Having spent the past 2 weeks in Hong Kong I was faced with a problem. I didn’t want to go back to Japan. As much as I love Japan, I love Hong Kong that much more. I had a hard time convincing myself why I should go back to Japan. I mean there were plenty of reasons, but my job is such that I only need an Internet connection to do it. So that opens up pretty much anywhere in the civilized world. So I needed something to remind me why I would even consider going back to Japan. Then Ann and I went to Shanghai and I got the reason I needed. Japan isn’t Shanghai. Sign me up.

Now that isn’t to say I despised or even disliked Shanghai. On the contrary I enjoyed my time there very much. On the whole it’s a nice city and though I think Beijing is a much better tourist spot, if I had to live in a city on the mainland, it would be Shanghai. It’s probably the least-Chinese of the mainland cities, which probably plays into my decision.

Ann and I booked 2 round trip tickets with 4 days and 3 nights in a 4 star hotel for less than the hotel in Hong Kong cost for 3 nights. I thought that this time, China would pose no problem as I had someone with me who could speak Chinese. But then I found out Ann was scared of mainlanders. And rightfully so. On my suggestion we dodged the taxi booths inside the airport that promised they could get us to the hotel for 300 chinabux. We got out front and I pushed Ann into a waiting taxi. According to someone in the know, it would be between 150 and 160 yuan to the hotel. It came out to a mean 155.

Once at the hotel we encountered another problem. What the hell do we do? We just sort of threw the trip together on a whim. Now we needed to figure out what was actually in Shanghai.

Ann had a couple books on Shanghai but they were both in Chinese, so while she went through them, I tried to check my Flickr and remembered that it was blocked in China. Oh well. Ann in the mean time, found the best thing there is to do in Shanghai: Eat.

We had the place to ourselves for the first half hour before the crowds of diners came in at once. “Ourselves” meaning Ann, me, and the 40 waiters who hovered around us with nothing better to do. A common site at most upscale Chinese restaurants.

Eggy shrimp thing

Soy saucey beef thing

Xialongbao. The whole reason I came to Shanghai.

On the way out

Afterwards we made our way around the city. The subway is both modern and outdated at the same time. Though it was nothing like Beijing, who’s subway is stuck in the 1920s. We made our way to Xin tian di, the Lan kwai fong of Shanghai. IE: overpriced (for China) beer and dining for ex-pats in a decently night-lifey area. Hou hai, the Beijing Lan kwai fong, is a bit more interesting though. Surely scorned by locals and the elitist ex-pats, they are horrible places to experience Chinese culture but great places to unwind.

Shanghai Nights

Shanghai subway

Ann buying a flower bracelet

新天地

新天地

Unfortunately China doesn’t have the best beers.

Tired from traveling to Macao and lugging around my camera everywhere I spent the next few days just taking in the Hong Kong life. Shopping, eating, and exploring HK Island and Kowloon.

Tsim Sha Tsui near the mosque.

Ann in Mongkok.

Nathan Road.

Kowloon Park.

Laying back in the cut.

Kowloon Park

Kowloon

Stairs to Knutsford Terrace

Darlie Toothpaste. It might be racist but Lime Mint is the best tasting toothpaste ever.

Victoria Harbour

The (in)famous Chungking Mansions

The obligatory custom stamp on the cheap.

One morning when Ann had to go into work, I was at a loss for things to do, so I decided to take a boat tour. Most of the interesting tours were at night. All the daytime tours seemed to be short half hour tours of Victoria Harbour, which you can see just by walking along Tsim Sha Tsui and Causeway Bay. I ended up finding a tour that was a 2 hour tour through the port and construction area way up out by the airport bridge and the New Territories. It sounded like a pretty industrial, grimy part of Hong Kong. Just what I was looking for. There were only 7 other people on a boat made for 200. Surprising so few people wanted to go on a morning boat tour of the dirty port district on an overcast day that looked like it might rain at anytime. Their loss.

Waiting for the boat.

The boat

Route of the boat.

New Territory Public Housing

The Port in Nam Wan

Click to enlarge

One meal I thought worthy of taking pictures was our dinner at Yung Kee in Central. Yung Kee is famous worldwide for its roasted goose and pork. It was a bit more expensive than most of our other meals, but still cheaper than anything I was used to in Japan.

Dead animals

Mmmm. Falkor

Thousand year old duck egg

Roasted pork topped by half a goose

Vegetables and fish. The most expensive part of the meal

Boeuf

Wonton noodles

Finally, we can take a note from Hong Kong about giving our elders the dignity and respect they deserve.

Tomorrow: Shanghai.

Today we saw the flashy Chinese side of Macao, then the historical Portugese side, then ended with the flashy Chinese side again. Kind of like a multicultural sandwich. Coincidentally, for both lunch and dinner I had pork chop sandwiches that are a popular Macaonese snack incorporating both cultures. You see what I did there? That’s called a metaphor or something.

First we walked to Macao Tower from the hotel. It was built in 2001 and is currently home to the tallest bungee jump in the world located at the top floor. That makes it feel sort of cheesy (even more cheesy than these towers are to begin with). Sort of a New Zealandy attempt to drum up tourist attractions (plus the tower was designed by New Zealanders and the bungee jump at the top floor was started by one). In another decade when Macao is as overdone as Vegas, it will fit right in.

Macaovian architecture

Portuguesey Water

Macao Tower

Ann and Taiko no Tatsujin

Inside Macao Tower.

The view from Macao Tower.

220 meters up, standing on a pane of glass.

Hotwheels. Macao-style.

Ann braves the glass floor…after several minutes.

After descending from the tower and a 20 minute wait for a taxi, we went back to the historic centre, namely the Ruínas de São Paulo, the Ruins of St. Paul, carved by exiled Japanese Christians in the 17th century. And the Fortaleza do Monte, the military center for the Portuguese colony built in the 16th century.

View of the Ruínas de São Paulo from Fortaleza do Monte.

Ann at the fort wall

Canon aimed at the Grand Lisboa under construction.

Guard dog at the Fortaleza do Monte

Ruins of St. Paul.

View down to shops from the Ruínas de São Paulo.

豬扒包

Beef noodles

Souvenir meat

Largo do Senado

Senado Square

After shopping we headed over to the Macau Fisherman’s Wharf/Doca dos Pescadores/澳門漁人碼頭. It’s a complex that opened in 2005 with restaurants and shops and weird random attractions like a replica volcano that erupts at night and houses a rollercoaster called Dragon Quest. There’s a roman themed shopping district and an amphitheater modeled after the roman Colosseum. Aladdin’s Fort has carnival rides and is modeled after an Arabian fortress. The Tang Dynasty Fortress wasn’t open yet. We walked around a bit before taking a seat along the water and wined and dined on pork chop buns and chicken wing tips until it got dark and we returned to Hong Kong.

Roman district.

Vulcania next to Aladdin’s Fort.

Macao fisherman’s wharf from Vulcania.

A fancy upscale 豬扒包 3 times the price and not as good.

Some big bridge at night/Ponte de Amizade/友誼大橋

Tang Dynasty Fortress

Cheap wine from Chile.

Fisherman’s wharf.

Floating Chinese restaurant

Walkway to the ferry pier.

Ferry to Hong Kong.

Not part of Hong Kong, Macao is also a Special Administrative Region. It’s got it’s own currency, though being valued the same as Hong Kong currency, you can use either. Previously Americans would need a Chinese Visa to go to Macao, but no longer. So Ann and I headed to the ferry port at Central and hopped on a ferry to Macao for the weekend.

Jet ferry to Macao

Click to super size me

The ferry’s route to Macao.

Getting seated.

Ann and I bought a package deal that included tickets and a night in a hotel room. It came out to only be slightly more than 2 round trip tickets would cost by themselves. Her aunt came along to gamble and have dinner in with us in Macao. It’s close enough and cheap enough that it’s not a big deal to hop over to Macao and gamble a bit (what it’s probably most famous for) and be back in time for dinner. Hong Kong citizens need only their ID cards to go to Macao (and the rest of China now). Unfortunately we got to the ferry and tickets from the booth were sold out for our ferry, so we had to buy her Aunt’s ticket from some very polite triad members for a small markup. I was the only one who actually had to pass through customs. I was essentially leaving Hong Kong and entering a new country, so I had to line up with the Taiwanese and Filipinos and get my passport stamped. The boat ride itself was only about 40 minutes. Ann spent the time playing video games. I spent the time fiddling with my shitty Sony GPS receiver which seemed to have trouble picking up a GPS signal in the middle of the damn ocean. It finally kicked in so you get a nice map. And that brings us to Macao.

Macao is similar to Hong Kong in that it was colonized by Europeans, but rather than Brits, Macao was settled by Ports…ugeses. This made for a strange experience. In Hong Kong everything is written in Chinese and English. In Macao, Chinese and Portuguese. Macao is building like mad, trying to be the Las Vegas of Asia. It’s still got a long ways to go to compete with the real Las Vegas, but it’s got its fair share of extravagance already. There is a Sands and a Venetian just went up. Macao tower is like a taller Tokyo tower with bungee jumping for that bit of Las Vegas flair. Macao itself has a real European flair that I wasn’t expecting. After all 95% of the population is still Chinese, but after 4 centuries of Portugal up in the mix, Macao’s food, language, architecture, and culture all have very distinct Portuguese influence.

Our hotel lobby with a …British? theme. Well, there were the stoic Royal Guard stationed out front. Though instead of bayonet rifles they carried M-16s. There was a huge chair in the lobby that was fit for a king. And if you sat in it you’d get a foot massage from a clearly Russian girl dressed like Heidi.

And there are also Casinos. In Asia, the game of Baccarat is king. To a ridiculous extent. Of the 3 casinos we went to, I’d say that easily 80% of the table games were Baccarat. Another popular game is Big small, a dice game. These games are almost completely luck based. In other games like Blackjack, a skilled player has an ever-so-slight advantage over the player who knows nothing (but the house still always wins). But a veteran Baccarat player on the other hand has no advantage over someone who walks up to the table and bets at random. And still, Macao casinos are scrambling to find more space to jam Baccarat tables. I could wax poetic about how its due to Asian culture’s superstition and blah blah blah, but instead I’ll just say, I won $2500 playing blackjack. Suck on that, House. Granted that’s Hong Kong/Macao dollars, but I’ll take it.

Our elegant TV remote. My favorite channel played nothing but Portuguese stand up comedy with Chinese subs.

Macao under construction.

Streets of Macao.

The Macao strip.

The famous Lisboa.

At night we met up with Ann’s aunt and took a minibus away from the main strip into the hills to a local restaurant that served Macao cuisine, a fusion of Portuguese and Southern Chinese. It was incredible. My favorite meal of the trip up to this point is by far a mussel/potato gratin dish. It went especially well with both cheap $20 bottles of Portuguese wine we drank.

Macao restaurant.

$2.50USD Bottle of wine

Fried chicken wings.

Meat.

Mussels with potato and a little bit o’ heaven.

Noodles and vegetables top off the meal. Another bottle of wine doesn’t hurt either. Even when it’s refrigerated like grape juice.

After eating we took a taxi back to the city center. Ann’s aunt went to a casino for a bit before catching a ferry back to Hong Kong after midnight. Meanwhile Ann and I went to Largo do Senado (Senado Square), a shopping square that was the center of the Portuguese colony. We walked around the many shops that included everything from old souvenir shops to art galleries to Starbucks and McDonald’s. We made it to the famous Ruins of the St. Paul’s Cathedral, which at night seemed to serve as a meeting place for Macao dog walkers.

Streets of Macao at night.

Ann and her Aunt waiting for a taxi. Macao definitely has a shortage of taxis.

Zooming through Macao.

Largo do Senado

Macao streets at night.

Ann at Senado Square.

Macao shops

Macao is a unique city for China.

Home sweet home…and shoes.

I wonder if these dogs speak Cantonese or Portuguese.

Ruins of the Cathedral of Saint Paul or Ruínas de São Paulo or 聖保祿大教堂

Our hotel or nosso hotel or 我們的酒店

Canon HK called this morning and my camera was repaired and ready to go. That was fast. Unfortunately it turns out my lens was also damaged. Specifically the aperture mechanism. The good news was that it could be easily repaired for not too much money. The bad news is they didn’t have the parts in Hong Kong and wouldn’t get them in until Ann and I had already left to Shanghai. So I decided to hold off on the lens repair until I got home to Japan. I took my camera back, took out my Sigma 18-50mm 2.8 EX DC and Canon 100mm f/2 USM and this is how I fared.

Victoria Harbour

I spend so much time with the 10-22 I forgot what it was like to shoot with an aperture as wide as 2.8 or 2. But at least I could shoot above ISO 100.

HK Space Museum

Entrance to underground Sogo in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The Clock Tower.

Kimberly Rd.

Victoria Harbour.

As the sun went down, Ann and I met up with her brother in Central, and took a minibus up the hill to eat. The food was fantastic, but what struck me most were 670ml bottles of beer for $10HKD ($1.30). I can’t remember the name, probably due to $10HK beers. It was Soderburg, Sodemburg, something like that. Basically an even cheaper version of Carlsberg. That’s quite an achievement in itself. After that her brother went home as classes have already begun in Hong Kong, and Ann and I went back to Lan Kwai Fong.

In line for the minibus

Lan Kwai Fong

Kowloon

Central

Ann and her brother

Tomorrow its off to Macao for the weekend.

Today, first thing in the morning, Ann went with me down the street to Canon HK to get my camera and lens checked out. Ann used her feminine charms to get it expedited. …Also I agreed to pay %20 extra. I want my camera back! All of the pictures today were taken with my piece of shoot point and shit.

After taking care of the most important thing, my camera, it was time for the second most important thing, my tummy. We went to the One Peking building in Tsim Sha Tsui which is shaped like a big sail. We went for dim sum there on the something-teenth floor. It was packed, though we were seated quickly, had a great view of Hong Kong Island, and best of all it was Chiu Chow style, my favorite. It’s similar to Cantonese style cuisine, but with a bigger emphasis on vegetables (meh) and seafood (winner) and goose/duck. Things like bird’s nest soup is a good example. Not the fake birds nest made from fried taro. Real bird’s nest made from bird saliva.

Ann getting the ordering on.

Cha siu sou

Har cheung, XO raddish cakes, etc.

After eating we did some shopping in Tsim Sha Tsui and visited the harbor for some choice shots of Victoria Harbor and Hong Kong Island.

A busy day on the harbor.

The Victoria Bay equivalent of a rice rocket burning the NOS.

A tour boat

Sunset

Click to enlarge.

A panorama of Hong Kong Island from Tsim Sha Tsui

As the sun went down we headed back into Kowloon where we had a dinner appointment with Ann’s aunt and her aunt’s friends at some hotel restaurant. 10 of her friends. Who I never met and probably spoke no English. I would have protested but Ann’s aunt was treating, it was a buffet, it was a crab buffet, and Ann’s aunt was treating us to a crab buffet. So to be polite I went along, and ate my weight in 100 different kinds of crab dishes. It turns out it wasn’t so bad meeting her aunt’s friends. They didn’t speak English, but they also didn’t stare when Ann and I spoke Japanese. I love Hong Kong. But some of the other diners seemed to find it fascinating. Some Europeans or something. Damn white people. Haven’t they ever seen a white person before.

After dinner, Ann and I, her aunt, and 2 of her aunt’s friends went out for karaoke, much to the dismay of one of her friend’s 4 year old daughters, who had invited me over to her house to play mahjong. Still got it.

Nightlife, East Tsim Sha Tsui Tstyle.

Now Japan does few things well, but one of them is karaoke. Compared to the States and China at least. I’ve gone into this before. So I was worried when after navigating our way through a no-foolin’ god-damned maze of mirrors, we found our room, and there were no fancy LCD screen remotes, no books, just an extra TV screen to choose songs. Awful. But wait, there were 2 extra screens. The upper one was for selecting songs (1 at a time, great design) but the one beneath it was a regular TV, for watching TV. Now I love a good night of karaoke, but a TV to watch will make some of those really long songs just fly by. And even better, there’s a keyboard, and you can surf the Internet or play computer games. It came in really handy when Ann’s aunt and her friend chose a 15 minute Chinese opera to sing.

Not easy to navigate to the bathroom after a few beers.

The most famous Chinese beer.

Brilliant!

Ann went in for a half day of work so I slept till noon when we met up and went out to eat. Little did I know, I was about to lose my best friend…

We met in Tsim Sha Tsui near Ann’s office and grabbed some Thai food. I went for the thai fried rice with shrimp paste. A lot of people don’t like shrimp paste just because it stinks and tastes strange. Weirdos.

After lunch we hopped over to Admiralty and grabbed a bus to Ocean Park, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Ocean Park is about 20 minutes away from Central, through the Aberdeen Tunnel, near Repulse Bay, where I went last year.

Causeway Bay

Happy Valley Racetrack in Aberdeen

Click to embiggen


Click to embiggen

Ocean Park itself is actually in two somewhat far away parts of the peninsula connected by a long cable car. The northern part has a panda habitat, and not much else. Most of the attractions are in the southern part, which is where the bus stopped. There are a couple rides, but it was hot, so we made our way to the top of the mountain where everything was. Luckily we didn’t have to hike (because it was hot and humid) but instead spent about 15 minutes on several extremely long escalators up.

Ocean Park Southern entrance

One of the long escalators up the mountain

Roller coaster on the side of the mountain overlooking the marina.

That’s just not right

Further up the mountain

Ocean Park is sort of an aquarium/Sea World/carnival/pandas . It wasn’t really anything new or exciting, though the aquarium wasn’t bad. The pandas were sleeping when we went though. Unfortunately, though it was the middle of a weekday there were a lot of tour groups from the mainland. Which meant I had to put up with stares and glares from mainland rubes. Being in Hong Kong I’d almost gotten used to not being stared at for being a big cracker. Oh well. It was at the top of the mountain where I lost it all. I dropped my camera, and more tragically, my Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens. The horror. I tried out the body with a different lens, but I still got the the dreaded Error 99. I could only pray that it meant my lens internals were fine, the glass certainly wasn’t cracked, and it was the (much cheaper) camera body that was busted. Nevertheless I bravely carried on with my little point and shoot with barely any manual control and no wide end. Who’s the rube now? Me.

Inside the aquarium

Nemo found

Cecilia, Andy, and a fat washed up sell out kung fu star

Dolphin/Seal show on the side of a mountain overlooking the sea. It was pretty cool but the view was more interesting than the dolphin show to me.

Lotta folk

I miss my DSLR.

Headed to the other side of the park the only way possible

Click for a panorama of Repulse bay from the cable car

Who needs hot dogs?

Ann knew I was feeling down after the loss of my camera so to cheer me up she got on the horn to her friends and contacted Canon HK who said to bring it in, they were right down the street from our hotel. And better yet, she let us skip a fancy romantic dinner and instead we went to a cha chaan teng where she ordered my favorite:

Three kinds of pork n’ rice.

Afterwards we went out for some drinking but the camera stayed at home. I did manage to snap one last picture at the supermarket.

Needs more pork

Ann took the rest of the week off for me so today we woke up bright and early for breakfast at half past noon. We took the MTR out to Sheung Wan, one of the first parts of Hong Kong Island settled by the Brits. Being next Central, the business district with all the huge skyscrapers, Sheung Wan is an interesting mix of old and new.

We hit up a noodle joint Ann used to frequent when she worked in this area before coming to Japan. It was straight locals so I figured we’d get stared at, but then I forgot this was Hong Kong, and no one batted an eye. There were about 4 tables on each floor and 10 people at each table, so it was a tight fit, but it was great. And my favorite, cheap. Afterwards we walked around Sheung Wan a bit.

We walked through Sheung Wan to Central, then hopped on the MTR to Causeway Bay. We had some time to kill so we bought some movie tickets for Rush Hour 3 and walked around Time Square. We also stopped in at Hui Lau Shan, a dessert spot and got some XO raddish cakes and mango smoothies. All on the ol’ Octopus Card.

After the movie (nowhere as good as 1 or 2 but nowhere near as bad as everyone said) we grabbed some Shanghai style cuisine.

After stuffing our face we hopped on a double decker tram (25 cents USD, go Octopus) through Causeway Bay and Wan Chai into Central to hit up Lan Kwai Fong, the expat bar street.

After a few overpriced drinks between us we strolled down to the Central port and hopped on a ferry to the Kowloon side (Octopus style). Took some pics of Central from the Kowloon side before a freak storm kicked up and we scrambled for shelter. Fortunately, in HK when it rains it pours, but only for a few minutes at a time, after which we walked home.

Hong Kong is such an amazing city, and it’s completely changed my life plan. Unfortunately, theoretical physicist aren’t welcome in the city.

Today Ann had to go to work, and then had a farewell party for a coworker so I was on my own for most of the day. I took out my trusty Lonely Planet and started walking around Kowloon.

click the map for a more detailed view of the route I took

While Lonely Planet Hong Kong isn’t nearly as bad as the edition of Lonely Planet Korea I used last year, it’s still lacking quite a bit of info. It suggested some decent sites, but left out a lot of ones I was already familiar with. The biggest crime is the lack of Chinese characters for locations. Granted its a cinch to get by in Hong Kong on English alone, not every cab driver or random person in the city is going to know every cheap restaurant Lonely Planet wants to throw at you.

Technically my first stop was across the street at the local cha chaan teng. A cha chaan teng is a small cheap tea restaurant in Hong Kong. There are usually 1000 different things on the menu, and will make pretty much whatever you want if they have it. The menus are in the table though if you ask nicely they’ll bring you an English menu with about 1/20 of the menu on it.

I got the cha siu and lemon tea of course. It was about $3US.

Then I was off into the heart of Kowloon. I walked up to Jordan, and took the subway up to Prince Edward, 3 stops away.

Then I roughly followed the route recommended in the Lonely Planet walking tour, passed the stadium (meh) through the bird market (sorta neat) and by the flower market (not as elegant as one might imagine).

Then I roughly followed the path, down past the Goldfish Market, then onto the Fa Yuen Street Market.

After that it was a quick jaunt across Nathan Rd. and Portland Street and then down Shanghai Street where folks were just setting up for the Temple Street Market from last night.

Then for dinner it was back to the cha chaan teng for some chicken fried rice and roast pork. And another lemon tea. They put about a half a lemon in each glass so it’s almost enough lemon.

The it was to 7-11 to use the Octopus Card to pick up some of my favorite HK drinks to go along with the Japanese snacks Ann bought me in Thailand. Mmm, Larb flavored pretzles.

After a good sleep, it was time to do things up Hong Kong style. This meant dim sum for breakfast. Well, lunch. We slept till noon.

Hong Kong dim sum is some sort of miracle. Take the restaurant we went to for example.

There are literally hundreds of tables, people sitting down and finishing their meals constantly. Dim sum usually has different menu items available depending on time, and often different prices depending on when you pay. Orders are constantly being placed and modified at every table. Some things on the menu aren’t available on certain days. And they aren’t working with computerized ordering. Just paper slips. 5 or 6 different kinds of paper slips. And yet it all works amazingly well. Why can’t Outback cook my 1 damn steak right?

I don’t know the names of all the hundreds of different dim sum dishes, nor how to read most of them. But I do knows what I likes, and I just had to tell Ann and she took care of it.

The food was plentiful and it was filling. My first real dim sum in over a year. And though it was pricey for Hong Kong, at $150HKD it was a fraction of what it would cost to get phony dim sum in Japan. After lunch, we took the MTR to Hong Kong Island.

The Hong Kong metro is cheap, fast, and easy to use.

We took the MTR to Admiralty and walked up to the Peak Tram in Central which takes you up towards the top of the hill and you get a great view of the city.

After fighting our way down through the crowds we made our way back to Central, then took the MTR back to Kowloon and to a restaurant in Yau Ma Tei which was the setting for the 2001 triad film Goodbye Mr. Cool. The curry and chow mein were cheap and good and the beer was even cheaper.

After we left the restaurant we were conveniently in the middle of the nightly Temple Street Market that runs all the way to Jordan. Which is only a short walk to our hotel.

And one for the road.

Summer time means free time which means I’m outta here. Going back to Hong Kong to see Ann and eat pork buns and then to Shanghai to eat pork dumplings. Then back to Japan in 3 weeks where there will be decidedly less consumption of pork.

Since I’m a cheapskate I bought the cheapest ticket I could find. The cheapest tickets are always with Air India. But their cheap tickets were only 10 day fix. Recently a China Air plane burned down on the runway in Okinawa, so their flights were cheap too, but again only 10 day fix. The cheapest tickets I could find for a +21 day journey were on China East. Not my favorite airline and a stopover in Shanghai wasn’t ideal, but the price was right.

As I sat at Kansai airport waiting for my flight I realized I’d lost the fancy pink sticker I was supposed to wear when I got to Shanghai. Since I didn’t yet have a Chinese visa, I couldn’t yet get into the country. But since I was only transiting, it should be okay. Except I lost that damn sticker. Oh well. I’m sure I could just explain thing to Chinese immigration…

Well, I made it through with minimal hassle. Got my transfer ticket, but had to go through normal customs with all the folks with visas. No quick bypass for stickerless-me. This meant I had to go back through security to get to my gate. At least Shanghai’s international airport was a whole lot nicer than Beijing’s.

Though I had no money in Chinese RMB. I managed to grab all my HK money (about $130HKD) from my drawer o’ foreign monies, but instead of my leftover Chinese RMBs I grabbed my Taiwanese dollars. I was hungry since the food on the flight to Shanghai sucked.

And it wasn’t much better on the flight to Hong Kong, but at least they were both short flights. After 13 hour flights to the States, 2 hour flights are no sweat. But passing through security twice, waiting for a flight twice, and passing through immigration twice kicked my ass. I got in to Hong Kong at 7pm ready to crash. Fortunately Hong Kong has its shit together, and together with Ann we were on a bus bound for the hotel in 10 minutes and it only took a swipe of the Octopus card Ann bought for me. An Octopus card is a rechargeable smart card that you can swipe on any train, any bus, trams, minibuses, (HK has a kick-ass, cheap, easy to use public transportation network) and at drug stores, 7-11s, McDonald’s, vending machines and lots of other places like parking meters and movie tickets. Because of the $50HK deposit, you can even go into negative amounts on a charge. There are cellphones, wristbands, key chains, and watches that can act as your octopus card. Things like this make me wonder what the hell Japan is doing. Supposedly the most technologically advanced country on earth, smart cards are barely becoming widely used whereas they’ve been in wide use in Hong Kong for nearly a decade (they debuted exactly 10 years ago). They are used for some limited stores in Japan and for most train networks in large cities, but the lack of compatibility and limited use looks really bad when compared to the elegance of Octopus cards in HK which are used by over 95% of the population.

But screw all that, I was tired and happy to be on the way to the hotel. It’s about 45 minutes from the airport to Hong Kong/Kowloon. It felt great to be back in Hong Kong. Our hotel was in Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon, right off Nathan Road. A really vibrant area with a lot of shops nearby. After putting our bags away we headed off for food. I left the big camera at the hotel because I was sick of carrying it, which meant I had to fight with my little point and shoot.

Our hotel was right across the street from Knutsford Terrace. Following an escalator between a pair of buildings, you come to an alleyway hidden behind some buildings filled with great (pricey) restaurants and pubs. We had the only thing I could think of to start off a Hong Kong vacation. Meat pizza and Carlsberg beer.

Summer in Japan is the worst combination of heat and rain you can imagine. It can be 40°C and raining for weeks in August. It’s a stickyness that pervades into every aspect of your life. Your bedding gets moldy, your clothes never get dry, and you are sticky for weeks at a time. But who cares, it’s also summer vacation so it’s going to take more than soggy underwear and crotch-rash to get me down. They also schedule most festivals in Japan during this period of muggy hell. Our neighborhood festival went on with 20 or so people despite the rain. As did the big Tenjin festival with 700 million people or so. Having learned the score, I skipped both and went to drink instead.

Summer vacation in Japan lasts from the end of July to the end of Sept/beginning of Oct. I don’t know how many classes I passed yet, or what my grades are, but I can say with certainty that I definitely took finals for SEVERAL of my classes. Possibly even most of them. I definitely failed a couple. I didn’t even bother to take my accounting final. Which makes the 3rd time in a row I’ve failed it. Next semester when I take it I’ll probably try to attend some classes.

Take THAT building 5. That’s what you get for failing me 3 times in the same class.

Fortunately most finals in Japan are full of essay questions so even if you don’t know anything (ME) you can probably still bullshit your way to a passing grade. I employed this in my civil law, strategic management, and philosophy finals, but I forgot my business law textbook at home so I sort of got screwed out of that one. Japanese history was one of the hardest finals as it wasn’t open note, and wasn’t essay questions.

But its summer vacation now so who cares about the past. I’ve got nothing on my plate other than some game translations that will probably consume all my free time. I’m still going to try and make it to Hong Kong for a few weeks. A couple of my friends came out to visit in June and July. They were both Canadians, but I put up with their backwater ways and showed them around Osaka. Well, showed them Osaka food and drink. And I think there was a trip to Himeji castle in there somewhere too.

One of the things my friend and I tried was Kushikatsu, which amounts to fried stuff on sticks. It’s an Osaka “delicacy” but there’s nothing delicate about it. As we waited for our table at the all you can eat kushikatsu joint, we saw some people coming out looking like they were about to explode. They were bright red and looked like they’d just run a marathon. We mocked them, because as two serious gluttons who put beer away by the liter, we felt superior in our fat slobriety.

The way kushikatsu at this particular place works is, you grab a plate and pile it with sticks of raw meat, fish, vegetables, cheese, and anything else they could jam a stick into (but mostly meat). You then bring it back to your table with a bowl of batter and breadcrumbs. Your table features a built in a personal deep fat fryer. How could anything go wrong.　

Oh how it went wrong. After a dozen sticks or so, the oil smell has seeped into your clothes. Another 10 sticks later and you begin to absorb it through your the pores in your skin. 15 minutes after that your pores have been clogged with oil and it begins to drip from your hair and you begin to question your existence. What the fuck are we doing here? Why is there a damn deep fat fryer full of lard in our table? How do we escape this hell? Are you going to finish that shrimp?

My clothes still smell like oil.

Keysha showed me a new sushi joint near Cafe Absinthe called Genesis. I just call it the American Sushi bar, which might sort of confuse people who don’t realize that sushi in America fucking rocks. Perhaps thats blasphemous, and I’m sure that there’s a lot of crap sushi to be found in the States as well, but in San Francisco, and probably all up and down the west coast, sushi is fresh, cheap, and comes in great rolls that are hard to find in Japan. Ever try to find a good, cheap Dragon Roll? Dynamite Roll? Caterpillar Roll? These uramaki rolls were born in California and are hard to find in Japan. Purists might call these Amurican-born rolls unauthentic or sacrilegious, but you sushi purists forget one important fact. And that is: “Fuck you, sushi-purists, get a damn hobby.” Case closed. Granted there’s some wonderful sushi in Japan that you can’t get easily anywhere else, but sometimes you just want a spider roll, and that’s not nearly as easy to find. Genesis makes some great uramaki including some Japan-only rolls that might make way for sushi nazis to accept these rolls as the orgasm-in-a-maki that they are. It’s also extremely pink inside, and your retinas will burn for days afterwards, and they served me Guinness from a bottle, but their La Miche roll had enough creme cheese that I’ll forgive that little indiscretion.

Plus it’s not that expensive, so afterwards you still might have enough cash leftover to afford a drink or two at Absinthe.

And for those of you who still can’t believe Americans can show up Japan in sushi, don’t forget. Japan totally rapes America when it comes to pizza.

As for how well Japan does Shanghai cuisine, I’ll leave that up to the readers to find out for themselves. There is definitely a trend in their ingredients…

Golden week again in Japan, this week forming a nice 9-day weekend. Travel prices during this time sky rocket, as Japanese travelers envelope the Earth. There is a simple (tough) way to beat the system though.

While a Shinkansen trip to Hiroshima is a brisk hour and a half affair, it runs in at about 10,000円. Being a student, I gots plenty o’ time, but not a lot of money, I found a better (worse) way to do it.

Local trains. Osaka to Hiroshima at half the price. It would only require changing trains a scant 4 times, and could be done in less than (more than) 6 hours. It involved waking up at 5am, something I am very poor at. So come 6am, when I actually wake up, I had to recheck my schedule on the cell phone, and found the optimum time to leave would be 7:40. So I got another hour of sleep and still had time to buy a breakfast of yogurt in a squeeze pouch and some onigiri for the rails.

The trip there was pretty uneventful. The first transfer at Osaka station I’d done a hundred times. It’s the same one you’d take to go to Sannomiya in Kobe. Except you don’t get off at Sannomiya, nor at Kobe Station, nor Motomachi, nor at Himeji. Under my revised schedule, you keep riding it till you hit a backwater station called Aioi. Here, anyone who’s transfering has 1 minute to transfer trains. Something I was a bit worried about. If the transfer was just across the platform, as it often is, then I’d be safe. If I had to run to another platform, I doubt my fat ass would make it up and down a flight of stairs in time. Luckily, pulling into the station I could see it was right across the platform. Because of this, I didn’t understand why everyone made a mad dash for the other train the second the doors opened. Getting to the other train I realized it was because EVERYONE got on this train. We went from an 8 car express train to 5 car local train that appeared to be pre-war. Needless to say, I didn’t get a seat. All I could do was straddle the wall and eat my onigiri as ladybugs flew about the packed cabin. It was pretty rural. There were some nice views along the way, though with station names like “Bear Mountain” you’d better have nice views, because there sure wasn’t much of anything else.

Click to embiggen:

Not many people got off at any of the 12 stops between Aioi and Okayama. Though, arriving at Okayama, everyone except me and about 3 other people got off. They must take that route all the time. My next transfer at Itozaki wasn’t for another hour and a half, so I kicked back and ate my last onigiri. Along the way I met a guy named Ken from Shikoku, who was on his way to Hiroshima to watch a soccer game with his friends. He gave me a can of coffee, reminding me of the guy I met on the Korean KTX who did the same. Arriving at Itozaki we switched to a newer train and made the last 90 minute leg to Hiroshima. This is where the Shinkansen saves time, by tunneling through all the mountains in about 20 minutes. The local train just sort of saunters around them until it finally pulls into Hiroshima station 6 hours after I boarded a train in Osaka.

Arriving in Hiroshima, I found that they are still sort of behind the times when it comes to their train stations. I had wondered if I would be able to use my smart card train pass out here, when some of their major stations don’t even have magnetic ticket readers yet. They rely on a combination of ticket stampers at the gate and the honor system. Their “metro” system is the same way. I don’t know what qualifies as metro nowadays, but Hiroshima’s is pretty much identical to the MUNI in San Francisco. It was cheap, though not very fast, and I don’t consider a 2 car (sometimes 1) train that has to wait at traffic lights very metro-y. Also there comes the question of where to stand when you want to board. Since the “stations” are basically in the middle of the street there is only a very small area to stand on, which isn’t bad except around busy stations. This being the only expected sunny day for Golden Week in Hiroshima many stations were busy, with many people getting off and many others getting on, and the ticket/money/train pass takers trying to scramble to keep up. Then even the locals didn’t know where to stand.

After figuring out the Hiroden system I made my way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. It’s the site of the Atomic Bomb Dome, one of the few structures to (partially) survive the 2km atomic bomb blast. It was sort of sombering and sort of eerie at the same time, but then you see tourists posing smiling with peace signs in front of it and you are snapped back to the (non-)reality of Japan. There was also some sort of festival going on for whatever holiday it happened to be today. There was a parade and crowds and lots of Okinawan music.

The next stop was Miyajima, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima. It’s about an hour’s train ride to the ferry, then a 10 minute ride on the ferry. On the ferry, a group of people in the bench across from me were speaking loudly in Kansaiben. I’d quickly grown to dislike the strange, annoying Hiroshima dialect. It was really nice to hear my own strange, annoying dialect and it made me start to miss home. Miyajima is packed with deer and further up the mountains, monkeys. The deer aren’t as pushy as the deer in Nara, but they also don’t bow for food when you offer it to them. Miyajima is also home to Itsukushima Shrine, a Shinto shrine dating back to the 6th century. The shrine, notably the floating torii (gate?) is one of the “Three Views of Japan.” They like to do the top 3 thing in Japan. There is also the “Three Castles of Japan” and “Three Gardens of Japan” and “Three Famous Mountains” and “Three Great Night Views” and on and on and on. The torii as well as the shrine itself seem to float, and is often photographed. However when the tide is low, you can walk right up to the torii. Along the beach there are people digging for…something. I’m not sure what, but I assume shellfish or crabs, of which there are plenty. Even the deer get in on it. At the torii some people were throwing rocks to see if they can get them to land on the torii. I don’t know if there’s any real reason or legend, other than one person tried it, then everyone else followed suit. It was interesting to be able to walk down to the torii, but the shrine probably would have been nicer if the tide had been higher. The island is also home to the “1000 Mat Pavilion” and the “5 Story Pagoda.” They don’t screw around when they name these places. They sort of screw around when it comes to souvineers, though. Miyajima is famous for its…rice scoops.

Click to bigistrate:

After I’d had enough of the island I took the ferry back to Hiroshima and took the Hiroden back to Hiroshima station. It would have been faster to go by JR, and not much more expensive, but I was guaranteed a seat on the Hiroden and thats all that mattered. I stopped along the way to find an Okonomiyaki joint for some Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki. I may not have known much about Hiroshima style, but I’ve lived in Osaka long enough to know where the best Okonomiyaki places are. They sure aren’t next to stations or along major roadways like all the places listed in the guide book. I found a small place in a dark alley. At first glance I couldn’t even tell if it was open. A good sign. Loud drunken local dialect coming from inside. Another good sign. Two kinds of beer on tap? Sold. They were surprised to see a furigner. It seemed like everyone was a regular customer and was on a first name basis with everyone else. Made a lot of friends and drank a lot of beer. The Okonomiyaki wasn’t bad either. Osaka is still tops.

After closing out the shop, I walked to the station. I switched my Shinkansen reservation to one leaving a little sooner (I totally would have done the 6 hours home, but then I would have had to leave at 5pm) as I didn’t want to wait for hours. On the train I made friends with the guy sitting next to me, Hironobu from Toyota city. Instead of coffee, he bought me a beer. He rocked.

Who cares? April is once again upon us which, in Japan, means sakura.

I vowed not to do the hanami thing this year and I made it till about mid-April. My friend Aya invited me to a cruise. A cruise through Sakura-nomiya. Oh well. Maybe my boycott will be more succesful next year. At least this year it was late enough that there were no crowds. It was also very windy, which means the sakura blossoms were coming down like rain. The only thing worse than gagging on a rogue petal lodged in your throat is doing it every 10 minutes.

Afterwards we went for Okonomiyaki in the true Osaka fashion.

April also means the new school year starts up again. Since last semester I only had 9 classes, I decided to kick it up a notch. I’ve got class 16 times a week now. This semester my classes include: Japanese History, something I am barely qualified to study at a high-school level, let alone University level. Korean, which works incredibly well being taught in Japanese, as they are such similar languages. Chinese, which works collosally poorly being taught in Japanese. Philosophy, which seems mildly interesting, aside from the 3 essays I’ll have to write. Civil Law, which seems interesting except that one of the 2 text books is 2000 pages of dense text and the professor expects us to bring it to class every week. Business Law, which seems really boring, but at least the text book is small. Theory of Business Administration, snooze. Theory of Business Strategy, shoot me now. Computer Science, at least I can surf the internet. Biology, focusing on the business aspects of. And a couple others that don’t really translate well. 専門導入演習 and 情報とキャリア.

Finally, April saw the arrival of two very much needed care packages. The first is from my ex-gf Ann. Click the pic for explanations.

The second, and much more important package came from my father, who knew that with summer approaching, I would be in serious trouble without:

…to look like human guys. Time moves really slowly when you are trying not to spend money but have nothing to do.

For one thing its hard not to spend money. I bought a fancy new white (mistake) leather chair. At one point I let it get a little too close to a heater I had on the floor and it sort of caught the back on fire a bit, but only on the bottom. So now it looks like my chair shit itself. I also bought a new snazzy dirt-magnet rug, and it finally warmed up so the futon came off the kotatsu. Of course the day I did that it got really cold again so I want to put it back, but am too lazy to dig it back out of the closet.

Finally Heejin is back in Osaka for a job interview. Hopefully she lands it because I really need a good drinking buddy. Both of us haven’t drank as much as we used to, and nowhere near as much as we usually do when we get together, so our tollerance has gone down. We still managed to put down a respectable 8 or 9 pints (mugs?) a piece. So much for saving money…

Back to the lazy life in Japan. After coming back after New Years, Winter break ended and I had a week and a half of classes. Then Spring Break started. In January. Until the middle of April.

In the meantime I gave out the souvineers from America, had a birthday, and tried to kill 3 months without spending any money. Japanese holidays that didn’t affect me like hinamatsuri and seijin no hi came and went.

One of Mina’s clients works as a wedding planner in a large Cathedral-esque building that is completely out of place anywhere in Asia. She invited us to a free tour of the facilities, which were nice. However in this case “tour” meant “pretend you are planning your wedding so you can get the grand treatment.” It was nice, albeit an uncomfortable experience. At least we got a free wedding dinner out of it with all the beer I could drink. And I could drink a lot of beer.

Just shoot me now…

My time in the New World didn’t last long.

But there was just enough pink meat, beer, and drunken debauchery to make me miss the States. Not that they don’t have meat, beer, or debauchery in Japan, it just costs a whole lot more. In America the meat is bloodier, potatoes are cheesier, beer is ale-ier, nachos mean something much more than ketchup and doritos, and pizza doesn’t come with mayonaise (alright so not everything is better in America). I’ll be in Japan for a few more years yet, and before moving back to the States for good, I’d like to travel a bit more throughout Asia, maybe live in Hong Kong for a while before moving onto the Middle East and Europe for a couple of years. But eventually, cheap dead cow and amber hops will draw me back to the land of my birth. I guess I can’t complain (lest I find myself on a no-fly list) though I would hate to end up living anywhere other than the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City. Anyways, on to the pictures of the damage.

After a couple of days of that, my time was up and back to Japan I went, which I guess really is “home” now, at least until 2010. Strangely enough, the two kids who sat next to me on the way to America (as mentioned in my last entry) were now sitting right in front of me. Freaky. This time I sat next to a woman named Sun. Not Sun as in the common Korean name, Sun as in Sun Spirit. Sun Spirit and her husband Red Tomahawk. They showed me pictures of their trips to Bali and Nepal. At least this time no one thought I was a bad father.

My parents wanted me home for Chrimmus again this year. Not an easy feat considering I had classes until the 23rd of December. It’s not cheap to fly near Chrimmus, and definitely not cheap to fly the day before.

The 23rd is a Holiday in Japan and so I decided to skip class and fly back the 22nd. That I wouldn’t have to pay $2000 for a plane ticket. I bought late and so besides the high price, there were no direct flights out of the Kansai area. I had to fly to Tokyo first and then catch a connecting flight to San Francisco. This assured that I would be up for a good 30 hours straight, since I can never sleep on planes. I then had to rent a car and drive (something I’d one done once in the past 2 and a half years) the 2 hours to my parent’s place in Sacramento. I may not be able to sleep on planes trains or buses, but get me behind the wheel of a car and I’m fighting to keep my eyes open.

In order to try and help me to sleep on the plane, I decided to pull an all nighter the last night in Japan. My girlfriend came over to help me out. It was pretty noble of her, considering she had worked the previous day until 10pm, and had to go to work the next day from 10am. She didn’t look happy in the morning. She spent most of the night going through the gifts I bought for my friends in the states, and writing Merry Christmas messages to them. She’s never actually met any of them, and doesn’t exactly speak English, so it was entertaining enough. Until I realized that all the gifts I bought were now technically from her. She is a crafty one indeed. We had breakfast in the morning in Kyoto and she went to work, and I went home to grab my stuff and head for the airport. I checked online and found a shuttle bus nearby and wouldn’t you know it, I fell asleep on the bus. And then at the airport waiting for my flight. And then on the 45 minute flight to Tokyo. And then at Narita airport waiting for my next flight. These little 20 minute power-naps were long enough to make me unable to sleep on the big 10 hour flight, but short enough that I totally didn’t feel rested at all. At least they had fine movies like You, Me, and Dupree to pass the time.

Next to me sat a couple of very young kids. I asked their mother, who was sitting behind me, if she wanted to switch seats. She said no, she was fine. Smart move, lady. There were a lot of kids on the flight, and their parents had all requested special nutritious kids meals for them. Not the kids sitting next to me. I might as well call them “my kids” as thats what everyone else probably thought. It probably didn’t help that one of them passed out for 7 hours with his head dug firmly into my kidneys. When the stewardess brought out the first meal, I couldn’t understand why she kept asking me if the food was really okay. Apparently she wanted to know if I thought it was okay for the kids. Yeah why not, kids gotta eat something I guess. Mom didn’t seem to mind.

We landed, I managed to grab my bags and sail through customs. It was 11am, but my body was telling me I should have been asleep 32 hours ago, then woken up 24 hours ago, then gone back to sleep 8 hours ago. So by that logic, I should be just about waking up now. Perfect. Time to go rent a car and head for Sacramento.

Chevy Impala. I could have done worse. It’s a big heavy car, so it makes me feel safe. Especially when I pull onto the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic. In kind of a nice surprise, I made it home without killing myself or anyone else. My parents looked about the same, but they completely redid the house.

I don’t have any before pictures for comparison, which sort of makes it pointless to post them at all. Just imagine exactly not-that, and you’ll have a good idea of what it used to be like. Besides my mom worked hard ordering everything (EVERYTHING) online so this is her time to shine. Though seeing my hip room full of DVDs and guitars and posters stolen from bus stops turned into a guest room with pillows and lace and green walls was a little more than I could take. At least the room had 900 channels of digital cable now. After taking in the new setup, I asked where I was supposed to sleep, and then crashed for 14 hours. My parents sort of go overboard on food whenever I come home, an this time they had outdone themselves. In addition to the pizza rolls, microwave burritos, and Jimmie Dean sausages, they bought a turkey, a ham, and a roast because they weren’t sure what I wanted to eat for crimbo dinner. At 4am, I felt a deep hunger only to be satisfied by one man. Jimmie Dean. At 4am, Jimmie Dean came through. 60 Seconds on high, 400 calories per bite. Take THAT Japan.

At 4:05am with nothing to do, I logged online to see if anyone in Japan was online, and whatdya know, my friend Dave in San Francisco was awake and online. He told me to come out to the bay, an hours drive at least. I asked him what there was to do in San Francisco at 5am. 24 Hour Indian Food.
Fucking Score.

The bay area chain Naan n Curry’s O’Farrell and Mason restaurant is open 24 hours. Lamb tikka masala at 5am finally made me feel like I was back in America.

After eating we were at a loss of what to do. There happened to be a 24 hour Starbucks around the corner, and since Dave had worked at a Starbucks downtown he knew the secret handshake to get us free coffee. I gave Dave his gifts (from Mina) and he put them together (remote control model car) while we waited for the sun to come out.

Dave managed to get his car put together and now the sun was just about out so we headed to the wharf near Fort Mason. We didn’t have anything in mind really, but there was nothing else to do. There were only a few people jogging and a couple people fishing. Dave tried out the car and for only 1000 yen, it’s quite a quick little thing. Dave felt the urge to beat the cold by partaking in the cities new initiative of all but ignoring marijuana. I don’t indulge in that particular vice, but took the opportunity to take photographs to further perpetuate the myth in Japan that all Americans are gun toting pot heads. There really was nothing else to do at the wharf. Dave raced his car around the seagull shit. I took pictures of a skunk. The Chinese fisherman wondered aloud what the hell we were doing. I wondered the same. It wasn’t so much interesting as it was very very cold. So we left.

After the wharf, we called up (woke up) another friend and headed to Haight Ashbury. Dave to look for a gift for his girlfriend, and me to find more myths to perpetuate about we Muricans. I found one. America is covered with graffiti.

And that was about it for my first 24 hours in America. If you’ve got a sharp eye, in this next picture you might be able to spot the next myth about America I plan to spread throughout Asia.

December in Japan closed out with me being duped into doing something I hate. Experiencing Japanese culture first hand.

It started innocently enough, with me in Nara one Saturday afternoon, having lunch with friends from school. With nothing else to do, they decided to throw a yaki-imo (roasted sweet-potato) party that night. I had never been to one, but I’d been to nabe (hotpot) parties and okonomiyaki (..okonomiyaki) parties, and they amount to drunken house parties, so I was immediately on board. I didn’t know whose house we were going to, but I hopped in the car and got ready to drink…

We were still driving well after it got dark. Traffic in Nara was bad, but that only delayed us for a couple hours. We were well out of Nara, in the mountains of Kyoto. In the mountains of Kyoto at night. In the mountains of Kyoto at night in December. Yaki-imo parties are BBQ parties. Japanese BBQs are not like western BBQs. They usually amount to a group of people huddled together squatting around a fire in a park with meat and vegetables on sticks. Well, as long as there is fire. We stopped by a store to pick up the materials, potatoes, butter, salt, pepper, popcorn, and marshmallows. Wait, no charcoal? That should have tipped me off. We drove to a deserted, pitch black river bank in the mountains. Then we left. Huh? Oh yeah, we need to get something for the fire. Not charcoal though. Yaki-imo are roasted in piles of burning leaves. They don’t sell leaves, but fortunately, in the mountain forest of Kyoto, there are leaves everywhere. So there we were in the middle of the night, collecting leaves (12 garbage bags full) of leaves to use for our ill-planned yaki-imo party. We also raided a lonely mountain conbini for their discarded cardboard boxes in case our leaves weren’t enough.

Once we made our way back to the river bank and got the fire going, it was a mere 30 minutes of freezing cold asses and hot smoky faces before the potatoes were deemed done and pulled from the fire.

They were good and with added butter even better. Perhaps not worth the ordeal, but an experience for the books nonetheless. We waited until the fire was completely out so none of the surrounding rocks or river would catch fire in the below zero temps. Then we high tailed it out of there. The clothes I wore unfortunately stank of burning leaves and boxes, and continue to stink to this day. I should probably wash them…

December continued with me doing a second thing I’d always vowed never to do.

Kobe Luminarie has come at the end of every year since the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. It’s meant to commemorate the lives lost in the quake. It amounts to a light display thats on display for 2 weeks at the end of December in Kobe. It draws huge crowds every year, culminating in the 10th year anniversary in 2004 which drew a record breaking *some impressive number of* people during its 2 week run. I love the city of Kobe, and would live there if it were feasible, and go there at every opportunity. However the swaths of people flocking to this event means that a night at Luminarie is a night of claustrophobic chaos from the 30 minute packed train ride from Osaka, to the 30 minute stroll down the strip packed shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of cell phone cameras going off at once. What could possibly drag me to such an event after I’d swore never to go? The same thing that found me at USJ and the same reason we all do stuff we hate like exercise and enriching ourselves. Bettering ourselves My girlfriend. (Un?)fortunately, the organization that runs Luminarie stopped receiving city grants after the 10th year anniversary and have been trouble recouping investments. Word is that this year is the last year for Kobe Luminarie. Who would have thought they couldn’t recoup the millions of yen in investments with crappy souvenirs like Luminarie hand towels and Luminarie cake sets. That’s not me being sarcastic either. I really am surprised they couldn’t sell enough of those things to Japanese consumers who eat crap like that up. Though I’ll be the first to admit that it’s really hard to express the magestic light display through cake.

Afterwards my girlfriend and I went to China town, which was also sufficiently lit up for the Holiday season.

This raised an interesting point. During the Holidays, Japan gets lit up like a frat boy on Friday. Especially Kobe. Why bother fighting the crowds at Luminarie when the rest of Kobe is just as nice, and deserted. During Luminarie, places like Mosaic Gardens, which are usually packed at night, become great empty date spots.

December. December started with me doing something I’d vowed never to do, and had avoided doing for 2 and a half years.

Universal Studios Japan is Osaka’s answer to Tokyo Disneyland. One surprising difference is USJ has even more characters than Disneyland. This is no minor feat, as Disney has a veritable army of cute Japan-friendly costumed characters. USJ accomplishes this by dipping into other sources of characters. The most popular addition has to be that of Sesame Street. Elmo could run for prime minister on the communist ticket and win in a landslide of 30 year old OL votes. Other’s include the Snoopy gang, Hello Kitty, Popeye, the somewhat confusing Crash Bandicoot, and the extremely confusing Break Dancing Pirates of Peter Pan.

I never had any desire to go to USJ, and in fact an intense desire not to. Of course USJ is THE date spot in Osaka which means its only a matter of time. Depending on how much you are swooning, you might end up in the sorry state I did, with a year long pass. God Crash Bandicoot save me.

I don’t have a beard, but I have a Korean friend named Hemi. Hemi like the dodge engine.

Her English is as good as my Korean, so we speak in Japanese. Hemi works at a Korean restaurant in Japan that mostly caters to Koreans living in Japan. This means its pretty authentic, which is a rare find in Japan. Everything in Japan is Japanese style. I once went to a Korean-run Chinese restaurant in Japan. Even this was Japanese style, which meant it was Japanese style Korean style Chinese food.

Anyway, back to Hemi’s restaurant. A while back, a group of Taiwanese people apparently came in to eat. They didn’t speak Korean, or even Japanese, so the basic emergency Japanese-menu was out. However, one of them did speak English. English really is the international language, and can be used almost everywhere, except Japan. Fortunately Hemi knew an English speaker, me. She called me, and translated the Korean menu (and how to do Korean BBQ) into Japanese for me. I then translated that into English for the Taiwanese girl who could speak English. She then translated that into Chinese for her group.

This sort of multi-lingual encounter (disaster) happens a lot. I teach English to a Korean girl in my building, mostly in Japanese. It makes for some weird lessons. I’ve never really wanted to teach English, but it’s difficult to escape in Japan. Everywhere you go people want you to teach them English. When people at my school ask me, it’s easy enough to bullshit and say I’m totally too busy but ask me next month. But when my landlady asks me on behalf of a tenant, it’s not as easy to lie, because she knows that I’m on my ass at home most days of the week. The plan there is to inflate the price and scare them off. When my landlady asked me to tutor a Korean girl who lived in my building, I promised I’d go talk to her. I told her my hourly wage was 4000 yen ($40). Of course she turned out to be a patent attorney and that wage was more than reasonable. I now have to give two hour long lessons a week because I’m too chicken to say No. At least it covers half my rent.

Schoolwise, I am attending most of my classes. I’ve only made it to my psychology lecture twice, and I’ve never actually been to my econ lecture. There were very few available credits this semester, so I wound up taking some bullshit classes. Classes like Career Development. It doesn’t really apply to me, but it’s 2 credits. One of the requirements of this class is to go to someplace called 私のしごと館, which amounts to “My Career Hall.” It’s a huge auditorium where students and young people can go and get hands on experience with various kinds of careers. Everything from designing cars to programming computers to driving trains. Well, I don’t know if they were ready for the big white guy, but it was mandatory for me so tough. Upon arriving we were to pick a possible future career to experience. I am pretty set on becoming a translator/interpretor and they had nothing relevant, so I picked the closest thing I could find. That is to say, I picked the most unrelated field I could find. 京象嵌. No Japanese person I spoke to knew what that meant. It amounts to some sort of traditional Japanese gold inlay. Being decidedly non-artistic and non-Japanese I felt this was the perfect career for me.

My friend Keysha went back to the States for the first time in 5 years. She left me with one of her Business English courses in the meantime. I know as much about business English as I did about traditional Japanese inlaying. She assured me that there was no actual “business” or “English” or even “teaching” involved. I still doubted whether I could do it, until she told me it paid 8000 yen an hour. Suddenly I remembered I knew everything there was to know about business English. Luckily, Keysha wasn’t exaggerating. The “class” amounts to a meeting room at a company, whose executives gather for an hour a week to practice English discussion. They don’t actually speak English, so nearly everything is in Japanese. And they don’t discuss things, as much as they pick on the youngest exec for an hour. And they don’t act so much like executives as they do kindergarteners. And $80 an hour ain’t bad for babysitting.

Look closely ladies and gentleman. Those labels are INSIDE the bottle, and a basic representation of the wild activities I’ve been partaking in since I left the Far East and came back to the Farther East. Sipping tea and OCD style arts and crafts while slowly chemically bonding my ass to my chair.

I spent most of the rest of the summer craving korean food and waiting for classes to start again. Luckily I live in Korea town and korean food and people are easy enough to come by. The actual Korean situation in Japan is a complicated one (and perhaps terribly uninteresting). There are two organizations representing the Koreans living in Japan. One is affiliated with South Korea, and has around 65% of the 600,000 or so Koreans living in Japan. They are pretty integrated into Japanese society, sending their children to Japanese schools and often times raising them as Japanese. The other organization’s members identify themselves as North Koreans, loyal to Kim Jong Il. Many of the self-identified North Korean residents send their children to their own privately run schools, which teach Kim’s Juche idea. They operate 60 schools throughout Japan, from kindergarden to high school, and even a university, as well as several credit unions. The largest concetration of their schools is in my area, the closest being 2 blocks from my house. It makes for a Korea Town that isn’t quite like what you’d find in LA or New York, where you can find all sorts of neat things, such as this handy guide to get to know your fellow residents better. They do make a damn good octopus pajyeon.

So anyways, school finally started and I got my grades for last semester. Well I somehow passed all my classes. Even the law class full of german terms I didn’t understand despite my professor’s instance that I must. In a Japanese university you get graded like a video game. I got a B in Modern Law, an A in Behavioral Science, and a no-foolin’ S in Business Administration. If I did the extra credit I could have gotten an SS and unlocked the secret class. This semester I missed one of the registration deadlines while I was in China with Avian SARS, so the total number of classes I could sign up for was a whopping 9. Which has me at school a mean 12 hours a week on paper (closer to 6 hours when you factor in sleepin’ in). This leaves plenty of time for karaoke and donkey bier with friends. One of these days I’ll write a guide for surviving 10 straight hours of karaoke. Coincidentally it involves lots of donkey bier. My american friend is also now in Osaka, as he was looking to come to Japan and was thinking about Tokyo. I put a stop to that right quick, though now it’s up to me to make sure the crazy Osaka grandmothers and North Koreans don’t rough him up too much. It involves a lot of getting drunk, which in itself involves a lot of money in Japan. I’m already missing the $1 warm flat biers of China. Last weekend I took him to Cafe Absinthe, a bar far too trendy for its own good.

As much as I hate going to Cafe Absinthe, it was only a matter of time before we ended up there. Absinthe is illegal in the states, and was made legal in Japan (hallucinogenic ingredients and all) last year. This makes Cafe Absinthe a must stop for all alcoholics visiting Osaka.

Cafe Absinthe is like a yuppy stoner bar for the upper class. The expensive prices, classy art pieces that change weekley, boring DJs playing what I dub Slumber-House, and hookahs being passed around by people dressed for the opera don’t make an atmosphere conducive to any heavy drinking. They do have some interesting house shooters personalized by the various bartenders though.

My favorite is the french (maybe?) bartender’s which involves lighting a lowball of absinthe cocktail, covering the flaming glass with his palm, extinguishing the flame and making the glass stick to his hand which he then shakes vigorously (hopefully not getting too much palm-debris in the drink). The drinking process is even more convoluted requiring the drinking to stick his fingers in the swirling drink, downing the glass, and sucking air through their fingers while trying not to cough and choke on the hallucinogenic fumes and look like a newb in front of the elegant and important patrons which dot the bar. For the more hardcore there is another drink which involves a shot of absinthe and freebasing with a water pipe.

After leaving at 3am (the bar has a god damned last call at 3am, another reason to hate it) we headed for home. My bike was taken by the fuzz (for the fifth time) and put in bike jail again, so it was either walk home or hail a cab. There is a rather nasty hill that’s hard enough to climb without having inhailed narcotics, so a cab it was.

The driver of the first cab I flagged down waved us away with a flick of his hand, despite having his sign set to “available.” He was stopped at a light, right in front of us, so I contemplated whether or not to give him the sad puppydog eyes of guilt or the glare of 1000 soul piercing knives. It didn’t matter because apparently he saw something really interesting to his left and he stared away from us for the duration of the light. That is until a pair of Japanese girls strolled by and flaged him. He gets out of the car and opens the god damn door for them, as if to say, “I’ll bow down to my blessed Japanese customers but DAMN YOU FOREIGNERS.” And he totally probably muttered that under his breath.

This was a fine impression of Japan to make on my recently-arrived friend so I broke out of complacent-visitor-in-your-beautiful-country-mode and switched up my angry-amurican-with-a-beef-mode. The best way to get back at him was to make him lose face in front of his customers, so I smirked and yelled out in my best holier-than-thou tone “So, you’re just a racist afterall.” I was happy I really nailed “racist” too as it’s a real tongue twister in Japanese. (“jinshusabetsushugisha” for anyone feeling saucy enough to give it a go) He turned a nice shade of purple, and gasped out “Oh…you speak Japanese..” before speeding off with his two passengers laughing in the back. My friend thought it was funny, as the very first Japanese phrase I taught him was “You are a racist.” Not that he’d really need it that often (hopefully), but it takes some practice before you can really make it pop.

Luckily the next cab cut over 4 lanes and pulled onto the sidewalk to pick us up, a much more common cab-hailing experience. Before I could even begin to regale the cab driver about the first prick, he mentioned how great my Japanese was. In his exact words, “It’s even better than a drunk Japanese chick’s.”

That is the most uplifting compliment I’ve ever received in any language.

Pics from Cafe Absinthe snatched from and directions to/away Cafe Absinthe right here.

Beijing airport is a strange one.

After 20 minutes of wandering around, I picked a line to stand in, and fortunately it turned out to be the right one. I checked my bags, and had nothing but a bottle of water when I passed through the security check. I set off the metal detector but the security guy never got out of his chair and grunted at me, which I took as Chinese for “Whatever, it’s cool.” I never passed through customs, and I didn’t know why. I sat and waited for my plane to Osaka with about 12 other people. When my plane finally started boarding, The 13 of us went through the gate, into the little tunnel thing, then down some stairs, and onto the tarmac. Everyone looked confused. There was a bus driver who was motioning to us, and after a few brave souls boarded first, everyone else got on. I guess the gate was then closed, and the bus driver got the signal to depart. Then we drove around the tarmac for a half hour. If you thought regular traffic lights were bad, airport tarmac traffic lights are a nightmare. When we finally reached plane at the ass end of the airport, we boarded and the plane took off…and landed in some place called Yantai. After getting off the plane, panicking and thinking I was on the wrong plane (along with about 8 confused looking Japanese people) we were then lead through customs finally. I guess this was the Chinese frontier. After passing through customs, we were led into a dead end room with some duty free shops (no free Remy XO samples like in Japan and Korea). After 10 minutes of wondering what the hell was going on, our flight was called, and we reboarded the plane and an hour later we landed in Osaka. My bronchial cancer asthma itus cleared up almost instantly.

It was the first time I’d ever felt any sort of homesickness, though a lot of it probably had to do with my actualsickness. It was an amazing trip, though traveling alone is sort of lonely at times. Everyday that I was alone, I ended up meeting someone new. Still, for my next trip I’m going to try to drag someone along. $1 Beers should help convince a few of my friends. My dumbass drunkard friends. After a 30 minute train ride that cost more than the combined total of every taxi I took in Korea and China, I arrived home and slept for the next 14 hours. I was hungry and craving something Japanese, so I woke up and ordered one of these:

It was 10 inches and cost as much as 3 days of meals for 3 people in Beijing. And it was worth it.

I really didn’t want to go to the Great Wall.

I was tired, hungover, and homesick. I had long since realized that I wasn’t so interested in the historical sites, but my guides were having none of that. I could tell neither of them wanted to go either, as they’d been plenty of times, but the idea that I wasn’t going was too much. They practically dragged me out of my hotel room in my underwear. I convinced that I would go willingly if they let me put on pants, and they were willing to wait until the fucking thunderstorm stopped. Unfortunately it did stop a couple hours later, so I put on pants and we went to the closest section of the wall. Badaling has the most tourists, and so isn’t as nice as some of the further sections of the wall. But as I wasn’t in much mood for hiking, and I’d probably end up back in China again soon (sooner than I’d like anyways) and then I could think about hiking the cool sections with the cool kids. For a touristy spot, there sure was a lot more hiking than I’d expected. I worked up a pretty good sweat. There were lots of shops hocking crappy souvenirs. A few places had drug a camel and a horse half way up the wall for some nice cheesy photo ops. Forunately there was a cable car down, as I was beat from the lame 30 minute “hike” up the wall. Not quite in the same shape as when I raced up the Statue of Liberty in 6th grade. On the cable car down the mountain, there was korean graffitti all over the inside of the car.

Click below for a panorama type shot of the Great Wall.

After coming back to Beijing proper, it was dinner time. Dinner was Peking duck, which really is better in Peking. Mostly because it was so cheap. A three person serving of ducks, pancakes, and the extras for $10, 1/6 of what I would pay here. The restaurant must have been famous because all the locals (anyone of asian decent speaking Mandarin was a local to me) were taking pictures of the restaurant’s name placard, convinently sitting right above my head. This suggests that we’d stumbled into a tourist (local?) trap, and had been fleeced. At $10 I didn’t really care. It got me full, and my burps tasted like duck fat all night. It was heaven. Afterwards we wandered around the city trying to think of what to do. I felt drinking was a good way to finish off the night, and they wholeheartedly agreed.

We headed back to Houhai street, found a bar with a half decent musical act, and drank lots of cheap Beijing beer. Of course there was much popcorn and it was very sweet.

After drinking, it was still far too early to end the night, so we went to Karaoke. Remembering the crappy place we went to last time, I urged them to pick a place a little nicer. This place was indeed a lot nicer. There was an all you can eat/drink bar. There were Japanese songs that actually worked, and several English songs from the mid 90′s. There was the stupid single computer unit, but this time we also got a collection of books and a remote to enter the numbers. The books and microphones came wrapped in a sash that said “disinfected,” and its the first time I’ve ever seen anything like that. It makes me wonder what diseases I’ve caught at other Karaoke places. We also got a fancy fruit plater with smoking dry ice. At about 4am we called it a night. I had to get up in 2 hours to catch my ride to the airport, so here I said goodbye to my two guides. Though I still felt bad for initially assuming them to be some sort of scammers, I sort of wish they did at some point, or at least let me splurge. I was so greateful for their help, and really the most luxurious extravagant night out in Beijing costs less than a meal for two at a cheap restaraunt in Japan.

Today in the morning, Jenny and Anniar had a school orientation to go to, so I was on my own for the morning.

I opted to go see Dongyue Temple. By this point I had my fill of Buddhist temples. Granted Buddhist temples in Korea and China differ slightly from temples in Japan, though for the most part, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen em all. Dongyue Temple, however, is a Taoist temple. Chinese Buddhism may be a proud religion, but it lacks a sense of razmataz. This is where Taoism comes in. It has many gods, magic rituals, and animal sacrifices. Though Taoism in China was all but wiped out during the cultural revolution, in the early 80′s the government realized that it could be a good source for tourism, and many temples were restored. Passing through the entrance to Dongyue Temple puts you into Taoist Hell. Taoism is the only religion that got Hell right. Burning lakes of fire and brimstone? Way to phone it in Christianity, that would suck for about 3 days, then you get used to the heat, put on a pair of bermuda shorts, and get a wicked tan. The Taoist afterlife is a bureaucracy that puts the DMV to shame. They have a department for EVERYTHING. These are all recreated at Dongyue Temple. Your first stop would probably be the Life and Death Department, or the Final Indictment Department. There’s the Department for Determining Individual Destiny and the Department for Suppressing Schemes. Each department is recreated with life sized statues that go from a little too creepy to way too creepy. The Department for Wandering Ghosts is sort of spooky and the Deep-rooted Disease Department is an eye opener. Some departments are in the same room. The Department of Weights and Measures shares a room with the Department of Abortions for some reason. The Department of Wind Gods is creepier than the Department of Mountain Gods. The Department of Upholding Integrity is a nice gesture. The Department for Distribution of Medicine is something we could use in the states. I guess if you want universal health care you can go to Canada or Taoist Hell, not an easy choice. Everyone loves the Department of the Hell, but my personal favorite was the Department for Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death, which sits a little too close to the The Department for Halting Destruction of Living Beings. I guess every good religion’s gotta have its contradictions.

Next stop was the Temple of Heaven. It’s said to be the best example of Ming architecture and the symbol of Beijing. I don’t think that’s accurate, as Beijing was a lot of fun, and the Temple of Heaven was a lot of not. One of the many (few) sites at the Temple of Heaven is the Round Altar, an altar that is apparently round. According to the guidebook, odd numbers were considered divine, especially the number 9 as its the largest single digit odd number. The uppermost tier of the 3 tiers has nine stone rings, each made of stones numbering in increasing multiples (9 stones, 18 stones, 27 stones, etc) up to the ninth ring which contains 81 stones. The number of stairs are also multiples of 9. If you know what a balustrade is, then you should know they are also numbered in multiples of 9. Was that interesting? Of course not. Imagine walking for half a kilometer from the gate just to reach the Round Altar and learn that. The Temple of Heaven is huge, so much so that you’ll have to do a lot of walking. Even for the most die-hard history buff, there isn’t more than a half hour of stuff to see. Because of the size, you’ll spend 3 times that just walking around. Pass. Technically a Taoist temple, it demonstrates that only the Taoist Hell is cool. Though I’ve never been, I bet the Drum Tower and Bell Tower won’t eat up as much time, and will give you a better view of the surrounding hutongs. Plus, everyone knows the Qing Dynasty is better than the totally weak Ming Dynasty.

I went back to my hotel to crank out some postcards. I suffered through some Chinese TV too. Everything on Chinese TV is in Chinese, except the one English Channel, which is almost as interesting as a PBS telethon. Sometime during the 3rd English language show about economics in China I fell asleep. Jenny and Anniar came back and woke me up, and we went out to eat. Our first stop was the ol’ BBQed squid on a stick stand. 6 Sticks for 50 cents can’t be beat. Or maybe it can. Especially if you aren’t a big white tourist looking guy. Afterwards we went out for Korean BBQ. I had just come from Korea, and so I end up comparing Beijing to Seoul a lot, which is probably unfair. I can’t say which I like better, Korea or China, because it’s not very politically correct to publically favor one country over another. Though, I should mention that I totally prefer Korea to China in almost every concievable way, except street squid prices. Thats not to say I dislike China, in fact I like it quite a bit, it’s just that I think Korea is a way way better country and has much much better food. So we went out for Korean BBQ, which wasn’t quite as good as Korean BBQ in Korea or even warped Japanese style Korean BBQ. But you can’t really screw up Korean BBQ so it was still good, and more importantly it was dirt cheap.

After eating, we balanced the otherside of the equation by going to get our beer on. Instead of going to the overpriced Houhai street (which I thought was too cheap to believe) we went to a local bar that was even cheaper. I think most of what you pay for at Houhai is the ambiance. This sure saved a lot of money by not worrying about the ambience. Instead of a live band, they had live karaoke. Instead of a lake view, they had a patched-up pool table. Fortunately they had plenty of gross sweet popcorn. After about an hour, we declared it a bust and moved on to bigger and better things.

Day 10 started at about 5pm when everyone managed to actually get up. 12 Hours of sleep works up a hefty appetite so first stop after waking up was dinner.

Today we had hot pot. It’s different from Japanese style hot pot in that there are two different soup bases, a spicy one, and a not-spicy one. Most of the ingredients in Chinese hot pot are the same as in Japanese hot pot. Thankfully this time there were no fish balls, which are a poor poor substitute for actual fish. The first thing that went into our hot pot were 6 large fish heads. Now were talking. Other ingredients were the standard green vegetables, lamb, pork, tofu (which I requested and only I ate…fine, more for me), and a spam like meatish thing that clearly came from a can. It was just as good uncooked as it was cooked, so we ate most of it before the soup was heated. One thing with hot pot is, as good as it tastes, nothing looks as good coming out as it does going in. The vegetables are green, meats are red, noodles and tofu are white. Coming out of the pot, everything is the same shade of dark brown, occasionally with rogue fish bones sticking out. That said, I never met a hot pot I didn’t like.

After eating we went to Karaoke. Karaoke in China was an interesting experience. First, the obvious question of the selection of songs. Obviously they had an extensive selection of songs from mainland China, and I heard some recent Taiwanese songs as well. The place we went had Japanese song’s listed on the system, but an error was keeping me out of the system. The English selections were working, though there wasn’t much of a selection. A lot of songs from the 60s and 70s. There was the random Backstreet Boy’s song, along with a healthy selection of Carpenters. Instead of the touchscreen remotes with built in cameras used in Japan, or the simple book+number pad system used in the states, here there was a single computer terminal built into the floor. At first it seemed like a neat idea. Of course it suffered from one fatal flaw, there is only one of them. Everyone knows the first 3 minutes of karaoke is the most vital. There are usually at least 3 remotes, so in a typical karaoke session, by the time the first song is over, there are usually no less than 20 songs in the system. Here, only one person at a time can input songs. So either they put in a couple, and have to pass it on, or they put in 10 songs and have to sing 10 in a row. Not to mention the system itself was pretty sketchy. It crashed and had to be rebooted within the first 3 minutes. I never thought I’d see a karaoke system BSOD. Plus the volume for each song varied so greatly, half the time we could barely hear the music at max volume, the other half our eardrums were being blown out. So everyone agreed karaoke sort of sucked, but I think everyone was too exhausted to care. By 1am, after being up for barely 8 hours, everyone was ready to crash.

We got up early (10am) to go to the Summer Palace in west Beijing. It’s on 2 square miles of land including a huge lake

and a hill with several palaces and gardens. It’s a world heritage site, and although it’s huge, most of it is dominated by the lake, so you could see everything in the better part of a day. We went on a Sunday so it was packed. There was the usual every-man-for-himself style of “line” at the ticket booth. My Japanese student ID was enough to get me a student discount (so take note those of you with fake student ID cards from Thailand) though you can’t see everything with a student discounted ticket, and will need to buy other tickets to see other parts of the palace. I didn’t mind too much, as most of those places look like anything else you could see for free. It was hot, but the weather was clear, and the palace is out towards the mountains so the air isn’t as smoggy as in the city. It was almost clear.

There were boat rentals, but on a hot day they were a hot commodity so there was a crowd. There were a lot of foreign tourists, and the boat rental place didn’t speak english, so there was a lot of confusion. Most didn’t seem accustomed to the fight-to-the-front mentality, and frankly neither did I.Fortunately Jenny was a pro. There were 4 person boats and 6 person boats. There were 3 of us, but the next 4 person boat wasn’t due back for a half hour, so after some negotiation, Jenny recruited a family of 3 and we got ourselves a 6-man boat at half price. Of course an hour on a boat with 3 people from the countryside in China meant there was a lot of staring. The older daughter ate cookies and stared at me for the entire ride which was a little disconcerting. The younger daughter looked to be about in middle school but her English was better than Jenny’s. Though I imagine her abilities to negotiate a $10 souvineer to 20 cents isn’t quite up to Jenny’s level.

After the boat ride, we headed towards the northern gate to Suzhou Street, designed to mimic a south eastern canal city. Some people liken it to a Chinese Venice. Though I’ve never been to Venice, and though I’m sure the Venetian canals are filthy, I doubt they have the same fluorescent green glow that the waters of Suzhou Street enjoy. The walkways were about a meter wide, and there were no railings. Combined with the cracks in the floor I spent a lot of time hugging the walls. Towards the end I wanted some water (8th bottle of the day) and Jenny convinced me to try some weird black drink that was being brewed. I later learned it was a kind of stewed sour prune juice. It tasted like sour flat Coke, and at 12 cents the price was right. I saw that it was for sale pretty much everywhere, but no one, not even locals were drinking it. Maybe If I didn’t have an iron stomach, I’d worry what all the MSG in the food and the stewed prune juice were going to do for the ol’ digestive tract.

After leaving the Summer Palace and grabbign some lunch, we headed to the Old Summer Palace, a few miles down the road. It was built in the 18th century, and troops from Britian and France destroyed it in the 19th. Though not nearly as large, and full of ruins and rubble, I liked the Old Summer Palace a lot more than the (New) Summer Palace. For one thing there are a lot less people. It was almost deserted. Though the buildings are pretty much all destroyed (they are kept as an example of foreign aggression) there are still paths and bridges and lot of places to relax. It would be a good place to have a picnic, if Chinese people had picnics. Maybe they do, but Jenny and Anniar looked at me like I was nuts when I explained the concept of eating outside on the ground. The lake at the Old Summer Palace is pretty small but big enough for some boats. I didn’t see any motorized boats, but there were covered pedal boats and uncovered row boats. The hot sun was telling me pedal boats, but not being able to speak Chinese meant I was at the mercy of my guides. They felt like rowing. We weren’t very good, but we could spin in a circle in the middle of the lake like nobody’s business,

Afterwards we headed to Houhai, a bar district by a lake. The lake is lined with bars and restaurants. It’s packed with people but because the area is so oversaturated with places to drink, there is always a seat available, and there are always waiters trying to drag you into their bar. Bars in China seem to work a little differently. When you sit down you order how many bars you think you’ll drink. We started off with a 6 pack of Heineken. I’m sure you could probably order one at a time if you really wanted to, but I get the feeling its frowned upon. It’s a lot harder to fleece the customer that way. With our 6 beers they threw in 2 extra for free, as well as some popcorn and fruit. The popcorn would have been great, had it not been so sweet. Popcorn in China tends to be vanilla flavored, which is good for about 3 bites, and is not good at all when paired with a beer. Still, everywhere you go seems to cart out this garbage sweet popcorn. We finished up the night with 14 beers, 11 of which were mine, a couple of cocktails, and 3 bags of awful popcorn. Its hard to take pictures in a low-light bar at night, but even harder when you can barely stand after drinking 11 warm $1 beers.

The Beijing Subway is like most modern subways, except for the modern part.

The platforms are clean, especially when compared to anywhere else in the city, and the trains seem to run regularly. But instead of a ticket machine, there is only a ticket booth. Instead of an electronic ticket gate, there is a guy who checks your ticket before you enter. It’s all very 50′s-esque. Even the prices. The subway costs between 20 and 35 cents. Although it may seem simple, there are some striking differences that might confuse the average westerner in Beijing. If you are lined up to purchase your ticket(s) at the booth, you are doing something wrong. You should be pushing your way to the center. Apply this same technique when boarding the train. There’s no need to let people get off the train first, but there does seem to be a need to push them aside and rush on the train to get one of the many open seats that seem to be available. I don’t pretend to understand it, but being twice the size of everyone else, I don’t mind playing their pushing games.

Today, Jenny and Anniar took me to the Silk Market to pick up some souvenirs. Silk seemed to be relegated to the 3rd floor of the building, while the rest of the floors were full of foreigners paying too much for knock off brands. When there are that many foreigners in one place, you should prepare to get fleeced. Of course bargain is the key word, but I’ve never seen such pitiful bargaining in my life. I’ve heard people mention that you should bargain 1/3 off or as much as 1/2 off the advertised price. This is madness. Your first counter offer should be at LEAST 1/10 of the original price. Never EVER pay more than 1/5 of the advertised price. If they quote you 150RMB, offer 15. Walk away until you get 20. The thing cost them 5. If they don’t sell it to you at 20, which they might not if there are a many other clueless shoppers around, don’t sweat it. It was crap anyways.

You don’t always get what you pay for. That fake shirt may have only cost you $4, but it certainly isn’t worth $4. That $10 backpack will be lucky to last a day. And those $5 pants will be fine as long as you don’t try to wash them. Oh, to anyone who might recieve a Miss Sixty shirt from me as a souvineer, don’t uh…wash it…or wear it…I’m not kidding.

After getting sick of wading through the crowds at the silk market, we decided to wade through the crowds at Wangfujing Street.

Everyone’s stomach was at odds today. I tried to explain that it was the 30 minutes we spent on the Tilt-a-Whirl, but it’s really hard to explain Tilt-a-Whirl in Chinese when you don’t speak it.We went to a food court at a shopping mall in Wangfujing. There were 30 different booths to choose from, but to settle everyone’s stomach it was decided we should eat vegetables. We went to a booth with a bunch of different kinds of vegetables on skewer sticks. They were all 1RMB each (about 12 cents) and they sure didn’t look apetizing. I picked out 5 sticks, thinking I was going to have to eat them as they were. Jenny picked out 10 more and threw them on my tray. Apparently I wasn’t doing it right. Finally we get to the end and it starts to make sense. The cook takes our vegetables and sticks them in boiling water, dumps a bunch of MSG on them, pours some Szechuan soup over it, adds a few spoonfuls of spicy pepper sauce, a couple spoonfuls of garlic, and gives us each our own personal little hot pot. Hence the name (I guess) 麻辣汤 which means something like spicy hot soup (I think). It tasted great, and for $1.50 it couldn’t be beat. Though I can’t imagine the MSG and extremely spicy soup did anything to help settle our stomachs. Apparently in some places you can get the sticks for as little as half an RMB each, so if $1.50 is too much for you, search around.

That night we went to see a Chinese acrobat show. There are 3 types of shows that are popular with the tourists. Chinese acrobats, Shaolin kung-fu, and Peking opera. I’ve seen all three and frankly you can’t lose with Chinese acrobats or Shaolin Kung-Fu. Unfortunately no one wins with Peking opera. It’s like the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese Noh plays. It’s boring for locals, and even worse for tourists who don’t speak the language. Stick to the acrobats and the kung-fu.

We decided to eat dinner at around 11, and so we wandered through the hutongs looking for a place that was still open. By this point I really wanted to pay for something, besides 20 cent subway tickets and 40 cent drinks. I had to show them how to properly exploit a naive foreign tourist because they were doing a terrible job of it. I let them pick the restaurant, because I was indecisive and clueless, but mostly because I just wanted to get out of this back alley at night. We picked a spot and again I let them order, as I was clueless. Well, they sure taught me to speak up. They ordered cold chicken feet, some potato dish, and a kind of fungus that grows on wood. It was…well, the beer was really good.

I suggested maybe we should order a fish or something, mostly because my fat ass was starving, and these things weren’t going to cut it. Fortunately the fish was great, and less than $2 too. The whole meal ended up costing something like $7, most of which came from my beers.

I woke up at 6am, still feeling pretty lousy from my middle-of-the-summer cold.

The air was even worse today. At first I thought it was fog, but the constant smell and taste of dirt suggested otherwise. I was done with the hostel from the Qing dynasty, so I was on the lookout for a good hotel. It was still pretty early, but I at least wanted to stick my bag somewhere, so I picked a hotel at random from the Lonely Planet book went to give them a call. It didn’t take long to find a payphone. There are 2 payphones every 10 meters. The problem came with how to dial. As far as I could tell, there were only slots for coins or phone cards. I didn’t have a card and the shops weren’t open yet. I hadn’t seen a coin at all. Chinese currency (RMB) come in bills up to 100RMB (about $12). There are a lot of bills, 50RMB, 20, 10, 5, 1, 0.5, 0.2, and a 0.1RMB bill that is worth about 1.2 cents. Not only is this a pain in the ass, but it meant I couldn’t call anyone for now. I hailed a taxi and had me take them to the nearest hotel. It was about 8am and check-in wasn’t until 2pm so I had 6 hours to kill. I walked down to Wangfujing Street, a shopping street that runs by the Forbidden City.

It was early so the crowds weren’t about yet. I didn’t care. I just wanted to sit and rot. So I sat down and drank some rotting milk in a jar at a drink stand. Then I headed towards the Forbidden City.

On the way to the Forbidden City I passed through a park. The willow trees almost covered up the smog in the air so I spent some time here.

In Beijing there was an art festival going on (I guess) and art schools were doing showcases all over the city. “Showcase” seems to mean find a foreigner and try to drag them to your art show and get them to buy your crap.They might be well meaning students, but it’s more likely a scam to sell second rate art to foreigners. There are a lot of scams to watch out for in China. There was a bit of reconstruction going on at the Forbidden City, but I really wasn’t in much of a mood anyways. I walked around for a couple hours and it was interesting. I just wish it wasn’t so fog/smoggy. Part of the awe (to me, living in a cramped city) of the Forbidden City and Tienanmen Square is their huge expansive open areas. It’s hard to appreciate them when you can’t see past 20 meters. In Tienanmen Square I met two English students. My first thought was the ol’ art school scam, but they didn’t mention any art school. My next thought was the English-meal scam where students will find a foreigner to practice English with at a restaurant, order a bunch of expensive food and then skip out on the bill. But those fears were laid to rest when we went to KFC and they treated.

They took me to the post office to mail some post cards and souvenirs I bought. They got me back to the hotel I was planning to book a room in, and when there were no rooms available, they took me to 3 other hotels in the city until we found a room available. It was at a hostel, but it was cheaper than the 300 year old hostel, with a room bigger than my apartment in Japan, and a king sized bed. Plus it was a great location next to Beijing station.

I was feeling sort of bad for assuming they were trying to scam me at first, and at this point, they could scam me and I’d still be grateful for the help they’d given me. After checking in, they took me to an amusement park that I thought was abandoned. I offered to pay, just because I wanted to know how much this place could possibly cost, but nothing doing. I did manage to gleam the fact that due to low attendance rates, the admission fee was currently 50% off. I had an inkling they’d still overpaid, as the inside was all but deserted. At first I felt a little reassured when I noticed the park’s mascot was Winnie the Pooh. Some corporate backing would mean that perhaps the rides would have some sort of up-keep. Then I realized it was just some good ol’ trademark infringement. No way Disney or even Chuck E Cheese would sign off on this place. There was still a bit of a wait for most rides, but only because the operators had to wait until enough people were on before starting the ride. 5 People seemed to be the magic number for the “big” rides. The park was pretty big. It took a good 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other. The rides and sign posts were rusted over and faded. The vast emptyness combined with the smoggy air made it feel like we were in Silent Hill. It was really quite surreal.

There was a huge deserted ferris wheel that gave a pretty good view of the park. It probably would have given a good view of the city if you could see through the smog.

When it got dark, things only got weirder. I was convinced that the park was closed because there was nobody anywhere. But Jenny assured me it was still open. The rides still seemed to be open as they were stilled manned by workers, most of whom where asleep. After a nudge to wake them up, most would let us ride till we screamed at them to stop, since there wasn’t anyone else coming. 10 Minutes of the tilt-a-whirl was about all I thought I could take. After a half hour, you aren’t the same man you were when you got on. There was a 3D show that was sort of reminicient of Captain EO in Chinese. It used the old effects like shaking chairs, and blasts of air to enhance the uh…experience. Another effect was used when dinosaurs (yeah, there were dinosaurs) vomited on the audience, they would shoot a blast of water in the audience’s faces. Well, it hit Jenny and Anniar in the face. It must not have been calibrated for me as it would clock me in the neck everytime. Probably better off that way. I’d probably get tuberculosis from that water. There was also a children’s dance show that we ducked into to escape the rain. It opened with a magician clown deal that the 3 children in the audience loved, and then quickly turned up the heat with erotic dancers in skimpy clothes, that the 3 fathers and 1 white guy in the audience loved.

My final day in Korea, we get up and Heejin takes me to the airport which is about an hour away. She also helped me buy the tickets, cementing the fact that if I had no Heejin I’d be lying dead in a Korean gutter now. Because of her, I perhaps only spent a brief time passed out in one.

I bid farewell to Seoul. I may have been staying in a sketchy area, but it was convenient, cheap, and I never felt in any danger wandering the back alleys at night. Seoul might not be the prettiest city in Asia (definitely prettier than Osaka) but it was fun and things were cheap. Especially meat and beer. I’ll be back.Upon arriving at the airport, we had to locate the guy who had my tickets. It seemed sort of sketchy to me, but the tickets were cheap, and Heejin always bought her tickets to Japan from him. I was on China Air, and for whatever reason, the line for China Air snaked through the snakity parts of the turnstyle, then out and around the entire Section-H and down about 30 meters like at Disneyland. After an hour of wondering if we actually were in the right line, we finally got me checked in. Next I had to phone the hostel I’d reserved in China to let them know what time to come pick me up, so we headed to the payphones. Of course in this modern age, who uses payphones anymore? There was probably a phone card or something I could have bought to make things easier, but I figured the handfulls of 100 won coins in my pocket would be plenty. Whenever I am confronted with a new monetary system, it takes me weeks to adjust. I either end up with mountains of coins or stacks of low denomination bills. Of course 100 won is like 10 cents, so each coin only gave me a few seconds of international talk time. I soon realized this and the conversation became very brief, with me trying to relay the time my flight would arrive while simultaneously popping in 100 won coins like mad. I barely got a confirmation when I ran out of coins and the phone died. It worked out perfectly. The last thing was to share one last meal in Korea, and it was to be the most Korean meal yet. Heejin had a Whopper and I had some garlic onion burger, sure to earn me friends on the plane. On board the plane, I met a Korean girl named Jyeon, who of course spoke fluent Japanese. She was going to China to study Chinese for 3 months. At this point I started to get that, “wait, what the fuck am I going to do in China?” feeling again. Then they served lunch and I forgot all about it. For the record, serving kimchi on an airplane isn’t the best idea. It wasn’t bad, but the plane sure stunk all the way to Beijing.

Then I arrived in China and really began to question what I was doing here. I’d caught some cold on the plane or while drunk in a Korean gutter or something, and the Beijing air wasn’t helping. After running the gauntlet out of customs with “taxi drivers” screaming at you to get in their car, I found a guy with a piece of paper with something that sort of looked like my name, so I figured, why not, and hopped in his car. The air conditioner was out and it was hot, so the windows went down. Thats when the putrid brownish-grey Beijing “air” consumed me. It’s about an hour to/from the airport to central Beijing. The expressway is lined with tall trees with greyish-green leaves, perhaps an attempt to hide the skyline. It was 3pm and the sun was nowhere to be seen. Driving in Beijing is not the safest way to get around. Pedestrians most definitely do not have the right of way, and if you manage to even find a cross-walk, just because you have the green doesn’t mean 10 cars won’t honk at you to move and then run the light.

You won’t have to worry about this too much though, as there are very few cross walks. The proper way to cross the street is to wait until the adjacent lane is clear, and run to the side of the next one until it’s clear. You’ll certainly be stuck in the middle of the street while cars zip by you, but it’s the way things are done. I am a pansy, and could never get used to this, and would walk for miles to find a cross walk when I was alone. Once I’d finally arrived at my hostel, I was about ready to pass out. I had chose my hostel based on its location in the hutongs. The hutongs are ancient streets and alleys that run through Beijing around the Forbidden City. They are very uniquely Chinese, and something everyone should see before they are gone. They’ve disappeared over the years, replaced by high-rises. With the 2008 Olympics coming to Beijing, the hutongs are being torn down faster than ever. I have to say, they were really interesting, except I had a cold and the air was killing me and I wanted to sleep. My hostel was built in the hutongs, in a building built in the 1700s. Now this seemed like a great way to experience Beijing when I booked it online while sitting in my underwear with a beer and my sinuses clear. Arriving in China sweating, tired, and with some sort of bronchitis, the thought of trying to sleep in a room from the 18th century somehow seemed less than ideal.

Especially when I wanted to crash at about 8pm and had to deal with german backpackers in the courtyard until 2am. The courtyard that my window opened to directly. My window that didn’t close at all. Granted the hostel had a lot of charm, and would be great for a night if I wasn’t on my deathbed. But I made a plan right there to find something else the next morning. I bought a Minute Maid orange drink for some vitamin C. The nutrition info said 4-43mg of vitamin C. I bought another just so I could double my odds. With 8 to 86 mg of vitamin C in me, I laid down and slowly died, listening to germans play chinese checkers.

I hate German.

Yargh.

Due to the previous nights events, I was out until at least noon. Heejin had somewhere to go, so when I finally got up at like 3pm I was on my own. I was in no hurry to do anything, or do much walking, so I decided to go to the COEX Mall. It was sort of far away, so I figured it would require at least a half hour of sitting on the train. That way I could sit on my ass while generally feeling like I’m out on the town and not wasting my vacation in a hotel room. The COEX Mall is the largest underground mall in Asia, and since I’ve never heard of an underground mall anywhere besides Asia, it just might be the biggest in the world. It’s got an aquarium, 16 screen theater, and a kimchi museum in addition to countless shops as well as two food courts. Every few meters on the ground there were large touch screen displays built into the floor. They were mostly used for advertisements, but they had games built in like soccer or pong. You had to keep an eye out as you walked to make sure you didn’t walk through someone’s pool game. On the train to the COEX Mall, I met a little girl named Mina who had studied in Kansas of all places. She showed me how to get to the mall, and then took me to the game center where she raped some drum game. I’m sure we were quite the strange sight.

After I had enough of commercialism (and found my way back to the station) I headed back to the hotel to do laundry, which meant washing some shirts in the sink and then blow drying them for an hour while watching Korean TV and figuring out my money situation. In Korea, the largest bill is worth approximately $10, so if you walk around with a lot of cash, you are going to have a fat wallet. Knowing this, I initially exchanged only 20,000 Yen ($200) at the port when I arrived. Little did I know, this would prove to be plenty for the entire time I was in Seoul.

Since I had more than enough money left over, and it was my last night in Korea and I was still hung over, there was only one thing I could think of doing. I called up the ol’ partner in crime and we went a’drinkin’. No more pics because a big camera would have only slowed things down.

Today I met up with my Korean friend Heejin. First stop was Myeongdong, a fashion district. Though rather than fashion, we were here for the 종로김밥 for breakfast. They are a kind of “kimpa,” rice wrapped in seaweed, eaten with spicy daikon kimchi and squid.

It was good, but today was hedonism day and so we were far from finished. Heejin may barely weigh 100lbs (if that) but she puts my fat ass to shame when it comes to putting food away. The next stop was ice cream, and despite the fact that it was 10 in the morning, the place was packed and there was a line. Heejin taught me how to order two mango flavored ice creams in Korean which I managed to squeak out, but then the guy taking orders asked me a follow up question which threw me, so I asked Heejin what he said. I asked in Japanese, and the guy picked up on it and made it clear he spoke Japanese too. This was when I slowly began to realize, I would never be able to learn Korean if I lived here, because everyone speaks Japanese. He had asked if I wanted big or small. That may have been the dumbest question ever. They were out of mango so we got different flavors and went to sit down inside. The walls and tables and floors were covered in graffitti. Jeehae was here and Hyeojin loves Seonga. This became a common theme throughout the trip, as anywhere frequented by young Koreans had been decimated with graffitti.

After dessert, we headed back to Insadong-gil to an art showcase. With hedonism comes a need for a bit of culture. We figured 20 minutes should do it, so we spent some time looking at various arts and such not.

At this point we really didn’t know what to do. Heejin’s lived in Japan so long she was almost as much of a tourist in Seoul as me. We did the only thing we could think of. Consume. We went to a tea shop in Insadong. This one was themed after a train station. The ground had train tracks running through it. The seats were from an actual train, complete with luggage racks overhead and tray tables in the arm rests. Of course the walls and tables were covered with graffiti. I had a pomegranate tea that was entirely too girly. Heejin had a sikhye drink, sweet and made from rice. We also had the obligatory rice cakes. If you get sick of hearing about everything we ate, scroll on to the pictures. Today we really only ate and drank and drank and ate. If only everyday could be so wonderful.

We left the tea house, even more full, wandering around trying to think of what to do next. We passed a Korean Starbucks, which actually had its name written in Hangul. We then stopped and got some silkworm larvae to eat. I say “we,” but there was a bit of arm twisting involved to get me to even eat one. They don’t taste as good as they look, and considering they don’t look good to begin with, that’s quite a feat. Heejin popped them like popcorn though. Such a champ.

After wandering around downtown for a bit, trying to decide what to do, and finding that all the Karaoke places were still closed (3pm is freaking prime time) we decided it was once again time to consume. We went to a little underground restaraunt place. I initially ordered a citron tea, but Heejin one-upped me by ordering a big pot of Korean rice wine and a Korean dish made from vegetables and acorns or something called 도토리묵 (Dottolimuk…maybe?). At 3 in the afternoon, I thought there was no way we’d be finishing that big jug of wine. By 6pm we were finishing up our second one and talking loudly. The table next to us had 3 korean students and a Japanese exchange student speaking in English to each other. I thought “what weirdos” until I realized we were a big white guy and a korean girl speaking Japanese to each other. By 8 we were stumbling out the door after polishing off a third jug of rice wine. Did I mention Heejin was a champ? Because Heejin was a champ.

After stumbling out the door we noticed it was dark, and decided to head up to the mountain Namsan, where Seoul Tower is, to catch a good night view of the city. To get to the top of the mountain there is a cable car, or stairs for people who are in shape (or think they are) and aren’t drunk (or think they aren’t). This wasn’t us, so we hopped onto a cable car and hobbled to the top of the mountain. There was a spectacular view from the top of the mountain. Pretty much everyone we talked to recommended not wasting money by going to the top of the tower, as the view from the top of the mountain is supposed to be good enough. Well at 5 bucks it wasn’t exactly breaking the bank so we went to the top anyways. Granted the view from the top of the mountain is plenty nice, and more than adequate, but the view from the top of the tower is really fantastic.

After making our way down the mountain (and opting for the cable car rather than walk down the mountain on the steep steps while utterly wasted off our asses) we were again at a loss of what to do next. Not really, we knew exactly what was coming next. Korean BBQ and lots of it. But it was a question of where. Anywhere around the mountain or tower would be outrageous tourist prices. Plus we were (I was) still stuffed from the previous outings, so to burn off some calories and make room for beef, we hired a taxi and drove around the city. Not aimlessly of course, we were going somewhere. But when you are drunk in a taxi in a foreign country and you don’t know where you are going, it just feels like you are cruising around the city, which was fine by me. Fortunately in Korea, like everything else, taxi’s cost a fraction of what they do in Japan. The taxi drivers seemed to speak some Japanese too. Love this country.

Heejin picked a spot that was really nice. Nice to me amounts to lots of meat, and a vacuum hose thing hanging from the ceiling to play with while the meat was cooking. It was a few bucks for a 3 person serving of kalbi beef. This looked like plenty to me, as I was still stuffed, but 3 servings for 2 people doesn’t add up nicely, so Heejin ordered 6 person servings. A champ. A champ to end all champs. Kalbi is cooked on a grill in front of you, then wrapped in lettuce or a leaf with a bit of sauce and maybe some other ingredients like radishes or kimchi or perhaps a second slice of kalbi. Kalbi goes great with beer, but even better with soju. Except when you are already drunk, but then you really don’t have a choice do you? No. No you don’t. We finished up the night leaving behind some wasted beef, which I’m completely sure was my share. I just couldn’t hang with Heejin. I think in the end I gained 5kg that day, and she managed to lose 3.

Gyeongbokgung Palace.

I woke up early and the weather was nice, so I hopped on the subway to visit Gyeongbokgung Palace. It’s the largest palace in Korea, originally built in the 14th century. It’s also home to the National Folk Museum of Korea, which I opted to skip. I arrived just after it had opened so most groups were still assembling for tours. Most of the tour groups were Japanese, though there were a couple of English speaking tours around. It would have been pretty obvious if I were to follow an English speaking group to mooch on their tour, but I figured I’d be pretty safe following around a Japanese tour. I did this for a while until ultimately realizing that I didn’t really care about the history, as it was sort of boring, so I left my (their) tour and wandered off on my own. This proved to be a much better way to see the palace, as it was still early in the morning. I managed to get ahead of the tour groups as they stopped at each building to learn the historical significance of each one, and the back of the palace was almost deserted.

The palace is pretty big. I kept thinking I was done until I’d turn another corner and stumble on another 3 courtyards. It was impressive, but I would have been satisfied with a quick glance at a couple buildings and a brief overview of the history. Something kept me there, maybe it was some kind of cultural guilt, or maybe it was because I really had nothing better to do. A lot of sites in Korea are closed on Mondays. As I was leaving there was a changing of the guard type ceremony going on. A line of guards in red suits (and glued on beards) were lined up along the entrance. I planned to stay and watch anyways, but it looks like you aren’t allowed to leave during the ceremony. The changing of the guard was pretty interesting to watch, though it could have used some tae kwon do or maybe a battle reenactment. It would have been out of place, and completely pandering to the lowest common denominator…but I’m all about that.

Afterward I headed down the street towards Insadong-gil. On the way I decided to grab some lunch. I found a place that had Dolsot bibimbap, a meat and rice dish in a clay pot. This particular place also had its menu items written in Japanese outside. This just screams tourist spot, which screams overpriced. Though I’ve been paying Japanese prices for bibimbap for a long time, so even the most expensive Korean restaraunt would probably seem cheap to me, and this one sure did.

After eating I walked down towards Insadong. Insadong is an area featuring many art stores, antique shops, and tea houses. It’s also home to Jogyesa, the largest Buddhist temple in Korea. I’ve seen a hundred temples over the years in Japan, but figured maybe a Korea one would be different. And different it was. In Korea, buddhists are like…actually buddhist. It’s hard to explain, but in Japan, most people will admit they are Buddhist, and will go to temple on certain occasions, but it feels like the Christian family that goes to church on Christmas and Easter. It’s more of a social responsibility than any real faith or belief. In Korea though, for whatever reason, the Buddhists feel really…Buddhist. There weren’t even any crappy souvenir shops selling offensive T-shirts or bootleg merchandise or any of the good stuff they hock around the temples in Japan. They did, however, have a lot of literature about buddhism.

After that, I headed to Insadong-gil, the main street in Insadong. It’s also where half the antique shops in Korea are located.

On my way out, I ran into an Irish girl named Ruth trying to buy a subway card. She spoke as much Korean as me (none) and we were both going to the same place, so we hung out for a while. She had spent a month teaching English in a small Korean village somewhere, and was spending a week in Seoul before going home. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even if her accent was so strong I had trouble understanding her. I got plenty lost on my own, and two heads are better than one, so you can just imagine how lost we got together. We eventually made it to Dongdaemun and we walked around the market area, then to the stadium where a flea market is held.

After finishing up with Dongdaemun market, Ruth and I headed back to Insadong-gil. She had the Lonely Planet Seoul book, which was hopefully more up to date than the Korea book. It’s maps were just as confusing, though we managed to make it to a tea shop. In Insadong-gil, the tea shops tend to have their own theme. One might be patterened after a school house, another has birds flying around in the tea shop. A common theme seems to be junk-shop, which a bunch of random crap on the wall like an American family restaraunt. The one we chose had sort of an antique shop feel with a few birds and a rabbit. There were 20 different kinds of teas. I opted for the cold pear tea. It came with two kinds of sweet candies and wasn’t a bad way to escape the heat on a hot summers day. I really want to go back. Only so I could try a few of the other teas, and not just so I could play with the bunny.

After this it was getting dark, so I headed back to my hotel to get some dinner. I asked the guy running the desk where and what he recommended. He spent 20 minutes giving me a rundown of the history of korean cuisine, but I had made up my mind on what to order 3 minutes into his lesson. He mentioned spicy, and beef, and thats what I’m all about.

It was indeed beefy and quite spicy. And the kimchi kept coming.

A deserted Momochi Seaside Park in Fukuoka.

My ferry to Korea was due to depart at 11am, and I woke up at 6am, there was nothing to do but partake in the hotel buffet. After an hour of bacon and bacon-flavored sausages, I set out for the one tourist attraction I could find within the city limits, Fukuoka Tower, which didn’t open until 9:30.So I walked across the street to the deserted Momochi Seaside Park. The weather was nice, so it would have been a great day to go to the beach, but still very few people were there. Besides the occasional group of Korean tourists, the only one around was Shirtless Standing On Tables Guy who kept requesting me to take pictures of him. He really only had one pose, and never deviated from it, but kept calling for me to take more pictures. This continued for about 10 minutes until my brain finally came up with an excuse to get out of there that amounted to “Uh, I have to go now.” By this time the Tower’s gift shops had opened up so I bought fish-egg covered dried fish for a few people and headed up to the tower.

It was a decent view of the city, perhaps not worth the Y800 entrance fee, but it killed a half hour which was just enough. I headed to the port and went through “customs.” It was a little bit like flying. There’s a check-in procedure, boarding procedure, duty free shops, even metal detectors and x-rays. Though both were turned off and none of the passengers were subject to any security checks. Granted, a hijacked boat with 100 people on board isn’t quite a hijacked 747.

The interior is a lot like an airplane too. Hideously upholstered seats, tray tables, barf bags, and safety videos. The boat was full of Korean families. I only saw 2 other non-Asians and they looked as fish-out-of-water as me. When the jet boat powers up its engines, you really get the sense that you are on a rocket boat. It sounds like you are sitting on the wing of a DC-10. Though it has to be pretty powerful. I saw one headed back towards Japan, and they must get 10 feet out of the water. It takes 3 hours to go 213km, so it’s probably not THAT fast. But it’s downright SMOKING for what amounts to a tugboat on water-skis with a jet pack. One thing I’d recommend is to get a seat on the 2nd floor near the window for the best views. Most of the 3 hour trip is just ocean, but the last 10 minutes when you are pulling into the Busan port is worth it. It doesn’t matter which side, left or right, it’s an amazing harbor. It’s the third largest in the world.

As I passed through Korean customs and took my first steps on Korean soil (pavement), something crossed my mind. “Shit, I don’t speak Korean.” I never really thought about that fact. What the hell was I doing in Korea alone? I was to meet a friend in a couple of days, but how the hell was I going to get there? I pulled out my trusty Lonely Planet Korea book (newest edition over 2 years old) and quickly realized it’s maps left MUCH to be desired.

I imagine that the maps they sell separately are of much better quality (I would hope) but the ones included in the book are pretty useless as a navigation tool. After 20 minutes of wandering around in circles, I decided it was metro-time.
Metro’s being my forte, (or so I thought) I strolled down stairs confidently and determined my ticket price and went to pay. Except the damn machine wouldn’t take my money. I figured maybe it was a problem with my (crispy clean) 1000 won bill, so I bought a drink and got some change. But it wouldn’t take my change either. Granted I couldn’t read a damn thing, but there was really only one possible place the money could go. I tried all my coins and all my bills, but nothing. I started to doubt that the one piece of English on the machine, Ticket Vending Machine, meant what I thought it did. I consulted Lonely Planet, which only mentioned that the Subway was a quick and easy way to travel. I was deciding whether to try to ask the 80 year old shop keeper or the bum sleeping next to one of the machines when someone else finally came to buy a ticket. Oh. You pick your ticket first THEN put in the money…

After the 20 minutes to buy a ticket, the train ride was 3 minutes. All for a trip that probably would have taken 10 minutes to walk, if only I knew which direction to go (or how to ask in Korean).

I quickly learned that most Korean metro stations don’t have escalators. They don’t have escalators and they are DEEP. Fortunately, Yongdusan Park, which sits on a very high hill, has several escalators.

I wandered up to the park, which was pretty crowded. It was full of families. I didn’t see any other (obvious) foreigners. I still hadn’t adjusted to Korean prices, the entrance fee to Busan Tower being 3000 Won, at first I calculated it as 3000 Yen ($30) instead of the actual $3. There was a bit of a line to the elevator to the top. I stood at the end, and was forcefully dragged to the front by two ladies who apparently worked there. I think it was preferential treatment, though it made me feel really uncomfortable. When the elevator came, the woman working it had to pry the doors open with her hands. Not a very settling ride. The top was packed with people, but the tower offered an excellent view of the city and the port.

After leaving the tower and the park, I headed back to the metro station and went to Busan station to take the KTX (Korean bullet train) to get to Seoul. I wandered around the station looking for the ticket booth but I couldn’t find it. I finally broke down and knocked on a door that said INFORMATION to find two train workers. I asked them where the KTX line was. They answered happily in Korean. Of course I have no idea what they said, but it felt good to get the benefit of the doubt. In Japan, I could ask in fluent Japanese and half the time I’d still get an answer in broken English first. The only useful thing I got from the explanation was a direction, somewhere off to the left. I wandered to the left and up some steps to find another Busan station. I was in Busan Subway Station, not Busan Train Station. Even if I could forgive the ticket buying fiasco, this was a rookie mistake.

I found the ticket booths for the KTX. There were 20 of them lined up along the wall. My advice would be to walk to the very very very end of the wall to the last ticket counter. It should say “Foreign Tourist Tickets” which means “someone who can speak English.” I told the guy I wanted to go to Seoul, and he asked me if I’d like a train that left in 5 minutes. I asked him if I could make it in time and he assured me it was no problem. It took me 2 minutes just to walk back to the start of the ticket counters, and of course my platform was at the end of the station. I get down the stairs to see I’m standing by my train’s car 5. I’m in car 13. That’s only 80 yards, not even a football field. I start running, at the last minute jump into about car 10 when the doors close behind me. I fight my way through the crowds to my car and to my seat.

The KTX is newer than the Shinkansen (the Lonely Planet book says the Busan to Seoul line is due to finish in 2008…thanks guys) and faster. It’s got TVs in every car, though overall it’s not as nice inside. It’s smaller, and none of the seats seem to rotate. So some people have to sit facing backwards. Some people have a problem with motion sickness so many people were sitting on their knees in their seats facing backwards.

Though the KTX is faster, it takes longer to go a shorter distance than the Shinkansen. I imagine this is because the KTX seemed to go around the mountains while the Shinkansen just went through them. I was in no hurry and enjoyed the Korean countryside which was really green everywhere. I made friends with the guy sitting next to me, a student who spoke pretty good English. He bought me a coffee and taught me to say a few words in Korean, which I forgot nanoseconds later.

I arrived in Seoul and bid farewell to my friend (who’s name I also forgot nanoseconds after learning it). I had booked a hotel/motel online and had the subway station, so I headed for the metro. By this time it was getting dark, so when I got off at my station and walked up the 6 flights of escalator-less stairs it was night time.

At this point I realized what an awful map the website had provided. It made Lonely Planet’s maps look like a street atlas. It was fundamentally useless, so I put it away and started wandering around. After circling the block a couple of times, I found a police station and went in to ask them. I showed them the crude map and they scratched their head for a while. One of them was selected to try to locate it and I followed him out the door and into the back alleys. And deep in the alley it was. Now I realized what a difficult task it would be to explain how to find the hotel with any sort of drawn map, so I’ve recreated the basic steps in a pictorial that is perhaps easier to navigate.

When you come out of the subway, you’ll see the following. Resist your basic survival instincts and head towards the light in the back.

At this point you are about halfway there.

At this point, turn left, trying to avoid the tuberculosis.

Just passed these two cats you’ll find your hotel/motel. Sleep well.

Despite it’s somewhat sketchy location, it wasn’t a bad place. The rooms were somewhat large (compared to Japan) and although they were old, they were clean. It really is close to the station once you find the place, a 1 minute walk. It had 4 computers with internet for free usage, a free breakfast (consisting of toast, coffee, juice, and/or rice porridge), and the staff is all really nice. They all seemed to speak passable English and more importantly, fluent Japanese. I found out that many Japanese stayed here, and once the staff realized that they could more easily communicate with me in Japanese, they gave me all kinds of tips about where to eat and what to see. Though it was getting really late and I was exhausted so I grabbed some beer at the store, came back to my room, and spent the night watching this:

I love Korea.

Got up at 5am and took the train to Shin-Osaka station where the Shinkansen (Japanese bullet train) hub is.

Being early in the morning on a Saturday, there weren’t many people at any station or on the trains, something I don’t see much in Japan.My train was a Hikari 700 series, which isn’t as fast as the Nozomi 500 series but at 285km/h its plenty fast. It’s about 2 and a half hours from Osaka to Fukuoka by Shinkansen, as is one of the most expensive legs on the train network at Y14000 one-way. If you want to save Y4000, you can take regular trains, changing lines 5 times, and make it to Fukuoka for Y9500. It will only take you 12 hours. There’s also an overnight bus that takes 10 hours and runs Y10000. The cheapest way (besides hitchhiking) to get from Osaka to Fukuoka is by the little known Meimon Ferry which takes 12 hours at Y6000.

When you take the Osaka Tokyo leg of the Shinkansen network, you get a lot of nice views of the Japanese countryside, including Mount Fuji. The Osaka Hakata leg passes through mountainous terrain and so consequently 80% of the ride is spent in tunnels, emerging every few minutes for 2 seconds of farmland, then back into a tunnel. It’s really a boring ride. There are no TVs like on some other companys’ rails. The only thing you get is an LED scroll bar at the front of each car that displays the same 3 news headlines over and over, along with the current speed of the train. Fortunately, there is a meal service. You could always kill time with an overpriced bentou and a beer at 8am, which is exactly what I did.

At 8:30 I called to confirm that yes, the ferry services had been canceled that day. So I was stuck in Fukuoka for the day. The only thing I knew about Fukuoka was that it was famous for its pork bone ramen, it’s spicy mentaiko fish eggs, and it was currently raining.

The first thing I did was pick up a guide book/magazine at the station book store. I should have checked it first, because I forgot that Japanese guidebooks only list places to eat, and places to shop. So I had 15 places I could eat Hakata ramen, but nothing to do for the next 24 hours. I noticed half the places to shop were in the same place, an underground mall in Tenjin. As it was raining, “underground” anything sounded good so I headed for the metro station.

I may not know anything about Fukuoka, but give me a subway network and at least I can get around. Fukuoka’s system is really basic, only a coulpe lines that intersect at a station. A far cry from the 30 lines that intersect at 200 stations in Osaka.

Everyone got off at the same stop as me, so I figured I picked the right place. The underground shopping area was quite underground and big enough that I managed to get lost for a half hour.

I grabbed some coffee and figured out where I was going to stay that night. The guide book with 60 pages of restaurants had half a page of hotels so I made some calls and booked a room nearby.

I went to check-in and ride out the rain, according to my cell phone, the rain was going to clear up at 6pm. Though my hotel room was small, and the TV only had 9 channels, 2 of them were porn, and the mini fridge was stocked with whiskey and water and quasi-drug drinks. They were expensive so I walked across the street to AM/PM and got the same thing for 1/4 of the price.

After dark, the rain cleared up so I went to walk around the city and grab some dinner. The guide book was useless so I left it behind, ensuring that I would again, get lost. I went to back to Tenjin station, went above ground, and as expected, was lost in 30 seconds. My cell phone could probably lead me back to the metro, now I just had to find something to kill a few hours. I wandered through a red-light district and into a night market with yakitori and tempura stands. There were a couple of booths where you could fish for eels. It looked fun but I don’t know what I’d do with an eel other than pay someone to cook it for me. It seemed like a lot of work so I snapped a few pictures and wandered on. Fukuoka, like Osaka, is a city with rivers, and so there are probably some nice boat tours and restaraunts on the water. It’d be nice to come back to Fukuoka with a proper guide book and when it’s not raining.

I walked by a couple of the Hakata Ramen restaurants mentioned in the guide book, but Hakata Ramen has a really pungent smell from the pork bone soup. If one isn’t used to it, it probably smells bad. I am a big fan of it, though I have it 3 times a week in Osaka, so I wasn’t really in the mood. Instead I ate a chain restaurant that I probably could find in Osaka, really making the day in Fukuoka that much more worthwhile. Especially when you throw in the 4 beers.

Tomorrow morning at 6am my shinkansen leaves for Fukuoka, a 3 hour trip. I have a reservation on the JR Beetle hydrofoil leaving from Fukuoka to Pusan, Korea. It’s a 3 hour trip over the Sea of Japan.

Unfortunately, today a Typhoon just passed over Fukuoka. It will have passed by now, but the resulting waves have caused all the morning Beetle departures to be canceled. I’m scheduled to depart from Fukuoka at 11am, but a decision about whether or not to cancel won’t be made until 8am tomorrow. At 8am tomorrow I’ll probably be somewhere in Hiroshima, on my way to Fukuoka. Worst case scenario, I’ll spend a day wandering around Fukuoka, crash at a love hotel, and leave for Korea the next day. I’ve always wanted to see Fukuoka, but here’s hoping my ferry won’t be canceled (fat chance).

It took 2 hours to get my one bag packed. Here’s to seeing if 2 pairs of pants can last me 2 weeks. It’s nearly midnight, and I’ve got to leave in 6 hours. Unfortunately I woke up at 6pm today, so good luck of getting any sleep tonight. I guess I’ll clean up my apartment so I don’t come home to squalor. Yesterday I woke late and missed the garbage squad, so this bag of garbage is going to have to just chill on my balcony for 2 weeks. I hope it doesn’t attract too many ravens.