A while back, Cherise and I went to Philadelphia. A while back, as in, er, last Thanksgiving. Between the great flood, moving, and going to India, I never really got a chance to post these. Until now.

We checked out a place called Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens. The pictures will tell the story better than I can describe it, but this place is insane. Basically, a few decades ago an artist bought a block of buildings, and has spent the time since turning it into an extremely intricate, highly decorated mosaic. Imagine if a pile of glass, tile, wood, mechanical and metal rubbish exploded over freshly plastered church ruins, and you start to have an idea of what this place looks like. Not an inch is spared- allow me to show you.

I decided that I was going to bring Cherise back some kind of black pearl jewellery as a gift from India. Hyderabad is something of a world center in pearl commerce: around 90% of the world’s pearls pass through Hyderabad at some point. You might find this odd for a city that’s nowhere near the ocean, and you’d be correct. It’s pretty damn weird. From what I understand, it has little to do with geography and more to do with historically cheap pearl processing labour. That’s right. Hundreds of years ago, pearl processing was outsourced to India.

On our trip up to San Jose over New Year’s, I gave Cherise a bit of a tour of my high school years at Bellarmine. I decided to swing by the infamous locale of many a Bell story (yet I doubt without anyone having actually visited), the Pink Poodle strip club, about five minutes away from our school. Here’s Cherise in front of the place.

I’ll be leaving for India this Saturday… leaving India on the 21st for Hong Kong, and leaving Hong Kong on the 24th, back to good ol’ Sunny So Cal.