2014 through the lens of my iPhone...

Like most of us now, I'm almost never without my camera-that-also-makes-phone-calls. So--some of this year's scenic mobile-photography highlights, from the Desert Southwest to NE Asia, Chicago and the Cascades...

 The first light of the year, spilling into the Grand Canyon; sunrise on January 1st, 2014:

 The year began with a mini road-trip--up to the Grand Canyon and then over to Santa Fe:

(so honored that this photo was included in

"The 100 Best iPhone Photos of 2014")

Paris Las Vegas. So weird.

As spring arrives in the Arizona,
     mountain snowmelt turns the lower desert green--
          in the Santa Catalina foothills:

...and the deserts bloom;

     for miles, globemallow carpeted the ground to the west of Phoenix:

...and late spring brings out the saguaro-bouquets:

Summer found us in South Korea,

traveling around the country for a month.

This was my fifth trip there,

but even the familiar can be framed by the unexpected:

In Seoul's Itaewon district, on a Friday afternoon,

you'd be forgiven for mistaking the streetscape

for a Middle-Eastern scene--Hallal groceries 

surrounding a hilltop mosque--

globalization and migration patterns... 

 Languid summer mornings along the river in Jeonju:

A four-hundred-year-old lecture hall in a Confucian academy, still used for classes:

 Back in Seoul, inside architect Zaha Hadid's newly opened Dongdaemun Design Plaza:

 ...like a spaceship on the outside, eh?

Looking down on Seoul's old South Gate--the view from our room on a one-night hotel splurge:

Facing the hills, in Busan's Gamcheon district:

Over to Ulleungdo island--the most beautiful island you've never heard of, off the east coast of Korea: a lush, vertical volcanic landscape rising out of Siberian and Japanese currents, rich in seafood and medicinal mountain vegetables, splendid isolation, and hardy smiles. Very few non-Koreans make it here; GO NOW before the government's "Mysterious Island" campaign draws too much attention to this rugged wonder.


...and we got to stay here:

 ...and 'the unintentional poetry of an old brick wall,' in the port of Mokpo, on Korea's SW tip:

--featured on http://www.iphoneographycentral.com/apps-uncovered-1-august-2014/
     For this scene, I used the PerspectiveCorrect app to straighten the bricks’ vertical lines a bit, and then Snapseed’s “details” option to bring out the wall’s texture.

     Earlier this summer, I spent a month traveling around South Korea, and toward end of my stay, I decided to spend a couple of days in the city of Mokpo, a port on the SW tip of the country–one section of the country that I had never before visited. The old center of the city is full of architecture from the Japanese Colonial period (1910-1945), some of it being preserved, but lots of it in varying degrees of photographically-interesting decrepitude. It was an incredibly muggy afternoon, and after a morning of hiking, I had just finished a lunch of the local specialty, octopus soup, when I walked past this wall around the corner from the restaurant. 

     I was immediately struck by how aesthetically pleasing the proportions of the differently colored sections of brick and tile were–pleasing, and yet completely unintentional: the outline of what once had been a staircase, the weeds growing luxuriantly in what had once been an adjacent building… What gets built, what gets torn down, what gets left behind, what is deliberate versus what is spontaneous–so much goes into building a city, into deciding how to relate the history of a place, into considering what’s worth keeping and commemorating or what should be forgotten…

     Korea’s 20th-century history has been such a fast-paced combination of painful humiliation followed by dizzying, breathtaking modernization; the seaside city of Mokpo illustrates all of that in such a compact space, and this particular wall, to me, seemed emblematic of it all. Three days later, I flew back to the U.S.

Back to Southern Arizona, escaping the summer's triple-digit heat by spending some time up on Mount Lemmon--almost alpine, with wildflowers, evergreens, and a ski-lift:

Just after Labor Day, a few days up in Seattle, with a day-hike up on Mt. Rainier:

And a week in Chicago in October:

I thought it would just be gimmicky, but I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed the glass-floored "Ledge" on top of the Willis Tower:

And back to Tucson for the remainder of the year.

As cliché as they might be considered,

desert sunsets just never get old...

This fall, Hipstamatic came out with its TinType app...

     great tool for portraits--fun with making faces:

...and what it looks like here NOW

'Fall'-color peaking late here in Tucson;

December in Sabino Canyon is glorious...

=============================

Five weeks ago, today, I had the trail-'incident' that has exiled me from running.

Most of the last few weeks, I've felt like this:

'jailed' by my crutches...

(but having fun with the XNview PhotoFX app)

Time has passed, physical therapy is coming along,

and I finally got the okay to retire the crutches.

So, this past weekend I tried a short hike...

...back on the same trail where I had the bad fall.

Not often you see this--

the exposed 'cacto-skeleton'

of a decaying prickly pear,

covered in lacy ice crystals:

Just behind the little dam in lower Sabino Canyon:

The Santa Catalina Mountains...



Hoping to run around these hills again soon...

After a month of running around Korea...

Today marks two weeks--already?--that I've been back in Tucson.

From late May through most of June, my wife and I were HERE:

(during the trip, I posted to traveling-allophile.tumblr.com)

It's taken me almost two weeks to get over the wicked East Asia-West Coast US jet-lag...

Finally, I'm sleeping 'normally' enough so that I can wake up and beat the summer desert heat by going for early morning runs...

...and running has become something I make sure to do whenever traveling. Last summer, I took advantage of my jet-lag by going for a long run along the Canal St.-Martin in Paris when I couldn't sleep on my first day back in France. This summer, upon our arrival in Korea, somehow we were able to 'switch' to the local time zone immediately; we flew in late at night, went straight from the airport to a nearby hotel, and the next morning, I found myself running along a saltwater canal in the 'instant city' of Songdo, built on land re-claimed from the sea across the harbor from Incheon airport:

Jet-lag is inevitable, and it might work in your 'favor' or not;

whatever the case--RUN!

It's one of the best ways to get over travel fatigue while at the same time getting the true feet-on-the-ground feel of a place.

A few other scenes from running around Korea...

====================================

Running along the top edge of Seoul's remaining old city wall,

just north of the Bukchon neighborhood,

on the slopes of Bugaksan mountain:

Down along Chong-gye-cheon stream, 

beneath the skyscrapers of downtown's Jongno district:

Along poppy-lined vegetable gardens in Gangneung:

...on the sandy boardwalk along the country's east coast in Gangneung:

By the remaining fortified gate in Jeonju, in the country's Southwest:

Crossing the Jeonju river on an idyllic morning:

===============================

So, back to Songdo, on that first morning.

Large parts of the city--Korea's gamble on establishing a brand-new international business hub for NE Asia--are still vacant lots, as I saw when I opened the curtains from our tenth-floor hotel room:

The morning was foggy, but by later in the day, this was the view:

--the elegant bridge that links the Incheon airport to the new city of Songdo..

The city is 'filling in' nicely, with families moving into these apartment buildings:

No shortage of modern angles and curves:

...along with the requisite public art:

The city is scheduled to host this September's Asian Games, so as I ran through the "Central Park" area, there was a lot of construction work and tidying-up still going on... 

Songdo is being developed as a planned modern Asian city that is consciously adapting what works in cities around the world: New York's Central Park, Venetian canals, Savannah's numerous neighborhood squares, along with incredible wifi connectivity. It's supposed to be a "smart city," with live-work-play pedestrian access.

A BBC article recently reported:

The waste disposal system is also impressive - or it would be if you could see it. Because there are no rubbish trucks trawling the streets or vast bins dotted around blocks of flats. Instead, all household waste is sucked directly from individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste processing centres, where it's automatically sorted, deodorised and treated to be kinder to the environment. 

Not bad, eh?

Some investors are hoping that part of Songdo's growth will come from Western expats who are growing tired of the pollution in China and will come settle here. Hmm. (I read that in this recent article from France's LeFigaro.)

Among the multitude of newly planted trees, there is also a plethora of public exercise equipment, traditional Korean shade-pavilions, and even a phone-booth-sized public library:

Get tired of straining your eyes by reading on your smart phone or tablet while on your lunch break? Ahh, the tactile pleasure of paper in your hands...

And there's the subway--gleaming, all polished granite and marble--feels vaguely post-apocalyptic, hardly a soul in sight:

But you can be in central Seoul in an hour, avoiding the traffic jams above ground.

That's what my wife did, after our first day in Korea--we took the subway from Songdo into the capital, an easy ride...

=====================

Running around Korea, then...

...in the weeks to come, I'll post more specifics about the remaining running routes:

mountain, stream, and river runs in Seoul, 

along the coast and around a lake in Gangneung,

and through a 'hanok village' and along the river in Jeonju.

Yours truly, running...and it's not a selfie...

More on this later.