Adventures of Isabel

Jakarta’s 800-year-old port. Still a working cargo port, Sunda Kelapa only allows piring, traditional two-masted sailing ships.

Cargo is still loaded manually. Interestingly (though not terribly surprisingly) most of the workers in the port and on the ships are Bugis — the seafaring ethnic group that earned notoriety in the English language as “Bogeymen.”

I felt [...]

Still in California, Still Alive.
There’s just something about grad school that kills my urge to write.

But I’ll be traveling a lot in the upcoming months. A research trip to DC in November, a short family visit to Utah in early December, and then an indefinite relocation to Southeast Asia. So here’s hoping life gets [...]

I had a chance to escape from the office for a few hours yesterday and accompany friends from Voice of Human Rights Media to Klender, a kampung in East Jakarta. They were shooting footage for a documentary about efforts to provide kampung youth with basic legal training to protect themselves and their neighbors against [...]

I can write stories.
I can take pictures.
Sometimes, I can even write stories and take pictures simultaneously.
But I can not write stories, take pictures and keep track of a lens cap all at the same time.
(And don’t say ‘just use a UV filter.’  Because then I would just say:  I can not write stories, take pictures [...]

Gado-Gado vendor in BenHil, Jakarta. On a heated stone, he mixes together peanut, citrus, sugar, chili, and your choice of vegetables, rice cakes, tofu and tempeh to make a delicious lunch.

Hallway of a Rumah Kost in Tebet, Jakarta.

So, one of my photographs was the lead image on MotherJones.com today. Cool, right? Except they didn’t pay me, ask me, or even notify me. I just followed the incoming link from my flickr account and saw it up there.

Legally, they were well within their rights. Mother Jones is a non-profit news [...]

Real Estate Tax Collectors office, Embaba, Giza.

Utah may be a bit lacking in street life, but you can almost forget when faced with sights like these:

View a flickr slideshow of images from Utah.
*note to self: polarizing filter is great for snow/water/sky scenes, but next time clean it off better/more frequently.*