Activities so far

The shooting game I mentioned earlier went well. We went for range shooting instead, and tried a few guns. Can't remember all of them, I think we tried a few riffles, caliber and one M16.

The kick for one of the riffle was pretty big, my shoulder went numb after a few shots. They took a video out of it, and I am now a laughing stalk among the colleagues, cause the reaction I got from the kick was pretty large -- whole body reversed.

Anyway, I also went to Denver with the German colleague last Friday. It was a spontaneous decision, as I was very depressed over the workload that week, and he need someone to split the 9 hour driving. So we left Kansas 12 midnight Friday/Saturday.

Just to show you some pictures before and after we crossed the Kansas / Colorado border.

This is when we were still in Kansas. It was early morning, about 6am.

This is what we saw half an hour later, when entering Colorado.

The trip went well, it was really relaxing. There is nothing much than just lots of lots of beautiful sceneries. Where Kansas is empty flat plain land, Denver is hilly filled with mountains.

My colleague was determined to find a place over 3000m above sea level, he was rather disappointed on the first day, when the Long Peak in the Estes Park was closed for the winter. But we eventually found a spot around 3500m the next day when driving cross Boulder.

We chose most of the small roads, so it is pretty difficult to follow the map. It was good that he has a Nokia phone with GPS in it, but the GPS failed when we were deep in the mountains. So it relied solely on his sense of direction -- I, the vehicle navigator, had very little contribution there.

The mountains were very quiet and peaceful, when we got down the car in the middle of the mountain, we could only hear the snow falling. Even our breathing was too loud.

We drove back Sunday afternoon, reach home nearly midnight. It was tiring, but rewarding.

We both took our camera, and I only managed to have his copies yesterday. It is very interesting to see things through his lenses. For example, when I took a picture of the person with the scenery, I tend to put the person in the middle of the picture frame. But when he took a picture of me with the scenery, I was always a complimentary figure of the scenery -- appear at the side, or corner. And I thought it was nicer from his perspective.

Here is another example, when we stood on the same place, taking pictures of the same scenery:

The first one is his, second one mine.




See the difference? It is very interesting to find that there are more than just your way of viewing one scene. It kinda serve a reminder to myself, that I should always try to look from other people's perspective. You'll never know if you would find a better scenery through the other's lenses.

Anyway, it was his last day yesterday at the Kansas headquarter, he returned to Germany office this morning.