I have sorted through and chosen the winners of my orient post card project!
read below for the best entrants.
you’re a winner? if I haven’t contacted you yet feel free to email me your address so that I can send you your prize!
post card one:
horrorvictorianorum:
“Hmm. Snippets of conversation with Alex’s young tour guide, I presume? Alex ate meat in China, but he’s normally a vegetarian. That probably inspired his young friend to ask him about why he didn’t eat meat at home. Vegetable-flavored chips are ironic given his inability to succeed at vegetarianism in China.”
what it really meant: the entrant’s caption was almost entirely spot on, everything except the vegatable flavored chips. they weren’t meant to be ironic, I just thought they were funny looking.
post card two:
hunsonisgroovy:
You’re at the Temple of Heaven and that’s where all this is located??????????????????????????????????/
what it really meant: this was the closest to correct caption. one of the images is the temple of heaven, the others are near the lama temple and my underwear in the backyard of one of the homes that I stayed at.
post card three:
hunsonisgroovy:
You took the S2 Line (Train) to get to Badaling (The most visited location of the Great Wall)
what it really meant: that is badaling, however I drove there, mostly sleeping along the way. good job.
post card four:
Kam:
The ochanomizu train in Japan near tokyo, a shinto temple and a buddist among the greenery. Surely, Alex felt this man’s life worth recording, the modern clothes out of place with the ancient expressions of robed pious men, now moving away from animal walk in lifesize bullets called trains.
Everywhere the flowers will bloom, like the days following Hiroshima’s atomic demise. There bleeding flowers and green bandages covered the angry red wounded Earth scattered with shadow people and melted flesh. Beauty among destruction is one reason we can go on, but alas Alex thought it was just a balanced composition.
what it really meant: I was actually in atsugi, near hon-atsugi or atsugi station in kanagawa, japan (I had mentioned this on my twitter). the buddist is actually one of my japanese friends who takes care of me while I’m there. his name is akira and he and his wife are practically my asian grandparents. the flowers were just pretty.
post card five:
Kam:
faces differentiate one moment from the next, but the same moment is united in the digital record. Alex wanted to make a face, and so did she, to keep us wondering what they may have really been thinking.
Everywhere the forces of life creates a sensation that emerges in something bigger than a smile ~ it happens over and over,and we haven’t named it… yet.
what it really meant: these pictures came from disney sea in tokyo. whenever I got tired of speaking japanese or we had language barriers we’d just make funny faces at each other instead. language barriers and differences in culture are never reasons to not have fun.
post card six:
Kam:
Pollen makes me sneeze and I can’t get a steady picture.
what it really meant: I was actually at the hakone volcano (owakuzawa) which is a crater that emits poisonous hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. while these emissions were not poisonous enough to hurt you they did smell like shit thus the mask. at this crater there are eggs you can purchase which have been boiled in the pollueted hot springs along the mountain. why does this matter? I’m very allergic to boiled eggs, even the smell (ask my mom, its true). my host parents knew this yet didn’t think about it when they took me to the boiled black egg capitol of the world. thankfully I didn’t get very sick and managed to snap these snazzy pictures instead.
grand prize winner
post card seven:
karenabad - winner of a holga camera
“No big deal, just cruising around with my friends.”
Best travel memory - Driving from Michigan to California with my mom, after I graduated from college and standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, not giving a fuck what the future had in store. Everything was okay and nothing mattered.
what it really meant: honestly, in all my years of studying japanese culture I had never encounted a bushel of children being carted in front of me. obviously its a way to contain and transport a whole class of kids which really makes sense when you think about it.
I enjoyed this travel memory because it was the most enlightening of all the memories I received. it talked about how it effected the entrant, not what they saw or what they did, more of what the place did to them. this is always what happens to me when I travel, I love to see the world differently and let new places, people, and ideas better shape me.
thank you everyone who entered this project! cheers!
