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Thursday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1273.
My new hobby: kitty toilet training
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.I don’t know if I have mentioned it before, but I think they have been evident in some pictures that I’ve posted, that Becca has two cats. Since I live with Becca now, this means that I have two cats.
I used to be certain that I was allergic to cats. This fear seemed well founded since both of my parents are definitely allergic and I’ve had bad allergic reactions at the homes of cat owners. I also found that I didn’t have reactions at the homes of dog owners. But, with the old Becca, who also had two cats in her house, I didn’t have allergies. And at another friends' house, who has dogs, I had bad allergies. What I realized was that I had bad allergic reactions at the homes of people with pets that shed hair everywhere and owners who didn’t clean nearly often enough; I have bad dust allergies, and this I’ve known since I was five.
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In order to live with Becca’s cats, and because it is the kind of thing that I think is cool, I have made a number of small improvements to our lives to keep the place somewhat clean. My first home improvement, which I actually made about 6 months before moving in, was to buy a Roomba vacuum. The thing works! Oh, my god, it is awesome. We pick our shit up off the floor, throw it on a couch or whatever, hit the “Clean” button, and leave for work. When we come home the place has been vacuumed and the Roomba is happily sitting on its dock charging for the next run. The vacuum’s bin is always filled to bursting with cat hair. It is very rewarding, and it keeps me from having runny eyes and nose all the time.
So it has been the better part of year since I bought the Roomba and I felt it was time for the next phase in home improvement: to get rid of the smelly litter box. The box is Becca’s job because they are Becca’s cats. This saves me the chore of having to clean it, however this also means I am at the mercy of her remembering. Sometimes it gets pretty loaded in there.
On a recent trip to the pet shop to get food etc. I saw a funny toilet seat-shapped thing calling itself the “Kitty Whiz Transfer System”. This thin piece of plastic claimed that it would allow me to teach a cat to use a toilet. How great would that be? No litter to clean, no lingering ammonia smell, and the incredible bragging rights that you taught your cat to take a dump in the toilet. I had to get it.
I waited a while to actually use it, though, because Becca had a week-long business trip and this wasn’t a task that I felt I could do alone. In that time I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was planning to do this. He recommended strongly against it. When I asked why he told me a long story of how he read online how to do it and tried to build his own “Kitty Whiz”. Long story short, he didn’t make it strong enough and it collapsed under the weight of his poor cat, who fell directly into the bowl. I figured, “hey, that’s hilarious. I’ll consider this a success if that happens too.”
But, I’m pleased to say, Becca’s cats did not fall into the bowl. They are in their 3rd day of training and look like they’re getting the hang of it. The first day was a tough, traumatic day for them because we were instructed to lock them in the bathroom until they figured it out. After 24 hours of whining, they did get it. Now they just need to keep using this special toilet-mounted litter box without incident for another 4-5 days or so and we can progress to the next stage. I’ll give more updates as I have them.
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01:57 am |
705 words in this post |
2 comments
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Thursday
Dan"
I have a quote next to my name for some reason
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1272.
Huh?
Hey guys, what’s up? I got an e-mail notice the site got hacked or something? Hopefully you all aren’t getting unruly. It looks okay to me, but uh - e-mail if things go crazy nuts.
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06:02 pm |
38 words in this post |
2 comments
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Wednesday
Joey
Matt Damon
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1271.
Get Some Nuts!
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01:25 am |
15 words in this post |
1 comment
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Tuesday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1270.
I’m a black guy, that’s so Cuil!
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.So, yeah, not a whole lot of posts lately, but I’m not going to let that stop me. In fact, I’m going to be going to Spain and France for the month of September and I plan to use this site to post updates about my trip. I said that last time too, and then I found out that Europe seems to think it is perfectly reasonable for internet access to cost 3 euros an hour and for computer keyboards to be made of solid lead. I’m planning to bring a palm pilot I won in a raffle so that I can at least type up my posts ahead of time.
But there was something I wanted to talk about in the hilarious world of the moment, and that is the latest upstart search engine, Cuil.
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Since my girlfriend and most of my bay area friends work at Google, and others at Yahoo, I follow news articles about search engines very closely. A dance friend of mine started Powerset, which immediately got bought by Microsoft for a fuckton of money, and I really wish I had become a closer friend when I had the chance. Cuil, according to it’s press release, was started by a former Alta Vista guy and, more importantly, a woman who Google already thinks is hot shit, as evidenced by the fact that they bought her and her previous search engine the last time she popped up on the scene. Cuil’s PR campaign brags that it is “the world’s largest search engine” because it indexes more pages than even Google (though google in response explained that they crawl over 1 trillion webpages and only index the ones that appear to be of any use to anyone) and the creator swears it delivers superior results.
So, unless you’re rooting for the underdog with unbelievable hubris, you’ve probably already guessed that the website totally blows goats. I’m here to tell you that this search engine would blow goats ... if it could only find them. But that’s to be expected. Wikia search sucked on its first day, but the creator was quick to stress that they were just getting off the ground. Powerset was great but limited on its first day, but they emphasize that they’re only searching over Wikipedia data. Cuil bragged about its superiority on its first day when if fact it couldn’t find a turd in an outhouse.
The unique part about Cuil’s search results is that, in addition to the classic text snippet that most search results have, it provides an extended snippet and a photo, very similar to the format of the top of the main page on Google News. In fact, just like Google News, the image next to the text may not be from the linked site, but instead from some other source from which a picture was selected by lord knows what search engine magic. The absolute funniest article reviewing Cuil pointed out the particularly hilarious results this feature occasionally yields. I can’t begin to imagine what wacked out algorithm would decide that a picture of two men masturbating on each other would be the best image to assign to the biography of a professor of quantum computing when safe search is on!
With some sick hope on my part that a picture next to a webpage about me would have some weird sexual image as well, I decided to “Cuil” myself. Sadly, I have a very common name, so I have to add extra search terms. I decided to try my name and then robot . I got this:
I also got 8 other results. At the time of this writing, 8 of the 9 total results were links to copies of that article. Whereas that article is simply the 1st hit from Google and a couple other papers I helped author are a short ways down the list.
Ok, I’m rambling on. This post isn’t anything like as funny as I’d like it to be. Basically I wanted to post the picture from that article because it is hilarious, but I don’t think Dan would appreciate me putting gay porn pictures up on his site. read less...
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03:27 am |
721 words in this post |
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Friday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1269.
That ray gun is mine!
I am super super super excited to say that I just found out that I will be an acknowledgement in the credits of EA’s upcoming game Dead Space! So sweet! I have no idea how much I can talk about the game, probably not much, but I can give you several links to official YouTube videos ( Strategic Dismemberment ). My friend Adam did the dismemberment tech for the game and he’s very proud of it, though he’s pretty sure ZeroPunctuation is going to rip the game a new one.
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In that trailer the narrator refers to a “telekinesis gun”, which is the thing that I helped out with. The game, in addition to some pretty cool lighting effects, relies heavily on physics simulation. Everything in the game applies forces on objects, and a physics simulator calculates the result. It looks pretty cool. The only problem, then, is that if you want to have a magic ray gun that moves things and you want things to move based the results of a physics simulator, then affectively have to know how to move things “in reality”! They found that objects flew too fast or looked keyframed or all kinds of aesthetically less-than-appealing results. So my friend Adam asked me how a controls person (what I am) would do to move to a destination point with a force input and discrete update rate. WELL, it just so happens that the magic force ray gun is almost exactly what every undergrad, and most graduate, controls problem analogizes to. So, I wrote him a two-page description of a pretty simple, and very reliable, algorithm for moving things with a magic ray gun.
I’ve been told that it works great for a number of their cases, but unfortunately not all. In some cases the result of my algorithm looks “too realistic”, which is to say the result isn’t very exciting but is what you would want such a device to do in the real world. It is being used in the game sometimes, though, so my name is in the credits. I’m so psyched!
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11:24 pm |
366 words in this post |
6 comments
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Monday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1268.
My heros are dying
I can’t even begin to express how sad it is that George Carlin died yesterday. He was a genius, and hysterically funny. I listened to his albums constantly as early as I learned to work the record player, so somewhere around the 5th grade or earlier. Enjoying Carlin was often an intelligence test of possible friends and, yes, some people didn’t make the cut.
It is weird to see these headlines this morning like “Carlin now headlining in heaven” when he was one of the loudest, shout-it-from-the-rooftops athiests I’d ever heard. What is very funny, though, is that even the Associated Press is quoting Carlin’s website for biographical information. Much of that biography is fiction and he proudly said as much in interviews, especially relishing his ever-changing stories of how his mother died, “In an ill-fated hot-air ballooning excercise” etc. He’s getting one more jab in at the end.
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12:35 pm |
156 words in this post |
1 comment
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Saturday
Joey
Matt Damon
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1267.
Umm...
So Facebook says it’s Peter’s birthday today so I’m going to go out on a limb and say:
Happy Birthday Peter!
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09:51 pm |
20 words in this post |
3 comments
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Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1266.
The Food
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.So I am going to lump all of my food experiences into one big thing. Many many great meals will be left out because I had so many, and to be honest, have forgotten quite a bit.
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China:
I am from the Bay, and I expected to recognize a good chuck of the food. No way. And the food is so varied that you can pretty much get anything. For instance, one would not think of the potato as linked to Chinese cuisine, but where Matt lives it is very much used (you can even get these Chinese hash browns everywhere there). Or cheese, but fried goat cheese dipped into hot sauce is a local food and excellent. I was also surprised to find that rice is considered poor man’s food and that you eat it at the end of the meal as a fill-me-up, not really during the meal. And soup (this is also true in Vietnam) is usually the last thing you eat and it just goes into your bowl where everything else had been. Anyway, some highlights:
Matt took me to a Sichuan place. Spicy and good. His favorite dish is called Grandma’s potatoes. It is basically American-style mashed potato, but with all sorts of spices in it and very hot. I was excited about it and thought I could make it at home. I told my Chinese labmate about it and she a) had never heard of it and b) found it on the internet and told me there is no way I could ever get the right oil and spices here. We also had these dry red beans with mint. I really don’t know how to describe them, but they are good. And Kung Pao chicken, which is great over there. More spicy. And of course a garlicky leafy green.
I think one of the best meals I have had in my life was also with Matt and a couple of his friends. I just love the Chinese style of eating where you order for the table and get to eat everything. Anyway, we had some kind of skewered shrimp with garlic and spices and you eat everything from head to tail. We had those red beans. And we had these pork ribs that I can’t describe very well but were absolutely amazing. Of course some kind of leafy green. A light soup with potato to wash everything down with. Soooo good. I’m forgetting some stuff as well. And with beer is cost about 30 yuan each (or a little more than 4 bucks).
bao tse (no idea how this is actually written): these are steamed buns that can be filled with lots of different stuff from pork to fennel to leek to mushrooms to sweet beans. The pork ones I probably ate 7 times at least for breakfast. The buns we get in the states are sweet (and actually I found these in Vietnam) but these bao tse are savory and you dip it in soy sauce, cilantro, and hot sauce (and MSG if you want. yes, MSG is actually a condiment). I liked these.
shao cao (again, no idea how this is written): this is not only good, but funny and semi-clandestine. Street food is apparently no longer legal in China. These shao cao places only exist at night. They have maybe 50 different skewers that you can choose from. You get a plate and pick up the skewers you want, they spice them and grill them. I had skewers as diverse as chicken feet, bao tse, dumplings, green onions, eggplant, stinky tofu, ribs, and plenty of other stuff that I dont know what it is. We had a shao cao place right outside our guesthouse in Dali, and this is perfect food for getting back from the bar. Matt told me that the cops can roll by on these place and they are gone in seconds. I can’t imagine getting all those skewers packed up so quickly. Oh, and its roughly a yuan per skewer.
Beijing Duck: there is something great about getting Beijing duck in Beijing. I went to the famous place where the elite Beijingers hang out at. We got one duck for three people. They bring out the entire duck (head and everything) and a guy wearing a dustmask. You are supposed to watch him carve it. When all is said and done, you get three plates of different meat. One is the normal duck meat with skin, another some fatty part with skin, and the other had some organs that I think was the liver. You also get duck soup from the stuff that leaks out. I liked all 4 of these things. You eat the duck the same way as in Chinese places in the States where you get pancakes, scallions, and plum sauce. Very very good.
Vietnam:
It was surprisingly different from Chinese food. Also very good, but less varied. And I saw roasted dog there, something I have no problem with, but is still a little weird as somebody from the States. As opposed to China where street food is illegal, it is pretty much the only way to eat in Vietnam unless you are a tourist. You just pull up a very small stool to a stand and plop. Some places only serve one thing, so you just get whatever it is they serve. But I dont know why the stool is so small. Vietnamese are pretty small, but even they had there knees at head level while eating. Strange.
Pho is eaten all the time in the North. I had it for breakfast. And you can get either chicken pho (pho ga) or beef pho (pho bo). I had both multiple times and was happy each time. So... fresh. I had my place in Hanoi that I kept going back to. The spring rolls that you get in the States are also popular there, but where I was they were usually fried. Very good. Also very fresh-tasting. For whatever reason, the mint and basil and other spices just tasted more fresh.
Fish sauce is in everything. I sat down at one place that had three types of meat on noodles with cabbage, peanuts, and fish sauce. And its actually soupy so you slurp up almost pure fish sauce. It was pretty good.
I was in Hanoi with an Aussie guy who ordered a roast pigeon. It really was a roast pigeon. It was chopped up, but it was obvious it was the entire bird as you could see two claws and a beak. I tried it... less meat than a quail even. The sauce was good, but I dont think I’ll be missing the pigeon.
In Halong Bay, food was included in our tour and you ate with the entire group. This was the only time I got to experience a large Vietnamese meal. You always get this water spinach, which is a weed in most countries but in Vietnam is sauteed with garlic and very good. I had a lot of fish in garlic. Squid salad, steamed clams, cuttlefish.. very good seafood.
The French influence is obvious there. And they did a great job. French rolls are everywhere, and I got snooty cheese on them. You could even find pate at street vendors. And some of the sandwiches are amazing. They have combined these French rolls with Vietnamese food. I found a sandwich vendor in Hoi An that I ate at three times because it was so good. In went chicken cubes, tomato, cucumber, and three sauces that I dont really know what they were. One was a hot sauce, one tasted like duck and I have no idea what the other one was. Scrumptous.
Hoi An had food that supposedly only exists there. In fact, my favorite food in Vietnam was there. It is called cao lau, and it is only considered cao lau if the water used to make it comes from a certain well in Hoi An. I had one of these everyday I was there. It is a noodle dish with pork, weird crouton like things, and then fresh spicing. There are large chunks of mint, and other herbs that I dont know what they were. Ah hah, I found the wikipedia on it complete with a picture (although I’m sure the recipe they gave is not right, there was way more herbs and things in it). Oh, and you load it up with hot sauce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_lầu
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03:41 pm |
1415 words in this post |
4 comments
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Tuesday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1265.
Beijing
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.4:30 AM jet-lagged style:
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Beijing is not small. They say the size of the city is the size of Belgium. There are quite a few people there. Rush hour makes LA looks like a lazy drive in the countryside. It is also very polluted and you can feel it (they say a day in Beijing is the equivalent of 70 cigarettes). But that place has a buzz. With the Olympics coming up, you can almost feel the excitement. I dont know how they will be ready for it, as it is less than two months away an half the stuff they wanted for it wasnt ready. I flew to the new airport. Very nice actually. I rode the new metro (the first time on the trip I didnt take a taxi for local transport). Also nice and easy to figure out.
I did more sightseeing (and probably spent more money) in the three days I had there than the rest of my entire trip. The first day I woke up early and went to the Wall. The second I went to Tianamen Square and The Forbidden City. Tianamen is just... huge. Thats about it. And seeing Mao’s face on the entrance to the Forbidden City from there is quite strange. The Forbidden City was neat, but very crowded. I was upset to not get the Roger Moore narrated audioguide I was promised by Matt (I would have loved to see this place to a voice that could also say “Vodka martini shaken not stirred”). But they have a new system that is a fantastic idea, but the lady who narrates it goes on and on and on. It’s all done by GPS. You put the thing in your ear and as soon as you get somewhere a British lady starts talking to you. She tells you lots of stories about past Emperors or whatnot. Almost all of them involve concubines. It seemed like the Emperors had a pretty cushy lifestyle. I liked the names of the buildings. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was closed for renovation, but I could still check out the Hall of Middle Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony.
I also went to the Summer Palace. I was determined to do nothing, but I got convinced to go there on my last day. Also very nice. Just huge. Its kinda like an enormous tea garden like in SF. There is a huge lake and you can walk around it as well as climb the Hill of Longevity. Buildings here had even better names, including the Hall of Understanding the Universe and the Bridge of Knowing the Fish. I took a 2 hour very peaceful nap.
My hostel was awesome. It was in a hutong. These are the old neighborhoods that are quickly being demolished in the name of progress. This was the only place in my entire time I spent in a dorm, because real money is actually spent in Beijing. But it had an awesome crowd, a rooftop area overlooking the hutong, and 4 yuan large Tsingtao beers. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
And I had Beijing Duck in Beijing. At a fancy place where the guy comes out and carves the duck in front of you. And they have ushers leading you to the bathroom. It was good. The only meal I had where I spent money, and well worth it. read less...
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06:10 am |
568 words in this post |
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Monday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1264.
Death of a Visionary
Stan Winston died today. While Jim Henson was a hero to me largely posthumously, Stan Winston has always been there making amazing creations, each one more elaborate and technically sophisticated than the last. I went into Mechanical Engineering and on to robotics because of Henson and Winston. My design of my robot head was based on books by the Henson Creature Shop, and on books by Cynthia Breazeal, who’s robot Leonardo was designed and built by Stan Winston and his company. Film and Animatronics have lost a legend. Horror and Sci Fi will never be the same. Now Rick Baker is the last champion of practical effects.
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08:57 pm |
113 words in this post |
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Sunday
Greg
craploads of zeros!
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1263.
Tide Website Launch!
Hey Everybody,
So a while back I put up a link to my tide website. Nobody commented on that post, which I assume meant that everyone was too embarrased to tell me that the site completely sucked  . Well, I am very happy to say that it no longer sucks. In fact, this site completely rocks! I have graphical calendars of all of the 2008 high and low tides for every location in the world that NOAA tracks. The interface is simple, you can find beaches/rivers in your area by a text-search or simply zooming in on a Google map. So for anyone who ever wants to know the tides because they’re going to the beach, tidepooling, surfing, ocean kayaking, or ocean sailing anywhere in the United States, Panama, Guam, The Coconut Isles from Outer Space, the Florida Keys, the Virgin Islands, or the Caribbean this is the site to go to!
Ok, I am really really excited, but I just launched the site. I’m actually advertising the site online and everything. I couldn’t have done it without tons of design help from Becca. She is almost entirely responsible for all the changes to the site that transformed it from the old, totally ugly and unusable site that I have since taken offline because of embarrasement. Becca is awesome. ... My mom helped too.
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07:14 pm |
233 words in this post |
4 comments
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Saturday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1261.
The Great Wall of China
A thousand thanks to Sean and Matt for telling me to do the wake up at 6 AM, drive for 4 hours to get out to an amazing stretch of the wall with very few tourists, walk along it over unreal terrain for 10 km, and take the bus back for 4 more hours. Unbelievably worth it. Thank you. I have heard bad stories about the locations closer to Beijing. But apparently a foot massage is included in that tour. I think I may have to go get one of these on my last day in Asia.
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10:30 pm |
97 words in this post |
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Friday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1260.
Hanoi
Exchanges with motorbike taxi drivers:
Driver: You want funky monkey?
Me:
Driver: You want boom-boom?
Me: No thank you.
Driver: Why not? You gay?
Driver: You want woman?
Aussie #1: Well I’ve already got three wives. I don’t need any more women. It’s trouble enough.
Driver: What do you want?
Aussie #2: Well, I could use a nice house, a car, maybe a girfriend, a good dog would be nice.
Driver:
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And thats about it for Hanoi. It has a lot of motorbikes. It has even more hotel scams. It has 15 cent homemade beer places everywhere. I had some great food. I liked it quite a bit after getting used to it. I saw the closed Ho Mausaleum. I went to the lake a few times and had ridiculously strong coffee. Oooh. Funny story. I ended up with tons of dong leftover. About 450,000 (or like 30 bucks, or enough to buy about 200 beers, or enough to buy about 25 bowls of pho, or about the amount an average Vietnamese person makes in two weeks). I was planning on blowing it at the airport, because I knew it would be useful only as toilet paper outside Vietnam. One problem. Once you cross security into the Hanoi airport, they do not accept dong, only US dollar. That is correct. The airport in Hanoi, the capital of VIETNAM, does not take VIETNAMESE dong. Hilarious. read less...
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08:39 am |
228 words in this post |
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Wednesday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1259.
Hoi An Again
Made it to Hanoi. Good. Had a few of those 15 cent beers last night so not feeling all that fantastic at the moment
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So Hoi An is a little picturesque town on the river, and only 5 km from the beach. The area of the twon near the river is quite old and very beautiful, but all the shops are tourist crap. There are over 500 places to get a tailor-made suit. It’s a lot. I debated getting one, because it truly is an amazing deal as a three piece suit costs you no more than 40 bucks. I met some Aussies who specifically made a trip out there because they needed a suit for work and thought it wasnt much more expensive to fly out here, buy one, and fly home than it was to get one made in Austrialia. But I got very sick of the worst sales pitch ever: “Helloooo, you buy something”. Yes, I buy something. Don’t care what it is. Just something.
I spent four nights there, which is awhile for such a small place. I felt I got to know it quite well. What kept me there (besides not wanting to deal with the transportation system here) was China Beach. A 2 minute motortaxi ride gets you out there. Its a 30km beach, and most of it is undeveloped and good. The motortaxis are all in cahoots with the little restaurants at the beach and drop you off at a specific one and you get a sales pitch. I actually liked these places for a beer, but I didn’t like the constant harrassment by peddlers to buy crap. “Happy hour! You buy something!” on cards, foot oil massage, and little snacks.
The only thing I actually did was go to My Son, a Cham ruin (from the people who brought you Angkor Wat) in the jungle. The ruin itself is not all that impressive, but set amongst the jungly mountains its quite pretty. Unfortunately, part of it was ruined in the American War.
The food was marvelous. I guess I’ll do a Vietnam food post all in one thing later. But they have stuff that is only native to there and doesn’t really exist elsewhere and was fantastic.
I fly to Beijing very early in the morning tomorrow. I was going to go see Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body today, but didn’t wake up early enough as they wont let you in past 10:15. I guess its all as well. I feel a little weird going to things associated with the American War, and seeing Ho Chi Minh would be a awkward. And I’ve decided against buying any Vietnam paraphenalia because I’m afraid of being shot at in Texas. Although I really like the “Good Morning, Vietnam” shirts and I think that may be OK. Heh, I saw a UT Longhorn visor being sold here. read less...
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12:04 am |
481 words in this post |
2 comments
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Monday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1258.
Hoi An
I am still in Hoi An, and leave in a couple hours on a FLIGHT back to Hanoi (hell no to the bus. damnit the keyboard í in Vietnamese. Oh well. Although ìf they lie to me about a plane flight, I may end up in a Japanese Encephalitis filled minefield on the Cambodian border. But it cóst me only 60 bucks. Worth it. But believe me I am not being pararanoid. Everybody hểre hás horror stories ò blatant lies)
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So I spent quite a bit ò time hểre. 4 nights. I đin;t do much either. The tơwn ís a quiet and on a nice river. The old buildings near the river are quite nice. The rest ò the tơưn. OK, thí will have to be done later. Keyboard tô mesed up. read less...
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11:01 pm |
135 words in this post |
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Saturday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1257.
Halong Bay
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.I am currently in Hoi An, which is apparently the tailor-made suit capital of the world. Holy crap there are a lot of these places. I arrived here in a pissed off mood after what ended up being 24 god damn hours on a god damn bus after being lied to repeatedly be different people. Just blatant in your face lies. But I am much better after two of the best meals I have had in Vietnam, as well as a day of doing nothing but relaxing on the surprisingly nice China Beach. But now I have to figure out how to get back to Hanoi. 24 hour bus ride is not an option. Anyway, Halong Bay:
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This could quite possibly be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. Certainly in the top 3 (Macchu Picchu and Death Valley being in that category). I had heard it was gorgeous, but I wasn’t fully prepared. It’s too bad though that its getting fucked up by tourists and locals combined.
Halong Bay has incredibly calm waters, and huge (like huge huge) jungly rock formations sticking out of them. It seemed like some kind of Greek myth. The haze made it all the more mysterious. And I had perfect weather, something that I hear is quite rare. I booked a 3 day tour out of Hanoi (pretty much the only way you can see the Bay is by tour). I don’t like tours, but this was worth it. The first day we went to a cave with the biggest stalagtites and stalagmites I believe I’ve ever seen. We then just cruised around the rock formations and went kayaking. I went swimming, and at first forgot that it was salt water because it is so calm... and polluted. That night we slept on the boat. Watching the sun set there was unreal. I can’t say it was a quiet sunset, because there was plenty of Vietnamese kareoke being blasted from the cabin below. Heh, that night I roomed with a Russian pothead, which was a hilarious combination.
The second day we went to Cat Ba Island. This is the biggest island on the Bay. Basically, it is jungly rock formations everywhere. We went for a hike, and I thought I was done with my fear of heights after being able to do Tiger Leaping Gorge no problem. No. I couldn’t do the last part of the hike. But man, beautiful. That night we slept in a hotel on the island. My roommate was a surprised-to-have-a-male-roommate Scottish girl who kept the AC on at 22 C. I told her my roommate at home puts the heater on when it dips to 25 (sorry Jen, but I had to point out most of the world is crazier than me when it comes to AC).
All meals were included, and good. There was fish at every meal. It was served communal style, and it was interesting watching the ediquette of everybody. And they gave us gringos forks, but I made a serious impression with the Vietnamese when I accidentally got seated with them and turned down the fork in favor of YOU FOUND THE SLIGHTLY LESS SECRET WORDs.
Anyways, incredibly beautiful. Too many people though. And too many people chucking shit into the Bay. But well worth it. read less...
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07:32 am |
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Thursday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1256.
Two awesome tales of kindness
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.I just got back from a cruise in Halong Bay, but I dont have time to talk about it. But I do want to write about two nice people (or groups of people).
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I’d been warned by a few that in Vietnam you continuously get screwed. This is true. I’ve decided to not care, and in the 12 days here, my estimate is that that will cost me about 50-100 bucks total. I think not caring is worth it. Although I just got fucked into buying what I didn’t realize was a 16 hour busride to Hoi An. Yes, I decided to skip second-rate Touristia of Nha Trang and instead go see something and also go see China Beach, which is supposedly very nice.
Anyway, the stories. I’m sitting having a beer in Cat Ba Harbor, and this Vietnamese guy asks me if I’m a footballer. I’m flattered, but I tell him I’m not. Apparently there was some international tournament in town. Anyway, we get to talking and he is a masseuse. He complains that he hates how all the massage parlors are actually for boom-boom and not the art of massage. I tell him I have been wanting a massage but have been too scared because I don’t want the boom-boom. He says, “Jaschu (people here really cant do my name), I want to give you a massage.” I think there has to be a catch here. He comes over and I got like a 20 minute face and neck massage. I didnt know the eyebrows and ears could be massaged. He finished by cracking my neck and my back. It was good. I ask him if he wants a beer, and he says “No, just wanted to show that Vietnamese massage is not boom-boom”, and he says good-bye and leaves. Awesome.
2) There were five Vietnamese guys no older than 20 years old on my tour. I could tell they didnt like foreigers at all. But for some reason, they loved me. I think it was because I could use YOU FOUND THE SLIGHTLY LESS SECRET WORDs. Anyway, despite the fact they speak no English, they invite me out for beers one night. I couldnt say no to 5 Vietnamese teenagers. Anyway, we go to this place by the harbor, and they order lots of beers that you share amongst yourselves. They also got tons more food that apparently goes well with beer. They got this like fish jerky stuff I didn’t like so much, and these amazing peanuts (Matt, the peanuts are Vietnam>China>USA) and this strange sour fruit you dip in chili powder. And they kept filling up my beer and pointing that I need to eat more food. I also had more cigarettes than I have ever had in my life because Matt had me scared when he said it was incredibly inpolite to turn one down in China. So I had 3 or 4. And they kept forcing me to eat and eat and eat. Anyway, when all was said and done, the waiter comes over for us to pay. They would not let me pay a single cent. Here we are in Vietnam, where despite the fact that I am a graduate student, I probably make as much as all of them combined as well as there parents combined. Yet they refuse to let me pay anything. Also awesome.
All right, time to go to my horrible busride that I a) dont want to take and b) probably paid way too much for but I listened to the sheisty-ass tourgroup owner on my cruise. I knew she was sheisty too. Damnit. read less...
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06:19 am |
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Monday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1255.
Kunming
I made it to Hanoi yesterday, and it feels like... another country. Tourism has been entrenched here for much longer meaning a) there are fat Americans walking around b) its a hell of a lot easier to do things and people speak English c) they know better how to rip you off (the god damn cab driver charged me over 20 bucks to go from the airport to the old town. It’s far, but there were signs at the airport saying it should cost much less. But you try arguing in Vietnamese) and d) prostitution is much more in your face. Oooh oooh. And people eat pho here not for just dinner, but also for breakfast and lunch. I’ve already had two bowls of pho. Phoantastic. Anyway, about Kunming:
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Matt has a good life. A lot of it is because it is so damn cheap to live in Kunming. He has a two-bedroom pad with nice furniture on the 8th floor (no stairs) of a large apartment complex that overlooks other buildings (and they amazingly all have solar panels on the top. How’s that for China never being eco-friendly). His fridge is empty because its simply too cheap to eat out. The public transportation seems pretty good, but you almost never have to take it because cabs are so damn cheap. And he eats for free at a Western food place because he tutors the wait-staff in English.
There is also a large expat community in Kunming. Pretty much everybody I met was awesome, and its so international. I played badmitton with two Italians and a Venezuelan. I played Monopoly on the computer (trust me, this is actually really fun) with an Australian and a Polish girl. And I had many beers with people from everywhere. It’s awesome. And most of the people there seem to really put in the effort to learn Chinese. Matt has both expat and Chinese friends. And seeing my 6'3" half-Italian half-Norwegian friend from college speak fluent Chinese never ceased to be funny.
Anyway, I spent quite a few days there just lying around watching DVDs, walking around and getting lost and hopping in a cab and paying so little, having amazingly food (one meal with his Kiwi friends rivals the best meal I have ever had in my life), and having Matt show me about. It was awesome. Thank you so much for everything Matt. And I hope you don’t mind me writing about you, but I figured it was cool after you linked to this site and now I have to be all self-conscious about writing well because people I don’t know are actually reading this thing.
For a fantastic blog run by a Californian who speaks Mandarin and lives in Kunming, I highly recommend reading www.mattschiavenza.com. I religously read it for the commentary not only on China as a whole, but on personal anectdotes. read less...
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02:58 am |
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Saturday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1254.
Random tidbits from a biased observer with a small sample size
AUTO LOG WARNING: This is a long post.So I decided to slow myself down and hang out with Matt here in Kunming for a few days. I decided I didn’t really feel like the 14 hour busride to the Vietnam border and later the all-night train from Sapa to Hanoi, so instead I decided to forgo Sapa and bought a plane ticket to Hanoi and will be leaving tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to write a few little random tidbits from what I’ve seen here in China:
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- Driving here is insane. I thought Bangkok was the craziest driving I’ve seen, but here is even more amazing. It seems like anarchy out there, and every space in the road is allowed to be accessed at any point. Luckily, drivers honk every few seconds to let people know where they are. And pedestrians simply have no right of way, even if they have the walking man symbol. Cars turning right, or even cars going straight, will honk at you and avoid you as you cross the street. You really have to be paying attention. Then, when you reach the other side of the sidewalk and you think you are safe. Wrong. Bikes, motorcycles, and even cars will drive on the sidewalk. Yes, even cars. And they will honk at you to get out of the way. It’s hilarious.
- Food here is amazing. I’ll write a full post about it later. But I had a fruit I’ve never seen before that was the best fruit I’ve ever had. I thought it was lychee, and I bought a few and was excited about my lychee. But when, I tried to peel it, there was no peel and the whole thing was the fruit. I bit into it. Oh my god. It tasted like a big rasberry, with even more of a rasberry-ish flavor. So good.
- Spitting. It’s funny. Anywhere, people will make a huge loogie-gathering noise and just let fly. You can even do it indoors. The highlight spit was on the airplane. I actually think it’s kinda cool that you can just get rid of all the crap in your mouth and people don’t care.
- I’ve heard some funny noises. In Dali, I heard a band play Jingle Bells. The best was when I was walking around Kunming I saw some type of city vehicle that was spraying water on the street (I’m not sure why you need to spray water on the street, but apparently they need to), and the song it played to let people know it was there was “Hava nagila.”
- Seinfeld is funny.
- Warm beer. I don’t like this. The only places where you can get cold drinks is where they cater towards westerners. But I do like the size of the beer bottles that you get. And Tsingtao is much better here than it is in the States. Other beers are also OK, kinda Mexican beer-ish. And the Chinese drink Budweiser to look cool and whatnot, I suppose not realizing how bad it is.
- I was sitting at a park people-watching and something seemed weird to me. It took me awhile to figure out what it was. What is was was that every mother, father, or mother/father combo had only one kid with them. read less...
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03:05 am |
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Thursday
Jascha
Bean Bag King
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1253.
Lijiang
It takes about 4 seconds to realize you are in pure Touristia. However, it takes about another 4 seconds to realize that this Touristia is not catered to you.
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Lijiang is an old city about 8000 feet up I believe. It is surrounded by mountains, with the 55000 meter mountain looming in which the other side is the Tiger Leaping Gorge. It is inhabited by the Naxi minority, but currently many Han have capitalized on the tourism there. It seemed to me the Han treat their ethnic minorities the same way that we do in the States; find them interesting and its kinda fun to observe their strangely different culture. For instance, you see old women in Naxi dress and at certain times in the central square, they dance for all to see. Reminds me of a luau.
The old city is arranged in a manner similar to Venice. It is windy and curvy, amazingly easy to get lost in, and has canals that people still use to wash (ewww) things in. The buildings are beautifully built and have the cool blue-ish rooftops that slant like a skijump. But what is in all these buildings is mostly crap. And there are hundreds if not thousands of these shops. Just trinkets, jewelry, dresses, and whatever else you would want to buy at a Touristia. However, there are none of the “One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor!” shirts that you would find at a Western Touristia. In fact, I couldn’t find a single T-shirt that I would actually wear, despite the fact that I was in desperate need of one. No T-shirt that just said Lijiang or something simple on it. I guess the Chinese tourists don’t want this. I also counted 7 yak meat shops.
I thought the city was pretty and very touristy during the day, but at night it became astonishingly beautiful. All the shops close, but they light these red lanterns that make the entire city glow red. Looking at these red buildings going up the hill is very impressive.
Oh, and I figured out the mystery of the 30 yuan popcorn. At the most touristy of restaurants, they have both a Chinese menu and an English menu. The English menu has the same stuff but for about three times the price. And I hardly saw any Western tourists, but they have a good gig going on there. read less...
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06:59 am |
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