Greetings,
I’ve spent much of this week in sunny Florida. Now that I’m back in cold, windy Chicagoland, I kind of miss it already.
Unfortunately, I just fell victim to a well known phenomenon in which people who vacationed to a foreign land ended up unable to stop raving about how good that place is.1 Usually, the topic of this adulation is Japan or some European country. But for me, someone who spent the last 14-years in the Northeast2, it’s Florida:
Maybe it’s the Indonesian in me pining for some tropical weather, but I miss the Sunshine State already. It certainly has some pizzaz, or at least Orlando does. I can see it almost as soon as I landed in the Orlando International Airport.
Of course, I’m aware that I was hanging around the tourist trap area of Central Florida3, so I’m sure I was only seeing what the people in charge wanted me to see. Indeed, when I’m not spending time at the hotel, I was at the theme parks. To be more specific: SeaWorld and Discovery Cove.
That’s right, I didn’t go to Disney World. Because if I’m gonna spend some cash for a photo op in Orlando, I’d rather do it with a dolphin instead of a guy in an overgrown mouse costume.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6112e1e-1856-4c5e-aba8-2e3261cefaa6_2992x2000.jpeg)
And even as I was on my way back home, I still found some surprises.
Yes, I’m aware that every large airport probably have its own chapel. But I’ve worked at Dulles Airport for years and have traveled out of it many times and I’ve never found the chapel. Sure, it’s not like I went out of my way to look for it. But I found Orlando’s airport chapel by complete accident.
Readers may notice that I haven’t shown any pictures from SeaWorld, and only one from Discovery Cove. That’s because I put them on Flickr. Check them out here:
As I implied in a previous post, I like photography. I don’t claim to be an expert or a professional, but it has been a passion of mine. A photo album on Flickr is the first thing I’ve ever put on the Internet. I wanted to add to that collection, so I spent the last two days doing just that:
I had a lot of fun in SeaWorld and Discovery Cove. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same about uploading the pictures and videos to Flickr. Since I took these pictures with my phone, I had to transfer them to my computer. Some photos I e-mailed, but most of them I used WhatsApp in which I started a private group consisting of only myself, then I posted the pictures there, then I used the web feature of WhatsApp to download the pictures to my computer, and then I uploaded them to Flickr.
Yes, it was as tedious as it sounds.
I wish I could use the Flickr App on the phone to upload these pictures, but Flickr decided that being able to upload your picture straight from the phone is a good way to sell their Pro membership.
And you know what? It’s kind of working. I’m seriously considering doing it just to make uploading future pictures less of a hassle. Not any time soon, though. There’s not enough justification for it.
Until next time, Michael P. Marpaung
Is there a name for that?
And a few months in Illinois.
Home of Disney World.