Back to Noe Valley

I'm happy to announce that in a month we'll be moving back to Noe Valley!

I'm very excited about it for several reasons:

(1) About half of my closest friends in San Francisco live in Noe Valley, within 10-minute walk from my new place! I cannot wait to be able to invite them over for spontaneous dinner/brunch/cake/coffee.

(2) Noe Valley is awesome and it has the best bakery in San Francisco.

(3) Our new place is awesome - it's an extremely well-kept, modern two-bedroom apartment with a garage, storage, small yard, washer, dryer, stainless steal appliances in the large eat-in kitchen, large bedrooms, and a nice living room overlooking the yard. Also our new landlords seem really cool, and taking into account how much time and effort they invest into choosing the right tenants I'm having high hopes that our new neighbors will be really nice too.  

(4) My first home in San Francisco was in Noe Valley and I have extremely fond memories of that time in my life. I also met the love of my life while I lived there.

Well, it seems that the history makes a full circle, and soon my love and I'll be back to Noe Valley - just one-and-a-half blocks away from the first place I had there.

News in Pictures

BBC News in Pictures published one of my photos online:

That was a nice surprise at the end of a long and crazy day. We're looking for a new place to rent in the Bay Area, and it' quite a challenge I have to tell you! But I'll write more about it once we conclude our search.

Bodie - a Ghost Town

Once, Bodie was a thriving town of 10'000. Today it's a photogenic ghost town preserved for the benefit of visitors from all over the world.

The town is named for Waterman S. Body (William Bodey), who had discovered gold in the nearby hills. It took just two years after the gold discovery to transform a town of a few dozen into a town of thousands. It was a typical Western town: with as many bordellos as citizens and with gunfights happening on a daily basis. And as quickly as the town grew in size after the gold discovery, that quickly it decreased in size after the gold reserves were over. 

Today, nobody lives there. But the town is not dead. Its past glory is both protected by California State Parks Foundation and immortalized on film by thousands of visitors.   

Only a small percentage of buildings that once stood in Bodie has survived to our times, but the ones that did are amazingly well-preserved, or as the park rangers say are preserved in a state of "arrested decay." The town's old-thyme charm and beautiful California's weather make for a photographer's dream.