So that I wouldn't have to spend New Year's and Christmas alone in Spain, my Mom and Sister flew out to see me and Sara. To make a trip of it, we spent four days, including New Year's Eve, in Paris.

This picture was taken at dusk from the view of the restaurant on the second floor inside the Louvre. For those of you who are planning on one day visiting this remarkable place: Don't eat here!

It's not that the food was bad or anything but it was such a colossal waste of time. All we wanted was to order a couple drinks because we had been wandering around Paris all day and needed some coffees and water.

However, inside the Louvre you must be in one of the dining areas, you can't be walking around with drinks. So we had to wait in line for a table to open up (almost an hour), wait for our waiter to come by, to give us menus, ask for our order, give us the bill, etc (another hour).

We spent nearly five hours at the Louvre, two of those just trying to get a drink. Heed my warning, stop before you get to the museum. It's not worth the money or the time that you could be spending seeing all of the amazing work.

Having said that, we did happen to get a great view over the courtyard and this beautiful picture.

In the final days of 2010, I moved out to Los Angeles with my girlfriend, Sara. She was going to be studying at UCLA, but I, however, had nothing waiting for me; no job, no friends, no family. All I could count on was her... and the weather.

On one of those typically beautiful LA days we decided to walk by the coast in Santa Monica. This picture was taken just off Ocean Drive, in a spot where so many people spend their time staring out over the cliff and the beach toward the horizon. Instead, I decided to look up, and found something just as beautiful and interesting. I  felt such a rush of optimism from seeing such large living things reaching toward infinity.

The sky is not their limit.

Coincidentally, after two months of searching, I landed a job in Santa Monica, not too far away from these very trees.

 

When I first moved into my apartment in Bilbao I lived with the owner, a Spaniard and his Spanish girlfriend, two Polish guys, and a girl who was studying abroad from the Czech Republic.

It wouldn’t have been such a bad living situation if not for the six of us sharing three bedrooms and one bathroom -Side Note-

That may have been the worst shower in the world. Yes the world. I know there are people out there that don’t have a shower or don’t have hot water, or a private place to shower and all kinds of horrible things, but then I wouldn’t constitute those as ”real” showers. This was a “real” shower in a “real” (expensive) apartment that had little pressure and little heat.

One handle controlled both the heat and pressure but the catch was you couldn’t have both. So you could take a hot shower, but it would just be a trickle, or have the water blasting down on you, but at frigid temperatures.

It was like trying to configure a Rubik's Cube just to put the nozzle in the right position to get the most of both without compromising too much of either.

On top of that, the shower head was in the middle of the tub, so you couldn’t stretch your body across the tub and still enjoy the water. No, you had to stand there scrunched under the water in fear of moving because if you did your body would escape the little warmth it could find from that small splash of water.

And if things weren’t bad enough, there wasn’t a full shower curtain, but two pieces of two different ones that hung around the sides of the shower, but unfortunately never met. So unless you used a clothes pin to close the gap, water would flood all over the floor. Needless to say, most of of the walls and ceilings were covered in mold. -End of rant-

 Later the Eastern European’s moved out and a mellow hippy from San Francisco moved in, followed by a dashing Frenchman. When it comes to roommates, you win some and you lose some - people probably thought of me as the loser since I nearly burnt down the whole apartment when I left some oil burning on the stove, and usually left unwashed dishes in the sink - but none of that mattered, because after a 10 minute walk from my front door I would have this magnificent view of the Guggenheim.

We’ll start my story here, in Bilbao.

Not many people in the US are aware of the big shipping capital located on the Northern coast of Spain. I wasn’t either until my first year of college when I was introduced to Frank Gehry in an architecture class I was taking.

I was mesmerized by one of his works, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, in which he had transformed what appeared to be crumpled up metal into the shape of a ship.

Upon further discovery, I realized that the museum sat on the bank of a river, nestled within the mountains, just a few miles away from the beach and ocean. Right then I was drawn in and decided I would find a way to visit that place some day.

Little did I know that in just a few year’s time I would be living in an apartment around the corner from that amazing structure.