Beautiful Day Photography’s Weblog

The FIRST day Rob and I ACTUALLY got to relax on the entire trip, happened to be the LAST day of our trip. I felt so bad, Rob wanted to stay an extra day here SO bad! We LOVED Portugal and didn’t want to leave. The wine tasting, dinners, wedding and now pool party, AND the fact that both my sister and her husband are actually now a “Couple of Leisure”…or in America called “Unemployed”, made it just FUN overload! Everyone just throughout the day just stumbled into the party. We had a yummy brunch and EVERYONE was super excited to see a reappearance of the cheese and desserts leftover from the night before. I sat on a lawn chair and took occasional photos. Honestly, I LOVE MY JOB!:) IF you want to see more photos of this “day of leisure”and the wedding the night before just click on this link!

Oh look its “The Twins” and Elizabeth is actually SMILING!!! I have proof!

Photo proof of Marisa’s domestic instincts….perhaps CHILDREN in the future??:)

The obvious winners of the chicken fighting in the pool; the cute little boy that stole Rob’s hat and was flirting with me in the pool…Watch out Robert!…And of course, Raul the groom’s, GRAND ENTRANCE into the pool via cannonball!

The town that we flew into is called Porto and it is in the North country of Portugal. My sister Marisa and her husband, Cedric, rented a beetle convertible to drive all over the countryside Port wine tasting and sightseeing the day before the wedding. We found out that Port wine is called Port, because it started in Northern Portugal and was mainly shipped out of Porto, so they named it Port. They have COMPLETELY different grapes that are only grown in this region and nowhere else in the world; grapes I had never heard of before. Only recently have their port wines been exported (since 1996) and usually only throughout Europe, so it’s next to IMPOSSIBLE to get these wines in the US.

The Douro Valley was SO beautiful and we had the most BIZARRE weather, from sunny and hot, to raining, to cold and windy, to the clouds breaking and a rainbow. It was magical either way you looked at it and PERFECT for the day, but we were constantly putting our convertible top up and down throughout the day. Our first stop was this 16th century palace that was part of and still IS part of the Portuguese Royal family. They had these insane gardens straight out of Alice in Wonderland and antique art and furniture from ALL over the world. We went on a tour throughout the house and in their chapel attached they had a REAL saint relic…The bones of St. Michael and people pilgrimage there to see them.

We then went to Quinta De la Rosa and tasted all types of ports and wines. I tried White Port for the first time. I didn’t even know White Port existed. People drink it as an aperitif and it’s SO good. I bought a bottle. The “quintas” are like little bed and breakfasts all over the wine country that are also port wineries. There are HUNDREDS of quintas all over the region and you can just pop in anytime to go wine tasting. It was SO wonderful. I then got super excited, because the wedding reception and place we were staying the next night was at Quinta da Vista Alegre ( Or House of the Happy View)…so I WAS happy to be at another Quinta the next day!

That night my other sister, Elizabeth, joined us all for an amazing dinner at “Sesenta Setenta”. It was SUCH a hidden secret, that our cab barely made it down the alleyway through the medieval town to get us there. The other cab we took didn’t even know it existed! We were so stunned by this gorgeous building and how you truly felt like you were in another world. We were treated like kings at this restaurant since we were a referral from the Sheraton (the nicest hotel in town) and we had the chef come out and talk to us and ate (for the second night in a row) an AMAZING meal! I will never forget that place! The ENTIRE day was one of the best I have had in a while.  It was SO fun to be with my two sisters, my brother-in-law and Robert (whom they had JUST met for the first time on this trip) and just have such an awesome adventure.  We all had a blast!

When we FIRST arrived in Porto, within minutes I did the most STUPID thing I think I have EVER done while traveling. I left my purse in the airport bathroom with BOTH Rob and my passports, wallets, cell phones, credit cards, all cash, jewelry and just about ANYTHING that you would deem important! We went ALL the way to our hotel a half an hour away until I realized when I tried to pay and my purse was not there what had happened. Although there was a slight language barrier, our cab driver at least understood my Spanish, he understood how F-ed we were and went like mach 10 back to the airport. Rob did not speak one word to me and I was praying to my travel guardian angel and I went back to the airport, convinced the cops to let me back through security and it was GONE. I almost had a nervous breakdown, until another guard came over and said something was turned in. He took me over to the police station and SURE enough there it was!! EVERYTHING was in it too! It was a miracle, saved the trip, and gave me JUST a little more hope in humanity that there really ARE good people out there. I would have done the same thing, so I was PRAYING for my karma to kick in and it did. The weather was pretty miserable that night, but it did not stop us from having one of the most fun nights we had on the trip. I think it was, because it was the first night we had ALONE without family and we weren’t feeling completely jetlagged. We were excited for a nice dinner out and to be on our OWN schedule.

The bride to be Diana told us to go to the old part of the city called Ribeira (translated into Riviera) because it is on a river. It was built almost 1000 years ago and the original city wall is there and it used to be the entrance into the city FROM the river through the wall. Back then they had warehouses and shops inside of the wall and today is not much different. Instead they have AMAZING restaurants in the walls and as you can see in the photo below, people INSIDE of the wall eating dinner through the glass. It’s deceiving how thick the wall is. The restaurant inside went back like 30 feet in! While going to the bathroom I discovered a hidden tunnel that connected some of the shops from the original wall… so cool and creepy! The ENTIRE old section of the city was a maze of these interconnected alleyways and staircases. I couldn’t living there you truly felt like you were back in time hundreds of years!

While we were waiting for a table at dinner, Rob saw these boys playing soccer in one of alleyways, so he joined for a while. They were trying to shoot in this tunnel as a goal, so they let me take a shot….I ended up missing and blasting this drainpipe at full speed ripping it off the wall. The owner of the house opened the door and sneered at the boys and then slammed the door shut. The boys (who didn’t speak any English) were like, “No problem, no problem” to me. It was REALLY funny…We both ran like scared little kids LOL! Here is a picture of his Portuguese soccer team;)

While at dinner at a restaurant in the wall called Don Tonhio’s, we went outside to check out the view of the river at night and met a whole group of Russians. They invited us to join them at their table and ordered expensive cognac and champagne. They were Hotelier’s that are working with a Portuguese furniture design company for their new hotel opening up in Moscow called “Garden Ring”. Only one guy knew a little English, but we managed to somehow communicate. It was SO funny, because all they knew how to say was “Barrack Obama”. So every time we toasted, we all toasted to Barrack Obama and every time they didn’t know how to express something or a word for something they would substitute the word with “Barrack Obama”…It was SO hilarious. At one point this Russian guy Michael was trying to express that in life family and relationships are more important than money and having “loving relations” as much as possible is the key to a happy life…It came out like this, “Have Barrack Obama EVERY NIGHT…Every night Barrack Obama…You be Happy”. If only Barrack could see that he was the language barrier link and that his name could mean SO many different things…LOL

On our last day in Holland, we stopped by Haarlem to visit Rob’s first cousin Linda (one of Henny’s daughters). She’s a doctor and VERY sweet. We all ate at this little cafe in Rob’s mom’s corner, we called it. Apparently, it’s her favorite table to sit at. I have NO idea why Rob can’t look at a camera and smile, but SO is the curse of a photographer I guess:) As most of you know, New York used to be called “New Amsterdam ” because of it’s first Dutch Settlers. A lot of the really old parts of NY show their architecture and narrow side streets, but ALSO many parts have copied Dutch city names…like Haarlem or Harlem in the US. Like most medieval cities, the skyline is completely dominated by their cathedral and the city is built like a wheel around the church, it’s center. Today there are many more tall buildings, but the church STILL dwarfs everything else around it. It was AMAZING.

This was a random art exhibit next to the Cathedral called “Size Doesn’t Matter”. It was an art installation of tires. My response was like, ” It’s so simple and gritty, yet clean and structured. The smell of rubber dominates the exhibit” . Rob’s response was, “These are all new, good tires, he could sell these after the exhibit”…Oh, how we differ:)

Rob, since I got rid of my Myspace account, now approves of my Blogging incessantly:) He is constantly taking photos of me shooting AND just in everyday life and he’ll say “That’s a Blog photo!” I’m SO proud of him joining the 21st century!! So during this ENTIRE trip he has been taking “Blog Photos” of me. I don’t know if ANYONE else out there has a collection of as many hideous, embarrassing photos of themselves as I do now, but that’s why you have to be careful of what you wish for. I ALWAYS complain about never having photos of myself since I am ALWAYS the one taking the photos….Prayer answered…I guess. This one was actually a cute one though…SO it made the Blog:)

So once we went inside of the cathedral, the sheer height was awe -inspiring. The most famous organ in Europe is inside of this church, where Mozart and Handel once played. The organ is like 4 stories tall and someone was practicing it while we were there, adding a really eery feel to our visit. The acoustics were incredible though. So this random guy while we were in there was hitting on Rob’s cousin Linda and he asked us, “Do you want to see our Bone Cellar?” Not a normal question, coming from an even more abnormal guy, but of course I JUMPED at the chance…So he leads us into a dark corner and lifts up this HUGE slab of the floor and there are TONS of bones and skeletons inside…hundreds. Apparently back in the day people would buy their salvation by buying slabs in the church floor to be buried. It pretty much guaranteed you a ticket straight to heaven and of course only the rich could afford it. So they started “renting” grave spots in the church to people at a reduced rate. After 3 years, they would ask the family to pay more or move their bones OUT of the grave. Most couldn’t afford more, so the bones would be moved. Due to superstition in the church, they felt that if the bones were moved outside of the church , the person’s angry spirit would haunt them, so they just threw all of the bones in a “bone cellar” inside of the church somewhere to make room for the new grave. So we were witnessing centuries worth of dead people thrown in that cellar…..I guess the ones with cheap or broke families:)

I just wanted to show the old map of the city we found in Latin showing just how DOMINATING the church was in the skyline, as WELL as the sheer height of the ceiling…mind you the people in this picture are Dutch AND TALL as it is!

Ask Rob’s Aunt, I was obsessed with two things while in Holland. 1) I MUST see windmills and 2) I MUST go fishing. So Rob’s Cousin took us to the countryside to see a bunch of windmills. I didn’t realize that most of the world’s pigments for paint and clothing come from the grinding of pigments and earth done by these windmills, but ALSO, they have these HUGE flower farms all over the countryside. Apparently, flowers are one of Holland’s biggest exports. You just don’t think about flowers traveling that far to become an “I Love You” or “Please forgive me” message for someone else. Talk about a friendly peaceful country..Instead of Oil or Diamonds, they are trading paints and flowers…LOL

While walking around we saw a friendly Ram and Rob decided that he was the “Ram Whisperer” and jumped the fence to make friends with him. Although, NOT a smart thing to do OR a good influence on his little 11 year old cousin (since she jumped the fence too!) it worked out ok and the Ram was quite friendly.

I have NO idea what this sign says, but then again I experienced PLENTY of that while on this trip!

SO two other things happened that were amazing One: Rob was able to meet his 98 year old great aunt, that he had not seen since he was like 4 years old! It was a pretty special event and I HAVE to show it.

AND TWO: I went fishing and caught two fish! I have photo proof, but you will have to wait to see since they are on his Aunt’s camera…but they were HUGE!!!….actually they were like 3 inches long, but I was SO proud. I caught them on left-over bread from dinner AND in the rain. So Rob’s Uncle Keven felt bad and wanted me to have better bait the next day to catch better fish. I will NEVER forget the next day when I walked in and he handed me a bag of maggots as a gift! I didn’t know what to say. It came out something like ” Wow….. that is SO sweet. Um,… No one has ever bought me a bag of maggots before…..” LOL That’s up there on my gift list let me tell you..

One of the things I thought was incredible about this city is that MOST of its commuters are on bicycles. Holland is a very “Green” Eco-Friendly country. They recycle more than any other country and you won’t see trash or litter all over the streets like in London or New York. They have ferry’s to take pedestrians and bicycles across the bay and instead of parking lots, you see these HUGE Bicycle parking lots with like 30,000 or more bikes locked up at any given time. I HAD to take a photo to show it. Also you see bikes EVERYWHERE locked up on the side of the road like in this photo with his little cousin Silke.

While roaming the streets we saw a billboard illustrating Parkour (which is the sport where people run up walls and jump off roof tops and travel through an urban city). It started in Paris and they showed a whole fight scene using it in the last James Bond Movie…So we decided to do a fake Parkour Photo shoot. We ended up attracting a lot of attention and had little kids and people joining us LOL!

Robert and I decided to go to Amsterdam to visit his Dutch side of his family, because we did SO much while in London in two days (and not to mention the pound is SO expensive that two cups of coffee are like $15 in London), that we decided to see a new place I had never been to and to see his cousins that he hadn’t seen in almost 10 years!…how time flies. I figured that we would be spending the rest of our trip with my sisters in Portugal so why not? Amsterdam was awesome. They refer to it as the Venice of the North, because the entire city is on canals and most people get around by water taxi or boat and lining ALL of the canals are houseboats that are permanently parked there. Apparently these boats go for like 500,000 Euro’s and are considered prime real estate. It was TRULY bizarre, because they had mailboxes and some had yards on top of their boats that they actually mowed! and people would just be hanging out on their floating back porch, doing laundry and what not….SO crazy!

What I truly loved about Amsterdam right off was the amazing buildings. Below is an old palace right near the Van Gogh Museum that we went to (AMAZING) and I had this “vision” in my head to get a black and white shot of this building with all of these pigeons flying in front of it. So I recruited Rob to run through and scare the pigeons. These birds were SO stubborn and would not move that I had to make him run over and over and over, to the point that a policeman nearby yelled at him in Dutch and made him stop because he was annoying people…LOL… I got a shot, but not quite what I wanted. Pathetic actually, I think only 1 bird actually got scared by Rob’s antics

While we were in Amsterdam, we stayed in the nearby countryside with his Aunt Henny and Uncle Keven. They lived right on the canals, but in the countryside, so they were clean and had fish and birds. They also lived nearby Rob’s mom’s OTHER sister Ellie and er husband Bob and their children and grandchildren…so LOTS of cousins to visit. Most of them spoke decent English (THANK GOD, because Dutch is the HARDEST language to try to speak!) Dutch is easy to read if you know English you can figure out a lot, but forget trying to speak it I actually have a clip here if a futile attempt to try to say the word “razorblade” in Dutch. His little 11-year old second cousin, Silke, was SO patient trying to teach me words in Dutch as we were strolling around Amsterdam

After walking around ALL of Amsterdam, I took this funny photo of Silke while sitting at a cafe, which was the catalyst for a RIDICULOUS photoshoot that we did in the middle of the street in Amsterdam…She TRULY will be a performer one day, but it was funny to see the before and after or progression of our shoot…Rob made me jump in and I feel SO uncomfortable in front of the camera sometimes, but I took the opportunity to show off the sunflower ring that Rob bought me at the Van Gogh museum….Yep, we go to Europe and he buys me a ring! Not quite what the relatives hoped for though LOL

Later on when we didn’t have his 11 year-old cousin with us, we decided to roam through the famous Red Light District. I LOVE this photo of Rob, he looks so disturbed while standing next to the Prostitute Information Center. I want to point out the highlights through these photos…

This is the Cathedral from the 1500’s that is in the Center of the Red Light Prostitute district…SO bizarre to walk into the amazing cathedral and then walk out and see all of the sketchy people and business dealing going on around you. Women (who some were like my grandmother’s age) were half naked pressed up against the windows at like 2pm selling themselves. I didn’t know you couldn’t take photos and I learned the hard way…they FLIPPED out when I tried to take a photo. They will come out and take your camera if you try. Inside of the Cathedral was SO cool. Rembrandt’s wife Saskia was buried there and they had all of this construction going on inside, because while trying to repair the floor they discovered underneath an ENTIRE other older church…so they had all of these archaeologists come in to uncover the older church…Pretty amazing! The other bizarre photo of the distorted wood face is an example of these weird reliefs that are found underneath each seat of the choir section. They are all different and each tell a tale of woe to learn from. This one translates into: Two drunk men living under one roof. Each are bad and it doesn’t make what they do good”…or what we know as today as “Two wrongs don’t make a right”

Here is an old man that could be my Grandpa trying to buy a hooker in the middle of the day…UNBELIEVABLE

This is the famous BULLDOG Cafe where people are just smoking Marijuana everywhere (I had an apple pie and coffee NO LIE), but it was a very unique underground, funky cafe. They recently, like in LA, banned smoking cigarettes indoors in Amsterdam, BUT NOT WEED. How crazy is that? There were actual signs that said, “You can’t smoke cigarettes here, but we DO sell alternatives upstairs”…Mind you we are STILL in the Red Light district where they have these CRAZY narrow alleys and passageways like a maze through prostitute land

Rob and all of his cousins/family

Another weird thing…Kentucky Fried Chicken was EVERYWHERE here. More so than Mc Donald’s. The Dutch LOVE their Fried Chicken!!

Some of the crazy people that dress in costume in front of the palace for tourists..trying to earn a buck. It was interesting, because I didn’t see ONE homeless person, but a lot of people were playing music or just street performing for money all over the city, young and old. It made it more interesting when you were walking around.

Dinner at the cousin’s place with Rob’s mom’s two sister’s and their husbands. I felt like a midget yet again ( I think I was standing on a chair to take this shot!) Freakin Dutch Tall people!

On our recent trip to Europe, we had the SUPREME luxury of flying Business class. A previous bride of mine’s father works at United Airlines and as a tip offered to fly us on his First Class/Business standby anytime, anywhere in the world. Since having our rest was SUPER important before this wedding….we took him up on his offer. Here we are in Business class. I was like a 3rd grader on a field trip taking photos, because I was not only excited to be in Business and have TABLECLOTHS put down for our meals, but we were putting down unlimited Bloody Marys and playing cards, so I MAY have been a bit enibriated:)

We only spent a few days in London, since I used to live there abroad during college. I did a National Geaographic Understudy through Syracuse University when I was 19. It was like going down memory lane, but Rob had never been there…so we decided to do some touristy things…Like the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. I was actually VERY excited to go there, because when I lived there I never actually did it. Kind of like when you live in LA and have never done the Star Tour or something. It was considered too touristy and uncool when I lived there. But NOW since I have read “The Other Boleyn Girl” and I am slightly obsessed with the Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn saga, it was AMAZING to see where they lived and where she was imprisoned, beheaded, and buried…it was surreal actually..Not to mention they keep the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. The Star of Africa, the 536 Carat Diamond worth 500 million dollars was there. Pretty insane. Also, I don’t know if you guys know, but the British Monarchy has Royal Ravens! Yep, they keep 9 Ravens there and feed them and clip their wings, because of some old prophecy hundreds of years ago that said the days the Ravens fly away is the day Britain will Fall. Pretty funny. This wall below that I am leaning on (and Rob stole a rock from!! Bad Rob!) was from 200 AD. The Romans built it when their empire stretched out as far North as the UK and this wall surrounded the whole city. Only recently while constructing some underground Tube stops did they discover more parts of this ancient wall.

BUT, the REAL main reason that we stopped through London was that two of my sisters who are twins, live there. The wedding we had in Portugal was actually a referral through my sister Marisa, the one on the far right, so both of them would be traveling to Portugal with us…SO fun!! This is us in Cedric’s (my sister Marisa’s husband) convertible on the way to dinner in South Kensington, London. And the last photo is a shot of the outside of Marisa and Cedric’s new flat they bought in St. John’s Hill….which the locals refer to as “Nappy Valley” Nappy as in diapers in British, because there are SO many young moms in the area that you literally are run off the sidewalk by strollers and I think in one minute I counted 15 strollers that passed me while strolling through the outdoor markets there….CRAZY!