I Like Bike

Posted on June 4, 2012

If Jenn-Chen.com was set to music, the soundtrack would be an eternal loop of sad trombones. As you can tell from the lack of posts, my grand plan to blog every weekday failed epically. I couldn’t squeeze out more than two measly posts last week. Two! Pitiful. I’m going to try posting daily again this week, though, and every week thereafter until I get it right. Or until my brain melts. Whichever comes first.

Blogging fails aside, last week was a good one. Unexpectedly busy, but good, with the chief distraction being my new bike. Yes, I got a bike! I’ve always envied the bike crowd here in San Francisco, but was too chicken to try city cycling until recently. After riding around with friends on borrowed bikes, though, I’ve found that riding with cars isn’t that scary, and decided to snap up a bike I’d been eyeing. My new bike is a 3-speed Schwinn commuter (pictured above), and was wildly discounted on it being a 2011 model. My roommate Julie and I named it Schwinny the Pooh. (Runner up: Schwinny Cooper.)

I’ve never owned a “serious bike” — you know, one that your parents didn’t buy for you at Walmart so you can ride around the 10 blocks in your neighborhood — so this weekend was spent studying up on bike anatomy, learning the city streets, and figuring out what equipment I need. I’ve already secured the essentials — a helmet, lock, and lights — and have been making a little list of doodads I want to gradually acquire. Key word being “gradually,” so I don’t break my bank account.

Like I said, I’m very much a newbie still, so please throw any bike recs or advice my way! Anyway, that’s all for now. Maybe we’ll meet again tomorrow?

BIKE: Schwinn 2011 Coffee 3-speed Commuter from City Grounds
1. Billykirk No. 211 Bike Pouch from Billykirk
2. Nixon watch from ASOS, since my iPhone will be tucked away
3. Tsumori Chisato sandals from La Garçonne
4. Bern Lenox in Matte Turquoise from Amazon
5. Unsexy man-briefs-resembling bike shorts from Walmart
6. ABUS 1200 Chain Combo Lock from Public Bikes to better prevent saddle theft
7. Crank Brothers’ Multi-5 Tool from Adeline Adeline
8. Origin-8 brass bell from Adeline Adeline
9. Basil wicker basket from Adeline Adeline for my rear rack

Categories: LIFE

Tagged: ,

Something Old, Something New

Posted on May 30, 2012


Sometimes I can’t tell if unexpected posts are the result of a deft and dexterous imagination, or my total inability to follow through with my own plans. Anyway, this post is one of those posts. When I first opened Photoshop, I meant to create a collage of floral finds, but noticed how these two kept inching towards each other in all my drafts and fell a little in love with how they looked side-by-side. Don’t they look nice together?

On the left is a corner of English painter Albert Joseph Moore’s Red Berries, and to its right is a shot from Ukrainian designer Masha Reva‘s 2012 collection. Something about their colors and their shared botanical excess, airy garments, and soft, undulating background shapes, just makes them so well matched. I might even go as far to say that I love them more when they’re together than apart.

I discovered Moore and his languid, booby-lady goodness on Tumblr a while ago, and Reva only recently on Pinterest, which are two platforms that I’m finding are too easy to be lazy on. I am a repinning queen, a serial reblogger, a baby hoarder of images — images that are interesting and beautiful but are honestly somewhat meaningless unless I do something about them. I consume and I consume and can almost trick myself into thinking I’m being creative even though I’m not. Hopefully, blogging daily will help me sort out what’s meaningful in my online collections. I’m pushing myself to remember the following mantra: creation after consumption, and action on top of appreciation. Or, as interwebs sage Wasted Rita once said: “Less Inspiration, More Self-Creation.”

Categories: ODDS 'N' ENDS

Tagged:

Get Ready

Posted on May 29, 2012

It has been six weeks since you and I met like this, and I do not feel the slightest bit guilty. Nope. Not even a twinge.

Much of my remorselessness rests on the knowledge that my blogging hiatus hasn’t really deprived you of anything. (If anything, this is something you do not need. Why aren’t you watching the news instead, or calling your mother? Really, guys.) The remainder of this non-apology can be attributed to my needing time away to do some important things.

Here is a list of those important things: slack off, freak out at how sloppy this blog looks and create a style guide and editorial schedule, think about writing, mull over turning 25 in a few weeks, cry and confront my troubled long-distance relationship, and find calm in unexpected people and places so that I feel clearheaded enough to do something crazy. Like decide that I will blog every weekday… starting today.

I know this blog can be way more than what it is now, from the level of writing to the quality of design, and there is a lot more that I’d like to write about. I realized recently that there are stories — ones buried five to ten years deep — that I would like to tell. I would like to write about my family. I would like to write about writing. I would like to write about that fleeting, secret period of my life where I was somewhat internet famous. (Oh yes, that story is a weird one.)

Having known myself for 25 long years, chances are I’ll fail this self-inflated blogging challenge within a week. Possibly by Wednesday. But I also think that I can really do this. I am hopeful, jittery, clearheaded, and desperate, like a runner poised at the starting line of a high stakes race. I am ready, I am ready.

Categories: LIFE

Tagged:

Imaginary Outfit: The Great Indoors

Posted on April 14, 2012

If you’ve ever tried making last-minute evening plans with me, you’ll know that if I’m already at home and in my PJs, it’s virtually impossible to make me budge. I am a homebody at heart, and love nights spent indoors. Your offers of beer and friend-of-a-friend parties do not tempt me; I am not wearing pants, and am happy as a clam. So, this Imaginary Outfit is a salute to all those nights padding around the house in sweats, indulging in snack-packed movie marathons with friends, and sliding into bed at the cool hour of 11 p.m.

(Wait, but why would I be wearing a giant pendant necklace or $245 knit shorts? You forget, this is an Imaginary Outfit. None of my Imaginary Outfits make much sense.)

1. Helmut Lang angora sweater from La Garçonne
2. VPL bra from La Garçonne
3. Alexander Wang jacquard shorts from La Garçonne
4. Nebra necklace from highly recommended indie designer Laura Lombardi
5. Vintage glasses. Source unknown. Help! :(
6. Heavenly-smelling Sabon body scrub, originally gifted from Lee
7. Micro Magno Radio from Areaware

Categories: FASHION

Tagged:

Magical Places

Posted on April 10, 2012
  • Aodi-cover
  • Aodi-coast
  • Aodi-fishermen
  • Aodi-boats
  • Aodi-burn
  • Aodi-outfit
  • Aodi-abandonedboat
  • Aodi-field
  • Aodi-keyswall

This post is not so much a travel recap as it is a nostalgia-fueled slog through my feelings. Just laying it out there, so you don’t boohoo about getting jipped in the comments. You have been warned. This is your warning! This post is like a big festival for my feelings. And the party starts on the northern coast of Taiwan, in a little fishing village called Aodi.

After a week of city living in Taipei, my parents, Jake, and I took a day trip to Aodi, where all us Chens spent their childhood summers, and where my grandparents still keep a house. Aodi is a little over an hour away from Taipei. To get there, you have to drive east out of the city, through smaller cities and mountain tunnels until you hit the coast. The northeastern coastline is one of my favorite sights in the world. Unlike the white sand beaches at the southern tip of the island, this coast is dark and dense, with prehistoric slabs of gray rock, black-blue waters, and deep green mountains. There’s even an active volcano off the coastline, emerging out of the water, to look at it. If you can see all this, you’re not far from Aodi.

Before they retired and moved to the city, my grandparents lived in a three-story building overlooking the sea. They built it in the ’70s, with my grandfather’s boat motor shop claiming the ground level, and the living quarters above. The last time I’d been in Aodi was seven years ago, so it was with equal enthusiasm that Jake and I set out to explore every corner of the house.

A marbled mint foyer marks the start of the house, which would be humdrum if not for my grandparents’ bizarro tastes. My dad’s boyhood room has navy and fuchsia window panes. The stairwell leading to the third floor is decorated with sprays of fake flowers. The living room ceiling belongs in a discotheque. As Jake and I squinted at the glittering, upside-down flowers blossoming across the ceiling, my mom informed us that beyond having it custom-made, my grandparents used to hide gold in the ceiling.

We spent the afternoon searching for relics from my childhood. I showed Jake the cabinet that my cousin and I used to hide tiny frogs in, in hopes of scaring my grandma. We watched fishermen weigh and box freshly caught fish — Jake snapped a photo of a fat, orange fish that was as big as a cat and still covered in saltwater and fish slime. I showed him the burned-down boat yard where I went on my first fishing boat ride, and the road where street vendors used to sell kids glass bottles of pop and light-up toys out of crates and cardboard boxes.

There was one place we really wanted to find, which was the site of a tide pool my father brought my cousins and I to one summer. I remember the pool water being so clear you could see everything — fish, crabs, sea urchins, starfish, sea anemone. My dad taught us the local names for all the creatures in the pool, and even scooped out a sea cucumber for us to hold. We may have taken it home for my grandmother to cook. Jake loved the story, so we set out to locate it. We searched hard, but never found it.

Walking back to the house, Jake told me — not unkindly — that Aodi must have felt big and magical to a kid, and that when you’re younger, you can be oblivious to how run-down things actually are. I said there was no offense taken, and that I agreed. I didn’t tell him that it still felt magical.

Categories: LIFE, TRAVELS

Tagged: , ,

Travel Diary: Shanghai and Beijing

Posted on March 21, 2012
  • Travel Diary: Shanghai and Beijing
  • The view of Shanghai from Jake's thirty-first floor apartment.
  • Bits and pieces of The Bund -- the Monument to the People's Heroes, the usual tourists, and the murals at the base of the Monument.
  • The view of Pudong from The Bund.
  • A bride-to-be and her posse on their way to snap bridal photos in front of the Pudong skyline.
  • The Bund at night. Such a great, history-rich collection of buildings.
  • Dragons bumpin' whiskers at Shanghai's centuries-old Yuyuan Garden, where Jake and I spent a rainy afternoon.
  • A lonely bike parked outside a Shanghai park.
  • Colorful tchotchkes
  • Skewered (and still-twitching) scorpions, starfish, and seahorses at Beijing's famous Wangfujing Snack Street.
  • Trying grilled seahorse, one of the more benign kabob options at Wangfujing. Photo by Jake Spring.
  • Tiananmen, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace
  • The Forbidden City
  • Our trusty guide, Lonely Planet.
  • The Great Wall
  • On the left, a colorful bundle of tourists in one of the lower Wall walkways. On the right, incriminating evidence of a teeny detour we took to a collapsed, prohibited section of the Wall. Nothing like standing on ancient ruins!
  • Pretty mountains along the Mutianyu section of the Wall.
  • Tobogganing down the Great Wall! (No lie, they have a toboggan ride station. Best thing ever.)

Are you there, internet? It’s me, Jenn, and I’m back from my half-month East Asia vacation!

Normally, at this point, I would say that it feels so gosh darn good to be back, but I’m so jetlagged that the only emotion I’ve felt for the past few days is bleary-eyed confusion. If you hooked my brain up to an electronic marquee, the scrolling text would just read, “WHAT IS THIS WHERE AM I WHAT IS HAPPENING” on loop. I can’t blame my body for clinging to China time, though. Those were two great weeks.

I arrived in Shanghai on a Friday afternoon, which is where Boyfriend Jake is now doing his business reporter thing. We spent the first week wandering around Shanghai, and then hit up Beijing before jetting over to Taiwan, where I played tour guide (which will be its own blog post). I wasn’t sure what to expect from China — this was my first time there, despite having lived across the strait in Taiwan for six years as a teenager — and found a lot that made my head spin, in good, bad, and neutral ways. Definite highlights, though, include seeing my good friend Dan (he of “About” page fame), nighttime strolls down The Bund, finding a vintage Polaroid shop in one of Shanghai’s old foreign concessions, riding a sleeper train across the country, tobogganing down the Great Wall!!, and eating everything in sight. Photos of some of those things, above.

Because my time-addled brain currently cannot handle creating CSS caption styles for my new blog theme, please hover over the photos for accompanying captions. I know, I’m a sham blogger. I’ll fix it soon, promise. But for now, hover!

Categories: LIFE, TRAVELS

Tagged: ,

And Off We Go

Posted on February 26, 2012

A slightly romanticized view of my travel essentials. In it, we've got my Poketo planner, sunglasses, moisturizer, reading material, water bottle, wallet, and card holder.

Hi, hi, hi. It’s been a while, I know. I just haven’t been home much lately. And when I am, I’m too exhausted to do anything. Two weeks of impromptu, 24-hour travel-a-thons — Disneyland, then Atlanta for a wedding — have left me wiped and off-kilter, but in the best way. I am tired, happy, and sated. You know how Disneyland went, and I’m happy to say that Atlanta was wonderful too. I mean, just look at these wedding photos. Do those not look like adorable good times?

This weekend, thankfully, will be a tame one. As much as I’ve enjoyed travel binging, I know my limits. Also, I am three episodes behind on 30 Rock, which is unacceptable. So, this weekend is all about staying home and doing all the normal person things I’ve been willfully avoiding for two weeks. Laundry, taxes, cleaning, and preparing to hit the road again for my big Asia trip that kicks off… in less than a week (eep!). The thought of packing for a half-month trip sends waves of dread rolling over me, but, so it goes. Wish me luck, guys.

Categories: LIFE, TRAVELS
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.