This is the last installment of my Christmas blog posts, with a grand finale in New York City!

This is the view we had at the remote place we stopped at for lunch. This is also pretty much the constant view on the road - green, hilly, incredible.

We got these weird grape-like fruits that Hera couldn't stop eating! They were really good and sweet but the skin was rough and Hera said the skin hurt her tongue...

Me on the big swing suspended in mid air! You can see the fog in the back that hindered our view.

Aaaand Hera's turn! (Actually, she went first.) She looks so tiny!

For lunch, we ended up going to a nearby hotel's cafe. The food was ridiculously overpriced even for American standards (let alone Ecuadorian standards) but the view was incredible. By this time the fog had cleared up, so the sun was shining and we could see the entire city in the valley below.

Ugh how can a place be so pretty??

More prettiness.

For the rest of the afternoon we ended up walking around the town and bought some candy and some fruit, as well as two bags of coffee beans (one for us, one for my friends). We noticed something interesting during our roaming - when we were buying fruit, one of the women at the stall was taking out the trash. Not five minutes later, the garbage truck had come and picked it up, and the woman was hauling the trash can back into the stall. This doesn't sound really notable, but we had noticed prior that all of the areas we had gone to - even the really poor areas in the Amazon - were really clean. That type of timing and on schedule-ness is pretty much nonexistent in America (yes, I'm thinking of you and your piled up garbage bags, New York City). I remember just feeling really impressed by it.

The last picture I got of Quito - everything is so colorful!

Our first day in New York was the 30th, and we spent it napping and recovering from our red eyes. For New Year's Eve, however, we went out to Times Square in the early afternoon to catch the 1pm show of Aladdin, on Broadway!

The view from Empire State!

Before I begin, this is a disclaimer that this blog post will probably end up being more of a photo montage of all the things.

The next stop of the Lu family's Ecuador adventure was the Amazon - the whole reason we went on this trip in the first place! We stayed at Yarina Ecolodge for three days. It's a small lodge located in the Amazon rainforest that's only accessible by boat from the nearest town, Coca, and has no wifi and electricity during a few hours of the day. At first, I thought that having no internet and no phone connection and no electricity was going to be quite awful, but it turns out we were waking up so early and were all so tired from our activities during the day that when we weren't exploring the area, we were dead asleep.

Yarina Ecolodge - we stayed in those little cabins, 2 people per cabin!

Yarina Ecolodge - this is the welcoming center and also where we ate our catered meals every day

We had a nature guide, Wintel, who spoke no English and knew we understood nothing he was saying (we also had a translator) but was a sweetheart and was so excited about everything he showed us. His enthusiasm was infectious, and we definitely wouldn't have learned and seen as much in the rainforest and taken away so much if it hadn't been for him and his stories. If you ever get the chance to go to Yarina, definitely ask for him!

This is Wintel! He's making Hera a little crown out of leaves.

With Wintel, we went on a couple hikes into the rainforest to look for animals - we saw LOTS of bugs (which were rather gross), birds (one made a laughing sound, which was hilarious), and tiny monkeys (which were adorable!) - and to learn about the foliage. Cue the photos:

This is the "Tree of Rain", notable because the fruit grows on the trunk and not the branches. Apparently the indigenous people in the Amazon believe that if you run around one of these 3 times and, on the last rotation, pick one of the fruits and throw it behind you and run away quickly, it will ward away tumors. They rather do look like tumors.

This is a type of mushroom that you can write on! The indigenous people use it as markers in order to not get lost.

This is the tarantula flower, named because its hairy.

These trees had roots that grew out like ribbons, so we started calling it the ribbon tree. Here's one, with Hera for size (she's 6).

On our night hike, I managed to get some pretty clear photos of bugs!

More bugs. We also saw spiders, but I opted out of taking photos (I really, really, really dislike spiders.)

Aaaand a cute little frog! This was one of quite a few that we saw that night.

During one of our hikes, Wintel brought us to a vine that had been fashioned into a makeshift swing. Yes - you're thinking right: I, and my family (although we didn't get a video of my mom, just know that she basically screamed for her life because she was rather scared), literally swung from vines like Tarzan. I'm cool, I know.

I have no idea what this fruit is called, but the little "seeds" shown are crushed and used as war paint.

This is a tree with a hole in it (the tree is still alive, too) and it's used to crush sugarcane - the juices flow down into the metal plate and then collected with a cup!

In case you ever wondered what coffee flowers looked like - this is what they look like.

Wintel made my dad and Hera little crowns out of leaves! Apparently these leaves are generally used to make skirts and roofs, and can last more than a decade with proper treatment.

Cacao!

Sorry for disappearing for a month - it was finals season, and straight after I was whisked away to Ecuador and the Amazon, where the connection was either spotty or nonexistent. No matter, now I have photos upon photos upon photos (and videos!) of my vacation and stories to tell!

A little backstory on why my family decided to go to Ecuador: my dad has wanted to go to the Amazon ever since I can remember. After probably what's been years and years of begging my mom, we finally decided to book the trip to Ecuador, near the source of the great river itself! We had no idea of what to expect - we were so unprepared that no one bothered to look up the currency of Ecuador until we had landed and we were waiting for my mom to finish renting the car.

Ecuador uses the U.S. Dollar as their national currency, in case anyone was curious. To be honest, I don't quite understand how that works, but it was very convenient to not have to exchange currencies and to be able to withdraw money from the atms (which had no withdrawal fee!).

We spent our first day in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, just exploring the city, trying out all of the exotic fruits, and eating chocolate. Since we didn't know where to go and how to get there, we asked our hotel for where to go and Google Maps for the way there. The drive there, while on rather bumpy and hilly roads, was breathtaking - the small, colorful Spanish-style houses, all huddled close together and climbing the hills, looked like layers and layers and layers of pixelated bright colors.

houses on houses on houses!

Our first stop was Mercado Artesanal La Mariscal, which was a large one-story complex of artisan stalls filled with woven fabrics and leather goods and weird foods and exotic fruits and beautiful white peasant blouses. We tried out a 65% mint chocolate that was mostly bitter - surprising to us, considering even a 75% in the US is fairly sweet - and a weird green candy that tasted a bit like sugary soap.

Mercado Artesanal La Mariscal

The weird green candy that none of us liked

We also tried a weird fruit that was about the size of a date but was reddish and tasted like a hybrid of a mango and a plum. It contained a large seed inside and it was really sweet and juicy and yummy, but we still don't know what it was.

The fruit we couldn't identify are under the mango slices

Our next stop was the Old Town near Santo Domingo, where there was another little market and we tried some fresh ice cream. We walked around the area and ended up happening upon a tiny, hole-in-the-wall chocolate and coffee shop called Chez Tiff Artisanal. The shop had two cases full of beautiful little truffles, and with the server's recommendation, we picked out four truffles: a passion fruit, a coffee, a blackberry, and a regular milk chocolate truffle. The truffles use fresh fruit, apparently, and the chocolate tasted richer and the truffles tasted better than anything I have had before - all for 80 cents each! Hera's favorite was the passion fruit truffle, which had fresh passion fruit juices inside.

Left to right: milk chocolate truffle, coffee truffle, passion fruit truffle, and blackberry truffle

We also got hot chocolates, which had no sugar in it and was just a combination of pure cacao with milk. It was tasty, but I added a bit of sugarcane sugar to make it sweeter - I think my sweet tooth has grown since living in the States for so long.

Incredible hot chocolates

The end the day resulted in us trying to get back to the hotel using Google Maps and us learning that Google Maps has trouble differentiating between pedestrian roads and car roads in Quito. It directed us down a ridiculously steep hill of a road (maybe even steeper than 30 degrees?) which was so narrow it barely fit the width of two cars and ended in stairs. Our pathetic little rental manual car had a lot of trouble backing back up - we all got out of the car, found rocks to block the wheels from rolling down more, and my mom had to carefully back the car up the hill and past the car that happened to be parked on the side. Pretty much all of us had multiple heart attacks during this time, and after my mom succeeded and we all got back into the car, the car smelled foul because we had been overworking the gears and the engine so much.

Thinking the worst was behind us, we got on the highway. Unfortunately, the highway also had a bit of an incline and the car wasn't a fan. We were on the right side of the highway, thankfully, when we heard a bang and pungent gas started to come out of the ventilation system. Long story short, we saw small pieces of the gears on the highway after we had gotten out and were sitting on the side and we had to get the car towed. It was quite an adventure, and I'm glad we were all safe - and that the car didn't blow up or waited to break down the next day when we would be on our way to the Amazon.

Say hi to mom carefully maneuvering the car onto the tow truck

Stay tuned for part 2 next week, where my family and I go explore the Amazon!

Read about part two of this trip here.
Read about part three of this trip here.

Counting from today, there are a total of 9 days until the last day of classes. This means that hell week, for me, is about to commence - a project due in each class plus production week for ADT. I'll be spending all of this week trying to finish as much work as possible in order to focus solely on ADT next week.

Before all that, however, I was able to go home and spend time with my family during my (all too short) Thanksgiving Break. Since I don't really have any other updates - I will be writing blog posts about my projects that I'm working on once they're complete in the coming weeks - I thought I could write about my break!

When I first arrived in Ottawa, my mom picked me up and we went to the school and I got a special treat: I got to see my sister playing the cello! She'll be performing for her Christmas Concert so she's been putting in a lot of hard work.

Hera and her teacher with a normal cello and a baby cello

Since my family doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we didn't have any fancy food. Also, my mom's not a fan of Thanksgiving food. Personally, I've experienced the whole Thanksgiving works, and I will say that I am a huge fan of cranberry sauce.

The next day I spent working on a project for a class which I later ended up scrapping because the project idea was too ambitious. I'll probably make it a side project for IAP or next semester, because I still think the idea is super cute.

I did spend some time showing my mom and her employees my project for a different class, however. I've been working with a friend to prototype an augmented reality application, and while we're still super beginners and we have a lot of kinks to work out, the image tracking that we're using is really good and quite impressive.

And then we had sushi for dinner.

I love sushi.

Saturday was a shopping day, even though we didn't really take advantage of any of the Black Friday (Weekend?) sales, and resulted in quite a bit of shenanigans with my sister!

We found giant present toppers and decided to put them on our heads because we're obviously the most precious presents

Saturday night = baby cuddles for hours

My sister is literally precious

While my break was disappointing in that I spent basically three days working on a project that wasn't progressing quickly enough so I had to scrap the entire thing, I did have a really fun time with my family and relaxing and eating nice things. While I'm at MIT I sometimes wonder if I romanticize my family a little bit because I'm away and stressed out all the time, but going home I tend to realize that for all the faults my family may have, they're still a really great source of relaxation for me.

Although, Hera promised me one thousand billion hugs this break. I only got 11 and about an hour of cuddles. I want more baby hugs.

How was your Thanksgiving? Did you take advantage of any of the sales?

I moved away from home - at the time, that was China - to go to boarding school in Connecticut when I was 13. I have lived away from home for the bulk of every year ever since. I am very familiar with being homesick, and you'd think that having lived away from home for 7 years and running now should mean that I'm very good at being homesick.

I'm not.

Actually, I don't really remember ever being super homesick during high school. I did begin listening to a lot more Chinese music, because it reminded me of China which in turn reminded me of my family. When my family moved back to Canada, I stopped listening to so much Chinese music and instead started binge listening to a lot of childhood music - Disney music, musical music, et cetera.

This is my ridiculous mom who got really excited being at NASA.

And this is my ridiculous little sister and my dad waiting in line for Disney tickets. My family is adorable. How could I not miss them all the time?

Homesickness really became a thing when I came to college. I think coupled with the stress of being a student at MIT, a lot of the time I just wanted to run home to my family. Obviously, this wasn't something possible, so to deal with homesickness I did some of the next best things. Here they are:

1. Skype my family. I skype call my family every week, and if we miss a week I start feeling really awful. My sister is the number one person who can cheer me up - last semester, when I was really sad most of the time due to numerous reasons, she would stick her (slightly stinky) little feet in my dad's face to make me laugh. When I called her this past weekend, she told me she was going to give me "one hundred - one thousand - one GOOGLE hugs!" when I got home for Thanksgiving.

2. Watch a childhood movie. I almost always had a lot of "down" time where I was building models and didn't really need to think when I was taking studios, and so I would just play all of the disney movies back to back. Classic Disney is the best kind of Disney. Also, Mufasa's death scene always helped me cry out all of my frustrations. I also watched all of the Harry Potter movies about a million times because that was also a token of my childhood.

3. Last but not least, go find the people who are the next best thing: my friends. My friends are my family at MIT, and I know I can always fall back on them when I'm feeling down and awful and homesick. While none of them are adorable 6 year olds (sorry, guys) they're almost just as good at making me laugh and smile and forget my worries.

I doubt that I will ever be "great" at being homesick. My mood gets pretty affected when I'm missing my sister who will run around and pull my hair and give me "one google" hugs, or my dad who makes weird faces at me, or my mom who never fails to feed me all the nice things when I get home. These are ways that I've been managing.

How do you deal with being homesick? Let me know!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am practically obsessive in my organization. I am that person that writes copious to-do lists, will block out everything - including break time - in my google calendar (to the point where it gives my roommate anxiety, oops), and has had a long standing love for anything paper.

It's no wonder I chose to study architecture. What other discipline would allow me to utilize my organizational skills in order to accomplish everything that's needed to be accomplished - building overly-complex models (my professor once said that I was a masochist because I would plan out the most complicated and intricately beautiful models even though they were way too time consuming), creating beautiful and minimalistic and informative drawings - and still, somehow, succeeding to sleep more than most of my classmates? And most importantly, I got to play with nice paper and nice pens all the time.

One of the things I've regretted the most about my past few years here at MIT is that I never took the time to document my experiences here. Sure, I still have my memories, but memories are fleeting and easily forgotten. Writing things down on paper or drawing them out or blogging about it on here makes it all so much more memorable and tangible. For example, most of what I remember of the past few semesters is all of the struggles and long nights in studios and arguing with studio professors trying to explain to them why I thought my ideas were valid and good. But I'm sure those semesters weren't all awful - I was probably spending time with friends, watching TV to relieve anxiety, learning to dance - but I don't remember because often the miserable memories outlive the happy ones.

I've been making a push towards documenting everything this past semester in a forgotten sketchbook that I have - making it kind of a planner-journal hybrid, where I've been drawing weekly spreads, making to do lists every day, and journaling a little bit of what I did and how I felt that day. It's really helped me notice trends in when my anxiety flares up but also it's helped me remember all the little things that I do to make myself happier. The sketchbook is really fun to flip through - the other day when I did so I realized that I had totally forgotten that I had gone to the New England Aquarium with my class and I found how nice it was to be able to bring back that memory.

I've been slowly coming to the end of the sketchbook - it most likely will only last until the end of the semester - and so I have been looking at replacement notebooks. As a child, I hoarded notebooks and would write in them a little bit before abandoning it for a newer, prettier, better notebook, and now that I know I actually will use up this first sketchbook I'm letting child me come out to pick out the newer, prettier, and better notebook. I happened upon these Midori Traveler's Notebooks the other day and child me (and grown up me!) fell in love.

here's an example of a Midori Traveler's Notebook from the blog True Life on Earth

I love the flexibility that these notebooks offer and all the different types of inserts that you can purchase to go inside, and the mission statement is something that really speaks to me. These notebooks seem so nice and sophisticated and timeless, which really aligns with my aesthetic as someone who prefers minimalism, like many other architecture students who have been immersed in architecture for so long. It's been taking a lot of effort for me to not immediately go out and buy one, but I promised myself I had to use up my sketchbook first. Grown up me can't succumb to all my childhood whims, and I definitely don't have the space to be hoarding more notebooks.

I have, however, promised myself that if I don't finish my current sketchbook by the end of the semester, I'm allowed to buy this Midori notebook for myself for Christmas and also to document my Christmas vacation in its own separate little notebook. Especially since, if I'm not wrong, I might be crossing off another continent on my list.

What have you guys been into recently? Do you also think it's important to document your memories?

There's less than 5 more weeks of the fall semester (!!!) which means it's time to start thinking about all the final projects. We just got the constraints for the final project for my Advanced Visualisations class, and I thought this week's blog post could be about exactly that.

For a little background, I took this particular class because I thought we were going to be able to do a lot of animation. Unfortunately, this was not so much the case - we explored a lot of different ways of visualizing architectural projects, but less so storylines and characters.

It was no surprise, then, that the final project had to revolve around an architectural project (existing, non-existing, a studio project, etc). However, I had already thought about this project and how I wanted to make an animation about a little girl and her pet, and I was really disappointed at first because I thought that my dream wouldn't come true.

During class, while I was desperately thinking about how I could come up with a way to showcase a building while also doing the animation that I wanted to do, I was able to come up with a storyline that I think will work.

I will be using a studio project from two semesters ago (read about it here) which was a fitness center that was all about manipulating a user's view. I think this works well because it will be a fun project to showcase, but also because I have the model for the surrounding area, which will help introduce the project. The building and surroundings will be 3d rendering, but the people and characters will all be 2d. A little girl will be walking her puppy down the street when suddenly, the puppy hears something from inside the center and decides to take off into the building. The little girl will then have to walk through the entire building to find her puppy.

I think this way I will be able to showcase the building (as the little girl explores it in order to find her puppy) while also doing a fun, cute animation about a girl and her pet as I wanted to do previously. The little girl will obviously be my little sister, Hera, who I already have a character designed around, but we don't have a puppy so I'm not sure what to model the puppy off of or what to name it (I did recently come across "Fifi" as a puppy name which I think sounds adorable).

Here are some of the inspirations I have looked at which helped me come up with my idea:

Both of these shorts show characters who explore different situations - the little blind girl who explores the city in her own way as she finds her dog, and the dog in Feast who explores life, food, and human nature. Both of these shorts will be helpful for me because I can learn about different styles of animation and explore what I'm more comfortable with, while also showing me how I can tell a story with minimal dialogue.

All in all, I'm super excited about this project and I will definitely update you as I work on it! Even though my professor said that the final project was "small" I really want to do something above and beyond, especially since I think it will be a fun addition to my portfolio.

What are you guys working on? Are there any projects that you're excited about?

Last year, I bought red and gold fabric and red and gold face paint because I wanted to dress up as Iron Man for Halloween. Last Halloween. I've always liked Iron Man - someone who was more or less a normal human being-turned superhero. I suppose I'm also biased, considering Tony Stark went to MIT, and a product I helped design ended up being shown in Iron Man 3. (I will always show off about this. A product I designed is in a movie. A superhero movie. A movie about an engineer from MIT who becomes a superhero.)

I HAVE PROOF. The tablet the kid uses to charge up the suit is called the Vinci Tablet. I designed the handle. I'm cool. :P

That never happened. I got busy and never ended up making a dress in time... so I made it over the summer. I self-drafted and patterned a dress inspired by Iron Man's armor - so here's some pictures of the process.

I first came up with a sketch for the dress. I wanted it to be mostly red with some gold elements and, after looking at some inspiration on google, I decided to add pleats to mirror the armor plates on the actual armor. I kept the skirt simple mostly because I knew I was going to spend forever on the bodice.

This was the first sketch I made and worked off of! The skirt actually ended up not being a circle skirt - it was a rectangle that I box pleated at a few points.

I had to self-draft a pattern out of tissue paper because I didn't have any patterns premade to fit my body (and also because I'm too cheap to pay for patterns). I gave myself a lot of allowances on the sides because I know from prior experience that I have a tendency to make things too small.

And so, the fabric manipulating commenced.

I spent literally years pleating. Well, not literally, but like, at least a couple hours.

Here I have laid out some of my (janky made out of wrapping paper) pattern pieces onto my pleated fabric.

I totally forgot to photograph some steps, but here's the front of the bodice coming together!

And a close up of the side pleats.

The dress came together in a few nights, although I had some trouble with the zipper (I hate zippers but I hate buttons more, so I opted for a zipper) and because the pattern wasn't perfect, I had some weird fabric bunching around my sides. I decided it wasn't a huge deal to me - The dress was only going to be worn for Halloween anyway. The one thing that was a little sad for me was that the pleats, when pressed down, aren't super visible - I don't know if it would've worked out better if I had made them deeper.

Also, the skirt on the dress differs from the original sketch because I ended up opting for a box pleated skirt - I thought the pleats on the skirt would look more cohesive with the pleats on the bodice.

I also painted on the Iron Man crest on my chest. It's a little higher than where it's supposed to be (canonically), but whatever. It gets the point across.

I was originally planning to also paint my arm to look like the armor, but I decided it was going to be too hazardous since I was working in the library (hence the books behind me). I didn't want to chance getting red face paint everywhere. I opted for wearing my brass rat (which I wear all the time anyway) because Tony wears his.

All in all, it was a super fun project and it was my first time trying to pleat anything or self-draft something that was more complex than like, a t-shirt dress!

What do you think? Do you think I got the idea across? Also, did you dress up for halloween?