Blue Bottle Coffee Co. Oakland

Blue Bottle Coffee is one of the most well know coffee in San Francisco. Having Oakland as the location for their headquarter and for being known for their excellent coffee, it's not surprising that they are pretty popular in this hipster town. I've seen their products here and there, spread across different locations in the Bay Area, but never actually go to their coffee shop.

And so, my mom and I decided to check the place out during one of our outings. We went to the Webster Street location in Oakland. They decided to use a restored brick warehouse and converted it to a cafe with an on-site roastery. The place was pretty busy when I was there. Half of the people coming in were grabbing their take-out coffees and pastries, and the other half stayed in the cafe to do meetings, work, or reading. Per usual, I tried their hot chocolate and decided to try their waffle as well. The hot chocolate runs a little bit on the bitter side, which I don't mind, and the waffle was delicious. The space has plenty of lights, high ceilings, marble tables, and tiled floors. Perfect space for a working, chllin' or if you want to get that perfect hipster shot of your coffee ;)

p.s: currently editing my cafe hopping pics when I was in San Francisco. More coffee shop posts coming up soon.

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Kanekin Community Photowalk

This past weekend, I had the chance to join the first photowalk hosted by Kanekin for their Kanekin Community members. The venue of choice was Kota Tua, also known as Old Batavia, a neighborhood where old historic buildings of Jakarta are located at. It's a pretty popular tourist (and photo) spot for tourists as well as the locals. We arrived at the place around 9 AM on a Saturday morning and the square was already packed with people. Families with children, students who are on some kind of group trips, couples who are on their dating outings, and of course all the people who are selling their goods and performing arts were spread all across the complex. We managed to walked around the area, visited the Bank Indonesia Museum and found couple of cool spots for shooting. 

Colorful grungy walls with interesting textures was probably the one thing that attracted my attention the most from this area. I ended up taking mostly portraits on this trip, recruiting help from my friends and some of the new people I met from the meet. So sharing with you some of my favorite shots from the day, here they are.

And if you happen to live in Jakarta, interested in the art & design community and want to join the next photowalk, you can join the Kanekin Community by signing up on their website. Who knows, maybe we can bump into each other on their next meet up! :)

Hope everybody had a great weekend! 

Special thanks to everybody who made these shots happened:
(in order of appearance) @gilbertrhezap @joshuasudihman @ellenwinarta @lydiaoey @luckyaldry @jochristian @cindy.octaviany

p.s: click on vertical images to see full-size/larger version.

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Brown Sugar Kitchen

After living in Seoul for almost a year, one of the things that I missed from the States is a good American breakfast with perfectly cooked runny eggs on the side. I didn't realize that I've been taking runny eggs for granted when I was still living there. Mainly because there are a good number of places that can cook 'em the way I like it that I can easily go to when I'm craving 'em. But turned out, it is something that I rarely encountered in Seoul for some reasons. The places I went to mostly overcooked their eggs, so I didn't get to taste those thick runny yolks very often. (Prolly need to go for a runny eggs finding mission next time :P)

Anyways, after an 11-hours flight and waking up too early because of the jet lag, going for a good American breakfast sounds like an excellent idea. Went to go try Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland and their breakfast was delicious. Plus their poached eggs were perfect! For my next visit, I think I'm gonna have to try their famous buttermilk fried chicken & cornmeal waffle cos everybody seemed to ordered that menu item ;)

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Do Stuff

Two good friends of mine launched their own Youtube channel today and I couldn't be any happier for them. I've been so excited and looking forward to this since the day they shared their ideas and showed me the sneak peek to their first video. Now that they have officially launched their channel, I got to finally watched the whole video of their Budapest trip and it is beautifully done. The cinematography is on point.

For those of you who are interested in going places, trying things, and doing stuff, check out Soo Zee & Leigh's new channel Do Stuff on Youtube!

Now I think I gotta go watch that Wes Anderson's movie. 

And oh, hope everybody had a great Valentine's day! :)

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Royal Guard Changing Ceremony

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this ceremony was "the royal guards sure have a really cool uniform". My eyes were feasting on the colors of fabrics that the guards were wearing. I mean, how can you not, really? Plus they have really cool hats, flags, weapons, and musical instruments too. There are two royal guard changing ceremonies that you see in Seoul, one in Gyeongbokgung Palace (경복궁), and the other one at Deoksugung Palace (덕수궁), which is the one I went to. The ceremony itself took about 20 minutes or so, consisting of the guards marching out of the gate bearing flags and playing traditional musical instruments, the exchange of guards, and the final march accompanied by the traditional musical instruments once again. I would probably recommend checking this ceremony out at least once because it's pretty interesting. Since it's a scheduled ceremony, you can check out the time to see it here before coming to Deoksugung Palace.

Fun fact: I had to get pretty close to the guards to get the low-angle shot and when the head guard saw me squatting in front of him, he stared directly at my camera for a good minute without blinking. He's so cool for being a good sport about it. 

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