that's what mees said.

eurotrip, beginnings

Johnson and I are taking some down time at our hostel tonight, so I figured I can jot down some thoughts from the first few days of our Eurotrip.  In the last four days, we’ve hopped from London to Venice to Florence, whew.

London (one day)

• From the moment I got into the city, I felt like I was in Harry Potter.  The buildings, the accents, signs pointing to King’s Cross… :)
• I think London smells like formaldehyde, which is pretty random and kind of gross.  Maybe it’s the gasoline they use?  It just kept taking me back to 9th grade biology class.
• High street Kensington looked like NYC on the first floor and Europe on the floors above — modern shops topped by ornate architecture.
• I had my first fancy sit down Indian meal — we went to Amaya, a one Michelin star restaurant with tapas style dishes.  I had the biggest prawn I’ve ever seen (the size of a lobster), an amazing oyster with cream sauce, and a great fig cocktail.
• We hung out at a pub and had some British ale, apparently it’s supposed to be served room temp.  The inside of the bar looked just like Duke’s in Cupertino Village, wood panelled walls and red cushioned booths.
• Small word differences were amusing — baggage reclaim instead of baggage claim, left luggage instead of lost luggage…  Different but the same.
• Generalization — British people are tall, skinny, pretty, and dress like preppy hipsters.  Or they look like Simon Pegg.
• London is flat, nary a mountain to be seen.  Where do people go to do outdoorsy things?  If I were to ever live in London, that might be one major thing I’d miss.

Venice (two days)

• Man, getting here from London was a pain.  I think it took us seven hours, and we had to take a train, plane, bus, and steamboat.
• 99% of the time when we were walking around, we were lost.  It was pretty unnerving, and it felt like we were in the Harry Potter maze with tall walls lining the narrow alleys in place of big bushes.
• We stayed at a place we booked through airbnb that was pretty nice, but smelled pretty heavily of mothballs.  I thought only Korean houses smelled like that.
• The first directions we received from the B&B receptionist — “Go left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.  That’s the fastest way.”  I had a big laugh, but that really is the only way to give directions in Venice.
• For the first hour in Venice we were roaming around dark, empty streets.  We  forgot that it was a Sunday and most things were closed — I was beginning to think Venice was a ghost town.
• When we finally “found Venice,” we got to the main square, surrounded by hundreds of tourists, and right in front of the building that looks just like The Venetian in Vegas.  ”That’s where Tao would be!” - Johnson
• We overheard an Italian woman speaking fluent Chinese.  So cool.
• For both nights we went to hole in the wall restaurants to grab small bites and a drink.  We judged a place by how many locals were standing outside with a glass of wine.
• The main drink in Venice is called spritz, which is prosecco mixed with either Compari or Aperol.  What either of those are, I have no idea, but the first one is bitter and the latter is sweet.
• We met some random people while hopping from place to place, from stoners from San Diego to funny old men from Canada.
• I tried cereal flavored yogurt.  It’s as bad as it sounds.
• We started using landmarks on the second day to find our way around — take a left at the second bridge before the tilted clock tower, turn right at the dragon lamp post.
• The best feeling was when we re-found bars from the previous day that we thought we’d never find again.  Serendipity.
• The small dishes were mostly small sandwiches or bread with toppings, or fried pieces of seafood.  Our favorite place had bread with artichoke spread, spicy chili spread, and asparagus cream with various meats and cheese on top.
• A tip I wish we had known — if you want to find an internet cafe, just look up.  There are small signs on random corners with an @ symbol and an arrow.   They’re all located in the smallest of alleyways.
• When one of the bars was closing, they offered us plastic cups to take our drinks to go.  Love!  It made our zig zag of a walk home much more pleasant, me with my cup of aperol spritz and Johnson with his cup of Paulaner.
• Every little shop is a cafe and bar mixed together, and the shop owners seem to drink all day.  They’re so friendly too!
• Overall — beautiful city, kind of boring, lots of elderly people.

Florence (we just got here today!)

• The train from Venice to Florence was the nicest train I’ve ever been on.  It felt like the Virgin America of the train system — new, modern, clean.
• I wish I had paid more attention in 12th grade art history.  Everything we see is so vaguely familiar but I wish I remembered more details. 
• Our hostel is right next to the Duomo.  Pretty awesome.
• Michelle gave us a tip to jump over the wall of the Santa Trinita bridge, sit on the protruding cement triangle, and drink wine while watching the sunset.  When we first walked up to it, we thought Michelle was insane because the triangle looked like a big drop from the wall but it wasn’t that bad.  What a perfect spot for the afternoon :)
• We were craving gelato and made the mistake of getting it right next to the Duomo — my gelato cost 6.5 Euros.  Ouch.
• Every landmark is immense, ornate, beautiful… and crowded.
• We had dinner at a small trattoria with great gnocchi, a kind of dry meatball dish with artichokes on the side, and a really good braised beef dish with potatoes.  Tuscan food seems simple (in a good way) and hearty.
• Our clothes are starting to smell like a bad mix of curry, smoke, and meat.  Laundry time soon…

Two more days of eating and drinking our way through Florence, then we’re off to Spain!

konglish

Currently streaming: SYTYCD Top 8 Results Show (Yeah, I’m a week behind, BUT WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON OVER THERE?? Vote people! Those two guys should not have been in the bottom two. But man, the Top 8 Performances show was amazing!)

My brother and I speak broken Korean, but we know enough to get by conversationally. We realized that we pronounce things “differently” (a.k.a. wrong) because we learned from my mom, who mixes different accents together from all the dramas she watches. My cousins said that after hanging out with us for two weeks, their Korean is getting worse. Haha :(

We graduated from Korean movies with subtitles to one without! We went to the movie theatre last night and watched a movie called “The Good Guy, The Bad Guy, and the Weird Guy.” I was proud of myself because I think I followed along pretty well, but it’s annoying not being able to catch the meanings behind all the one-liners. So the whole theater would laugh, and I would just be confused. And it sucked whenever people spoke in Chinese or Japanese because I couldn’t read the Korean subtitles fast enough before they disappeared.

(Notes on the movie: It was an action slash comedy, and it was interesting because it had a Western theme. So it was weird seeing Korean people looking like cowboys and riding horses. The Weird Guy ended up being the Korean equivalent of Jack Black. The movie was just okay, but the interesting thing about it was that it had pretty interesting cinematography. One thing that they did was use the camera as another surface, so when someone got shot near the front of the screen, the blood would splatter on the lens too. I guess I haven’t seen an exorbitant amount of movies in America, so I don’t know if that kind of stuff has been done before. Regardless, I thought it was pretty cool!)

My two cousins are going to Canada in a week or two to study abroad for a year. So they’ve been asking us about slang and mannerisms, and today my cousin asked me you’re supposed to use air quotes. It’s really hard to find a way to explain things with my minimal Korean abilities, so it stumped me for a while until I could think of an example. She’s been watching “Friends,” so I think that’s why she asked. :)

Some other terms we’ve taught them are “sausagefest” (one near and dear to my heart), “third wheel,” and “chill.” And on a random night when we were out drinking, we happened upon a tough subject, and you can imagine how hard it was to explain what herpes is. It was mostly guesturing.

From my mom, we learned that “cold rice” is a mix between being the odd one out and a third wheel. We invited her to hang out with us today, but she said she didn’t want to be the cold bowl of rice. I guess it’s because all other bowls of rice are hot?

We have a niece on my mom’s side that is like 18, and she came with us to the movies last night. My two cousins met her for the first time, and they said that they think she’s from the “4th dimension.” It means she’s eccentric and offbeat in the way she thinks, and basically doesn’t belong in this dimension. They also said that if there are people that are just a little bit strange, you can say that they’re from the “3.5 dimension.”

I would much rather learn all of these things and hang out with my cousins than sightsee. We went on a short trip to GyeongJu (somewhere more south than Seoul), and I had my first Asian bus tour experience. It was ridiculously hot, and we visited a lot of traditional, historic Korean places. For example, we got out of the bus, walked up stairs, walked through a giant pathway, and reached… a hill. It was a mound of grass, and we took a picture and got back on the bus. It was a tomb of some general. Gah! But I did get to stay in my first hotel in this month of traveling, which meant readily available INTERNET, which meant a massive upload of pictures to Facebook.

I only have three days left in Korea! Overall I’m exhausted from my month of being a nomad, but I wish I had more time with my cousins. Before they go to Canada, they’re stopping by Seattle to visit our other cousins and I’m hoping to go meet them there! That means that I basically only have a week at home to myself before work starts (man, I almost typed “school” instead of work, how sad).

AHH work is starting soon! I’m excited because having an new (and interim) apartment will be fun, and I found out who my roommate is! She’s also from South Bay, and she went to Stanford. I’m getting a bit anxious and antsy because the e-mails from our training coordinators are starting to flow, and so far I’ve just put archiving them in the “Intuit” Gmail folder. Time to crack that open, I guess.

So anyways, here is what our next three days look like:

• I need to go shopping! I haven’t been able to find pretty postcards, a Hyori poster, a soju glass, and a funny Engrish shirt. (I saw some girl wearing a shirt that said “SLIPPERK WHEN WE,” and I did type that exactly so.) I’m surprised at the lack of cheesy tourist shops in Asia! I might have to wait until I get to the airport.
• We’re having lunch on Saturday for my grandma’s 80th birthday!
• JASON MRAZ ON SATURDAY NIGHT <3
• And a million hour flight home, which will either be ample time to sleep or write in my travel journal that I haven’t touched since Taiwan.

I land at 11 AM on Sunday! LET’S HANG OUT!! I need to stay up anyways to beat the jet lag. Right? I think…

Wow lots of parentheses today. And quotation marks. My bad.

P.S. Some biznatch chopped off my bangs. I’m crying inside. And my hair looks like ramen.

annyong!

Currently streaming: Project Runway s5e01, and suffering from Arrested Development deprivation. Can you tell?

JASON MRAZ IS COMING TO KOREA! My brother and I convinced my cousins to go with us to the concert. It’s such good timing because the concert is the day before we leave, and the venue is right next to one of their houses. Ahh I’m so excited :D:D

So my whole family is very dependent on Internet. We’re at my cousin’s house right now, and each of us is at a different computer/laptop — my mom and I are both streaming our respective shows, and my brother and dad are replying to e-mails and doing some work.

More random observations from Korea:

• Light switches for bathrooms are on the outside, so you have to remember to turn it in before you go in.
• The Korean version of Skittles is called Beetles. It tastes exactly the same, but they have less flavors and use pastel colors. The packaging and everything makes it obvious that they copied the American one.
• When you’re born, you’re already 1 year old. And everyone gains a year on New Years, and not on their birthdays. So it’s been weird telling people that I’m 23 because it sounds so much older than 21. Eep.

Oh and apparently I’m a Korean citizen. I wasn’t born here, and I don’t recall filling out any paperwork, but apparently my grandpa wrote my name down somewhere when I was born.  So I have dual citizenship here and in the US. Cool?

Off to lunch and some museum. Laterr.

les cousins dangereux (but not at all)

Currently streaming: Weeds s4e06

My favorite thing about being in Korea is that I get to hang out with my cousins. We don’t really have much family back at home — we have second cousins in Concord and two really young cousins in Seattle, who we haven’t seen since they were babies. I didn’t really understand how much we’ve missed out on until we came here.

Whenever we hang out with them, I find myself thinking, “YAY! These are my cousins” pretty often. It was kind of strange re-meeting my cousins because it felt like meeting people that I automatically knew well just from being related, which is definitely not something I’m used to. I can’t really explain it without being cheesy, but it’s just been really fulfilling to experience these relationships that we’ve never really had the chance to develop. ANYWAYS… My cousins are cool! :)

There are two girls who are the same age as me (DaSol and JiYoung), and JiYoung has a younger brother (MyeungGi) who is vacationing in the US with one of his friends right now. They showed us some pictures of MyeungGi, and he is really tall, skinny, and wears glasses. And… he’s the drummer in a rock band with his friends, and they named themselves “Genocide.” HAHA! He is just the most unlikely person to be in such a band. He has his hand in front of his face in most pictures because he likes taking pictures but not being in them. It kinda blows that he’s not here, but he’s going to be visiting us in Cupertino in a month.

The three of us (girls) are all the same age, but ever since we were really young, our grandparents had us calling each other “unni” (older sister) based on our birthdays. So DaSol is oldest, I’m next, and JiYoung is the youngest (her birthday is actually only 9 days after mine). All I remembered about them from 10 years ago was that DaSol was bossy and JiYoung was kinda bratty, but I think it was because of the whole age hierarchy thing. And they are not like that at all now.

DaSol is really fun to be around because she has a great sense of humor and she’s really silly. She was helping me choose a bag of chips at a 711 yesterday, and she didn’t know how to explain one of the flavors so she just started jumping around like a crab. She’s so cute! She loves learning languages, and she speaks Korean, English, and Mandarin. She spent a year abroad in China, so her Chinese is better than her English. When Deanna was here, DaSol would translate Korean to Chinese, and Deanna would translate that into English for us when we were stuck on words. She doesn’t drink that much, not because she’s sheisty but because she talks so much so it’s kinda funny. When you give her a drink, she takes it without thinking, puts it down, and kind of forgets about it because she’s so animated and into the conversation. We just have to keep reminding her that it’s in front of her.

JiYoung is REALLY skinny and barely eats anything, but she has so much energy that it’s really weird. She loves to walk around, and she thinks my brother and I are really lazy because we’re not used to walking so far. Seriously, we walked like a mile to get somewhere yesterday and she told us it wasn’t that far at the beginning. I think she is so interesting because she is the only person I’ve ever met that sincerely enjoys doing EVERYTHING. She doesn’t know what career she wants to pursue only because she wants to do everything. It’s really surprising and refreshing to see because we all struggled with deciding on even one thing we really want to do for just the next two years.

My brother and I have been learning more about the lifestyles of people our age from our cousins, and it’s interesting to compare them with the way we do things in the US.  For example, people here celebrate their relationships every 100 days instead of every month. I thought it would be harder to count the days, but they all have this program on their phone that counts down for them. So they said it’s a huge deal if someone forgets an anniversary because it’s right there on their phone all the time.

One of the biggest reasons why things are different for them in Korea is that people our age don’t move out of the house until they get married. The only people that dorm at college are people from the countryside or far away from Seoul, and the dorms are really far away from campus, obscure, and kind of expensive. Living at home for such a long time explains things like:

• If they’re in a relationship, people only see each other 2-3 times a week. There are a lot of colleges within Seoul, and if they don’t go to the same one it’s really hard for them to meet up. It’s weird because it becomes kind of like a long-distance relationship even if they’re in the same city. I think this kind of explains why they celebrate anniversaries every 100 days because they don’t see each other often enough to do it every month. If they did, they’d be celebrating an anniversary after like the third date. o_O
• Their parents expect them home every night, so they don’t have much time to hang out with people. They have to go to school and finish all their campus-related activities/studying before going out because they can’t just go back and forth to school as easily as we can. Usually, they’re so busy that they really can’t do much on weekdays. One of my cousins takes a bus for an hour each way to school everyday. Kinda sucks!
• Since they don’t have their own places, they have to get creative with how they spend time with their friends and significant others. One of their popular hang-out spots is the sauna, and they just drink and hang out at these places. There’s food, internet, and these rooms where you can just sit and chill with friends (and sweat, obviously). We went to one with our cousin, and it’s pretty interesting. Each room is heated with different elements (there was a pine tree room, a mud clay room, a silver room, and even an igloo room for cooling off). Yesterday, we went to a place where you can rent DVDs and watch it there with your friends in rooms that look like those karoake rooms. I guess since they can’t watch movies with their bfs/gfs at home, they go to places like these. It reminds me a lot of how we were in middle school and high school to avoid our parentals, and just imagine if we had to keep doing it this way until we’re in our late 20s. Gah!

We were walking around yesterday, and we saw two girls in bikini tops and skirts dancing on a makeshift stage to really loud music on a random corner. Our cousins said that it was for the grand opening of a new potato soup restaurant. Wha?

(Rena!) Transportation here is cheap, as previously mentioned, but I’m starting to hate taking the bus. It is seriously like taking the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, but without the wizards, magic, or the beds. We literally have to grab on to bars with both hands and plant our feet, and we still end up almost falling over and crashing into people. At least there’s AC.

So a big deal in Korea nowadays is that pople here are protesting the importing of beef from the US, and it’s been going on for a couple months. I’m not totally clear on what the deal is. Someone told me that the US is sending over expired beef, and someone else said that Koreans are just scared because the previous contract was stopped because of the Mad Cow Disease outbreak. I think in general, people here just don’t trust it, for whatever reason. But I really don’t think the US would sell expired food products because we have stringent regulations for food and things. I think?

Anyways, we went to Lotteria today, which is like the Korean McDonald’s, and there are signs in the windows and writing on the take out bags assuring that their beef is 100% un-American. Apparently, they get their beef from Australia (hi Shelly!). The universities here have huge printed banners on their cafeterias saying that they are against US beef too. We went to this famous waterway (Chung Gae Chun) and we randomly came across a HUGE protest. There were a million people yelling on the top of their lungs and running in hoards between rows of police vans. Crazy!

But regardless of all this beef (haha!) with the US, our burgers at Lotteria kinda sucked. I miss the American stuff!

update from korea

I’m with my parents and my brother now in Korea, and we’re staying at our grandparents’ house in Seoul.  We haven’t been here in almost a decade, and I was quite alarmed to see that there are RANDOM pictures of my brother and me all over the house.  Apparently my dad has sent over pictures over the years, but it’s really funny because they are just so random.  There is one picture of my brother at his Cal graduation, and his eyes are closed.  And there’s one of the both of us at our house looking scrubby, and I’m in my ABA sweater. We brought some pictures with us on a CD to give to my grandparents, but they when they saw it, they were like, “What is that?  Why would you bring pictures on that?”

So obviously, there is no computer at my grandparents’, and I don’t think they really know what Internet is. It’s 11:30 AM on a Wednesday, and I’m at an Internet cafe. We got here at 10 and this whole time, it’s been full of 10-year-old boys who are playing pretty destructive and violent video games.

One thing I really don’t like about Korea is that it smells. With every intake of breath I feel like I’m snorting half a cigarette and a tank of gas. BLEH! And there are also those weird whiffs of sewage and/or fish when you walk through the wrong patches of air.

There are a million “chicken & beer” places here (like OB Chicken in Berkeley!), and it’s funny because they call it “Chicken and Hof.”  We’re not sure if hof is some word in German or something, but if not, then some Korean person made up their own “English” word.

My brother and I have been playing “Where’s Waldo?” with Hyori advertisements. She is seriously EVERYWHERE, and there seem to be only a handful of celebrities they use across the board for endorsements. I saw one ad with the Korean girl from lost, and it was for some clothing brand. But Hyori is on ads for everything from makeup to cell phones to soju. Roy would be in heaven. But I asked my cousins what kind of plastic surgery Hyori has gotten, and they said, “Just… everything.”  Haha, but I guess no one cares!  I want to see a before and after picture of her, but I’m too lazy to look. Anyone?

A cool thing about the transportation system here is that transfers on the bus and metro are free within a span of 30 minutes. So when you get off the bus or metro, you can get another free ride anywhere for 30 minutes! I don’t know if they do that in other places in the world, but all the Asian subway systems make the BART look like crap.

On my down time, I’ve started to watch Planet Earth! My brother brought the DVD set to Korea, and I really like the cave segment so far. The blind salamander is so cute! I want one. It’s cool how they show you the “Planet Earth Diaries” because the whole time when I watch it, I always wonder how they film it. I’ve been thinking about what it would be like if they did a segment that focused on humans. Maybe “Planet Earth: Metropolitan Cities” could be their next habitat. I guess I wonder too often what our lives would look like if they were televised, like “Real World: Cupertino.”

We went to Pizza Hut the other day, and they put a thin strip of sweet potato puree right before the crust in their pizzas. I think it’s kind of weird to eat with the regular pizza toppings, but Deanna and my brother really liked it. Next stop, McDonalds? And on the subject of food, we went to Din Tai Fung here! Deanna and I hadn’t had xiao long bao’s in almost three days, it was the longest we had gone without them in a while. It wasn’t as good as Taiwan but still satisfying to our cravings, yay!

On a random note — throughout our trip, Deanna always has Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” stuck in here head. I don’t think I ever really heard it before hearing her rendition, and when I finally learned the words I was APPALLED.

“You look so dumb right now, standing outside my house”
“You’re so ugly when you cry, just cut it out”
“Grab your clothes and get gone, before the sprinklers come on”

SERIOUSLY? Rihanna can battle it out with Heidi Montag for the “Why Did I Agree to Sing This After Reading Through It Once” award because this song is almost as bad as Heidi’s “Fashion.”

Time is out! Bye all.