<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/DMtql5P.jpg" /></p>
<hr />
<h3>When I first walked onto foreign ground, I felt largely at home, with the eye of an aesthete.</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>I reckoned “this place was made for pictures.” Yet, a pride in my ability reckoned we take everything piece by piece. It felt like interstellar travel, the way our shared ride wove around bends, other spacecraft alit traveling at speeds no less than breakneck. The air was cool, yet refreshingly pleasant, like the heat killed moments following a hefty downpour, droplets of water bejeweling all manner of surface, a cool so nonchalant, as it were never under pressure.</p>
<p>Every day was a chance to take one thousand images or one masterpiece. It was a beauty in every detail, every straggling teen, cocoa-tanned and wavy-haired, convincingly islander, adult shops that dabbled in more vice than one, herb for conscious-altering experience -- I found myself visually gorging on every nuance and niche. It felt vaguely picturesque, as if it were a dream, horizons seemingly within grasp, the heat leading a sensual dance with the eyes, the sky either vastly wide open, or cotton candy tufts of white, no room in between. It is clear this place is different, nothing like the older, stoic northeast, it was young, hip southwest, cool as could be. I often reasoned I could make it out there, in the streets, had fortune dealt a severe hand – these streets were not so generous. For all its decadence, motorized scooters and electric charging stations, it was clear many went without on these long horizons, in the spring sun, and pale moonlight. It left an uneasiness akin to understanding the connotation of eating meat. One perished in order to sustain another, these, the consumed, and the utilized and discarded, they were a constant reminder that a pearl of great price paid for this opulence. All of a sudden, I was drawn in and repulsed, for I knew it was raw.</p>
</blockquote>