Young Pinoy Artists Festival 2016

When Pinoy Stop launched an art exhibit featuring works of Pinoy kids, I wondered if my son Jo-Lo would be interested in participating.  He is actually good at arts and crafts, but he's been spending more time on Minecraft lately so I was not particularly sure.  I floated the idea to him, but it wasn't until a couple of weeks before the deadline that he said he wanted to join.  I made a couple of visits to the art store for acrylic paint, various bits of paper and we were off!

Jo-Lo made a total of 5 artworks.  3 are paper weaving types which is reminiscent of the banig, the woven mats used for sleeping in the rural areas.  Two were of a simple pattern, with a third giving him more challenge as it was more intricate and and had a bigger base. His other artwork was a Christmas lantern where he used eggshells and acrylic.  And lastly, he painted a pop art of his favourite fast food chain Jollibee.

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park

Initially, the Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park was not one of the highly anticipated trips in our itinerary (primarily because I knew we were not going to be able to climb it anyway) but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed our day trip.  Kudos to our friends John and Elaine for arranging this trip for us (we left the planning in their capable hands so we actually did not know the complete itinerary - their itinerary did not disappoint).

This national park is home to the tallest peaks in New Zealand. From afar, we caught glimpses of snow-capped peaks as we wend our way across picturesque landscape.  The South Island is indeed so different from the North Island - from what little I have seen of the north anyways.

How to recover missing photos from your camera's memory card

I actually had a very stressful problem when we went back to our motel after visiting Arrowtown and Queenstown.  While driving back I turned on my camera to view the wonderful photos we took of these two very picturesque tourist spots.  I was a bit concerned when a huge batch of my photos would not appear on my camera's screen, but I thought the laptop would show me the rest.  It didn't.