the city and still come home feeling relaxed and refreshed.
More to come…
Excerpts from the Circular File #1
The Circular File Cabinet
As a teenager, I had a job in a photography shop. Sometimes when we were organizing the office, I would come across piles of old invoices or memos. When I asked my manager how to deal with them, he would often say to put them in the “circular file” which meant the garbage can. At the time, I thought that was really funny and I still think of it when I am chucking paper in the trash. What you are about to read below is rescued from the “circular file” on my computer.
A Writing Exercise
My parents had several Czechoslovak friends who immigrated here with them and ended up driving taxi cabs. Even my dad drove a cab for a while. When I was little, I overheard quite a few stories about the passengers they picked up (only the most wholesome ones of course..I can’t imagine the stories my parents heard after i went to bed!).
Some time ago, I was in the middle of writing a long story in which a main character immigrates to Canada from the former Czechoslovakia and becomes a taxi driver in Toronto. At the time, I thought it would be useful to write a few little vignettes about possible passengers, just to get my mind into the space of the taxi cab. I tried to imagine a collection of different people my main character Jaro might pick up and how, in a short space of time, they could change the way he sees the world in some small way.
I ended up with a handful of them which I will post up on here from time to time. They are not really a part of the bigger work, just fun exercises. None of them are the real stories that I heard as a little kid. All these characters and events are fictional and any resemblance to real people and events is coincidental (as they say).
Jaro is the taxi drivers name in my story. In Czech, “j” makes a “y” sound. So, to pronounce it correctly in English, you would say Yaro. This is a very common male Slavic name.
Jaro’s Taxi Fares: The Translator
Jaro picks her up in front of the Fairfield Hotel on Bloor Street West. She pulls open the door, tosses her bag inside and jumps into the back.
“Hi” she says in a big voice, her round eyes beaming at Jaro in the rear view mirror. “Going to the airport, no rush so please drive easy. I don’t have a good stomach for fast car rides” Jaro obliges, trying to be gentle with the accelerator as they pull out into traffic.
“I don’t spend a lot of time in cars back home you see?”
Jaro asks about her home country and finds out that she is Sorosian. Jaro thinks for a minute and replies that he is not too familiar with Soros.
“Not surprised” she answers. He asks her if she knows Czechoslovakia.
“Sure thing…thrown together from parts of the the Hapsburg Empire after the first world war, occupied by commies after 1968, Velvet Revolution in 1989, Velvet divorce in the early 90s… Now the porn capital of Eastern Europe! Velvet PUSSY! HAHAHA!“ Jaro is slightly offended but also impressed. He laughs. She isn’t wrong.
She explains that she is here for a consultation on a James Welter novel she is in the middle of translating.
“To be honest, I didn’t need a consultation. I just made that up to get a free ride here. I have always wanted to visit Canada” she admitted. “I just write whatever I want anyways! HAHAHA!” she laughed maniacally.
“What do you mean?” Jaro asked.
“Well, the government of Soros is paying for translations of English novels into Soro to promote the language and keep it alive. Part of an Indigenous Language and Culture Preservation Program. There are about twenty-four thousand Sorosians left and less than half can speak the language…just the parents and grandparents mostly. The kids just want to speak English and watch Korean dramas.” Jaro nods in the front seat.
“Welter’s bullshit mystery novels seem to be popular everywhere so that’s why I got this assignment. The Sorosian government wants to translate these kinds of easy readers and then promote them in local bookstores and libraries. They hope that the kids might pick them up and read them in their native language”. Jaro keeps quiet as he takes a gentle right turn.
“But I’ll tell you that there isn’t one Sorosian interested in a Canadian mystery novel set in a quiet prairie town. Myself included. So when I get bored I just make up whatever I want. No one will EVER notice.”
“You really do this?” Jaro asks.
“Sure! Like when Detective McCall is staking out the town library waiting for the Deauville Gang to break in and steal the Group of Seven painting?…I got so bored…I made McCall stake out a highway strip club instead. He gets bored and goes into the club, gets drunk on Seagrams 7, gets a lap dance and a HAND JOB! HAHAHA!” Jaro flushes a little at the language coming from this small well dressed academic.
“Welter can’t read it and no Sorosian will read that shit either!’ And certainly no one will read it in both languages and compare. So I am free to entertain myself while I get paid! HAHAHA”. Jaro chuckles.
“Anyways, I probably improved the book and I really just came here to see the snow. It doesn’t snow in Soros but I LOVE snow. There is nothing more beautiful to me. That’s why I came in winter. I spent the last couple of days near Collingwood. Lots of snow. Do you like winter?” Jaro was always surprised to find another winter lover, especially from a warm country. He replied that winter was his favourite season apart from the city driving and that he especially liked the sound snow made under his boots.
“I have travelled all over the place looking for snow and the best is Japan. The snowiest country in the world is Japan” said the translator.
“Japan” Jaro repeats as he eases on the brakes.
“Yes! Isn’t it surprising? For every centimeter of snow you get here, they get a meter. There are towering walls of snow along the roadways”. Jaro imagines an earthquake and what would happen to those snow walls on the highway…always imagining things from behind the steering wheel.
“If you really love winter, go to Hokkaido in January. I could die happy there”. Jaro replies that he is not sure if he will ever get to Japan.
“If you love winter, if you love snow, you should try to go…I went to translate a volume of Soseki Haiku and never wanted to leave. Do you know Haiku? Short poems, 17 syllables, nature? Absolute murder to translate into Soro but I did my best. They are just gorgeous, no embellishment needed. Definitely no handjob Haiku!! HAHAHA!” Jaro chuckled again and shifted in his seat a little.
“I love poetry the most. Novels are just so much noise and repetitive storytelling sometimes. All ego. Not poetry and definitely not Haiku.”
She pulled a small notebook out of her bag and opened it on her lap. She was silent for the rest of the ride. Jaro liked her sense of humour and her crazy laugh. He drove quietly hoping she would pipe up again but she seemed to be absorbed in her notes. When they arrived at Terminal 3, he pulled to the curb and walked around the car to let her out. She snatched up her bag and bounced out of the back seat.
“It was a pleasure meeting you Velvet snow man…I hope you take my advice”. Jaro laughed and said he would think about it. Just before she turned to go, she handed him a neatly folded page from her notebook.
“5-7-5” she said. Then she skipped off into the terminal building. Jaro got back in the cab, unfolded the paper and read:
If I disappear
Come find me here in winter
Snow white Hokkaido
He counted the syllables on his fingers as he read it two more times. 5-7-5. It was beautiful. He would think about it. He tucked the paper under the elastic band on his sun visor and drove away.
Natural Spotlighting
***your phone will crush all the details in these photos. It is better to view this on a bigger screen***
Facing East
Every morning I make coffee and then sit at an old table to study or write. My cat hops up, curls into a ball, and sleeps beside me while I work and listen to chill music. This is my favourite time of day. At the opposite end of the room there are a few tall and narrow windows that let in the bright morning sun. This warm light filters in through the trees, slowly circles the room, and then gradually disappears. This scene changes a little bit every day and every season brings a new variation. I never get tired of looking at it. In the picture below, you can see what I see on a summer morning…
Natural Spotlighting
I began to notice moments when a ray of morning sun would pass through gaps between leaves and illuminate some small part of the room as if to say: “look at this!”. Whatever it touched would glow in this focused light. It reminded me of a spotlight on a dark stage, but made of sunlight. It was kind of a natural spotlight. I wondered if there was some way to capture this in a photograph. I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be easy.
Technical Difficulties
When I set out to make these photos, I decided that I wouldn’t move things into a spot of light. The scenes would just have to happen on their own and it was my job to notice them and to try to capture them with my camera.
One problem was that the weather had to provide hard contrast between areas of light and shade. All of the photos below had to be taken from a shady area pierced by a strong beam of bright sunlight. Less than a big-blue-sky sunny day wouldn’t work for any of these pictures.
The bigger problem was getting my camera to see what I was seeing in my imagination. It took hundreds of photos and nearly two months to figure it out. The main subject is intensely lit, but because the photos are shot on very bright days, even the shade is full of light, So, if I exposed the spotlit subject accurately, the background would still creep into the photo.
Most of the problem was solved when I experimented with severely underexposing all of the shots (like 2 to 3 stops of underexposure!). This caused the shadows to fade to black and, as a bonus, added rich colour saturation to the main subject. This underexposure usually worked to produce the photos that I was imagining.
The Photographs
What John Irving said…
I once read an interview with the novelist John Irving where he said that his approach to writing is to start with the ending and then figure out how to get there. That’s where the hard work is. My approach to some photography projects is similar. I start with a specific mental image of a finished photograph and then figure out how to work with natural light and the camera to get there. This is never easy but I usually end of with something unique, something I haven’t seen before. If you are interested in seeing a couple of older photo projects that came about in the same spirit as this one, have a look here and here.
The images above are simple but making them was a challenge and I am happy with the way they turned out. I don’t do any photo editing other than some slight cropping sometimes. I try to get the photos that I want directly out of the camera. It’s not that i think that there is anything wrong with post-processing. It is just a different kind of photography and I don’t enjoy doing it.
I hope you liked these photos. If you have any questions or comments or if you know the names of any of the plants up above, please feel free to leave a message in the space below. I always look forward to hearing from you.
If you enjoy the content and would like to contribute towards website maintenance and development, you can make a donation here. Thank you for reading TigerSalad.