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Showing posts from January, 2008

"My Fair Lady" in Kennedy Center

Having watched (and stunned by) Audrey Hepburn 's film version of "My Fair Lady" , I felt it almost irresistible to catch the latest revival of this amazing musical . "My Fair Lady" is unique in so many ways. For starters, it's not a love story. One of the most genius things about it, I think, is that the male lead barely sings, in a musical! And after ten minutes or so you watch it, you would fully understand why: Because Professor Higgins was a man who enjoyed solitude, who never gave away affection, let alone love. Singing would be too emotional for him so he would only speak in rhythm. To balance the professor's emotionlessness, the show has a flower girl-turned fair lady, who is both interesting and elegant. There is no "bad guy" in this show, only tension and conflict between the leading actor and actress. The conflict between them is as old as the human beings itself: the conflict between sexes. That warrants its universal appeal. No ma

Double Diamond! - Encore

Wall of Trail Maps Originally uploaded by yisu1979 Three years ago, I started to collect the trail maps of the ski resorts I visited and put them on the wall of our dinning room. To this day, all four sides of them are full. If you've been to our apartment, you would surely remember it.

Double Diamond! - II

Learning from the lesson last time, I asked for an 8.5 shoes this time and the skis were still 150cm. We got our rental gears from Blue Valley Ski again. At the Base of Arapahoe Basin Originally uploaded by yisu1979 , courtesy of Yinyin We started pretty early considering we had a big group. A-Basin located in a high-altitude area so at the top of the mountain, there were no trees. Because we had half beginners and half intermediates, we split group into two. I was, of course, in the intermediate group and before long, we picked up where we had left last year. By the end of the second day, four of us intermediates almost finished the whole skiable area: A-Basin was too small for us. Two of us even tried a rather difficult diamond trail. So we decided to bite the bullet of a $86/day lift ticket and tried our newly improved skills at the Breckenridge . (Now in case you don't know what the "double diamond" means: Ski trails are labeled with their difficulties so th

Double Diamond! - I

Despite the grueling memory of my last Christmas ski trip , I booked the same trip this year. It was almost "courageous" of me to do so, as one of my friends put it. But it wasn't easy this time, either. Our flight was delayed, as usual. Then after we boarded the plane, we were asked to unload it for a mechanic problem. So we were delayed even more. By the time we reached our hotel in Denver, it was already 2am! Fortunately our bad luck ended there. We got a rental car of Jeep Patriot , which was very nice vehicle for the mountain roads of Colorado. Skyscraper Originally uploaded by yisu1979 The next morning we had a few hours to spend in Denver downtown before we drove to our vacation house. We wasted no time to go directly to the famous 16th Street. Castle-like Building Originally uploaded by yisu1979 Walking on the street was enjoyable even in winter. There were interesting buildings to see. Building Originally uploaded by yisu1979 On the