fine fine…heres the obligatory journal post. *grumble* so ive been in amsterdam a week now. the first week was akin to living in some weird dutch version of a real world house…given that christa (who was here prior to me and whose time overlapped with mine) and dano (our resident IT guy) were all here at our office/house too. btw, this place is pretty rockin’…the first two stories are the offices, with a few residential rooms sprinkled about and on the top two floors. it doesnt hurt that we’re in a pretty nice area of amsterdam.

given the larger-than-usual crowd at the house, we went out pretty much every night…the best we could anyway, given it frickin’ rained everyday. we roamed the canals, checked out the village and windmills around the zaanse schans, ate in chinatown (new king…yum), and swung by the red light district too! the hookers were noticeably less skanky than i had imagined! i suppose they looked more like porn stars, but with good health insurance. this week will probably be less action-packed, since christa and dano headed back to our new york office over the weekend. anyhoo, heres some observations ive made while here. in bullet-point…woot!

> as aforementioned, the hookers are noticeably more upscale than the new york breed. hawt!
> life revolves around albert heijn (a supermarket)
> their ready-made dinners are pretty damn good (im eating curry right now).
> im addicted to european fanta again…damnit!
> there are public urinals in the middle of the streets (open btw, no walls). wtf…
> bicyclists are to amsterdam what the taxi drivers are to nyc…dicks.
> hate to bring up this cliched notion…but the beer tastes better here!
> everybody’s been to the “heineken experience” except me.

a couple of pics already posted to my flickr…

hi there…im in amsterdam, and its pretty here. it rains alot tho and the sun doesnt set til 10:30…which is really fucking me up. i cant remember what i did right before i left either. so ya, thats lost to the memories. *shrug* im also going to be missing alot of movie premieres…transformers, potter, transformers. but hey, heres a pic! there will be more put on flickr eventually.

addendum | i’ve started adding pics to my flickr account…woot.

MEMORIAL WEEKEND
rolling back a few weeks to catch up. hmm, guess all the way back to memorial day weekend. oh thats easy to summarize. i pulled a major peter gibbons over the weekend. i did nothing, and it was great. but then monday rolls by and dora decides to throw one last bbq before she heads off to the big red motherland for i dont know how long. we strolled thru chinatown beforehand to grab some fancy-pants ingredients for the bbq…scallops, shrimp, squid, etc. the scallops and shrimp got grilled nicely. but the squid…yea, that kinda exploded its guts out during the grilling process. it wasnt a pleasant site. lets not talk about the squid. it was chill tho, and a nice (potential) last bbq…well, at least on doras roof anyhoo.

the following day was doras going-away drinkies at white rabbit. actually, before that was pre-drinks at verlaines, which i hadnt been to in years. i think as it was described by a friend, its the place you go to if youre just out of college. psh to that…i still like their drinks. most of white rabbits a blur. i think i got trashed. the next day at work definitely wasnt pleasant…yar.

THIS WEEKEND
…and the following week is halfway over…woot. go me. saturday was fun. my parents called me to let me know that one of our relatives was in nyc. my youngest aunts husband (id say uncle, but hes not a blood uncle) was in town for the book convention at the jacob javits. so my parents came in and we all met up for lunch. i took them to kun jip for some wholesome korean and got them stuffed on every korean dish i knew. yum. i met up with di that nite too and we caught knocked up. har…judd apatow, you rock. the movie was actually a little more serious than i thought itd bother to be, but i was pretty much laughing uncontrollably thru 75% of the movie. good stuff. we grabbed ramen from rai rai ken afterwards…where i stupidly left my little noodle card (i was 2 away from a free bowl of noodles). sad face…=(

ooh, and lets even blog a bit about this week so far. since i was on a ramen roll, i met up tuesday with jess for some food after she came out of her god-knows-how-long hibernation. we went to minca ramen factory for some local ramen flavor. yeeerm. woot, and this weekend is the big apple bbq festival too. woot…a whole week of good eatins.

i have pics from our bbq too still on my d70s. but im too lazy to download them atm. ill do that tomorrow…bleh.

post-at-whim journals…ah fun. now with these infrequent posts, i have to go further and further back to recollect past weeks. take this post for example, i have to rewind all the way back to last monday. and hey look at the banner…its for march! nice reminder of my procrastination…woot woot.

LAST WEEK
last monday was berfday tapas for m at ñ. then friday was…nothing, hmm. guess i was tired after work. and saturday was an early mothers day celebration with the family. i hung around afterwards to have din with fish at marakesh, a local moroccan place. they like, really want you to know its moroccan. its like hi, lets decorate the whole place with as much exotic paraphernalia as possible, then dress all the servers up in super traditional outfits, and oh yea…throw in a belly dancer. yeeha. the food was good tho, and they were stuffing dollars into the belly dancers bra like she was a stripper. is that right? *shrug*

sunday was dim sum with mink and her new fiance. ooh…getting hitched. word. we chilled out for the entire afternoon noshing on food and catching up (i hadnt seen mink since last november actually). fun fun.

THIS WEEK
this weekend i did nothing. it was great. i wouldve done something, but i didnt want to. instead i ordered beerfest on movies-on-demand and watched the broken lizard troupe drink alot of beer. it was great. and now for a random journal additions. for some weird reason, i decided to make myself a nice wholesome breakfast yesterday. my omelletes…they arent that good. i need to work on those. i think i need some extra herbs to add a little oomph. the bacon tho…that was yum. you cant really fuck up bacon, but i think the fact that it was boars head bacon added to the yumminess.

time flies when youre too busy to bother posting. but hey, its super-nice outside now, and with it comes a social life. hooray!

LAST WEEKEND
rewinding back to last week, friday was dinner with m and her sis marisa at sala. i <3 tapas…like, alot. and we got a nice selection of dishes, my fav chorizos, and a paella…word. we hit up a bday party at blvd afterwards. my beer was $7…that should be illegal.

satty was super nice outside, so dora had her first rooftop bbq of the year. it seemed like everybody was on their roof that afternoon cooking something up. the weather was obscenely nice, and we had two grills cooking up the good stuff. the burgers arrived a wee too late for me tho, b/c by the time eugene showed up, i had to jet to meet di for dinner. bollocks. we had din at danal…ate and drank wine til the restaurant closed. yum.

THIS WEEK
marisa was looking at doras apartment to sublet, so we met up wednesday in our neighborhood for some din at 26 seats. that place is yum.

friday was bowling at port authority, satty had me oot in joisey, and sunday oot some more. fuck my shoulder still hurts. oh, and we had bbq pre-bowling friday nite at rub. pulled pork and briskets…yuuuum. and now, the rest of the past week and weekend in picture form. yay for the camera on my phone! otherwise i wouldnt have anymore pictures to post.

hey look, its flooding outside. like you know…biblically and all that. im looking at my week-long forecast, and theres these funny looking gray blobby “cloud-like” thingies with rain coming down from them straight to thursday. i guess thats not a good thing. blah.

lifes been booooring and painfully idiosnynchratic. here, i can summarize the last two weeks within two sentences. last week i did nothing, and this week i had late-nite drinkies with the jens at angels share (di is…well, in nyc, miller was in town to visit, and bobo was visiting from ireland). ha…thats one sentence i suppose, not counting the parenthetical sub-sentence. the jens are insistent on getting me hooked up with a nice lady-friend to bring me out of my funk. good luck with that…ya.

anyhoo, i have din plans this week with m and mikey. things to look forward to…woot.

blah…obligatory post since im a week overdue. i got a new phone…wooha! my old samsung was seriously old-school…so i upgraded to a swanky new motorola rizr. yea…a rizr. like, missing a vowel much? motorola seriously needs a new naming convention. its starting to sound like a dodgeball team.

“allow me the pleasure of introducing you to blade… laser… blazer… razr… rizr…”

new names moto…new names. anyhoo, besides the asinine name, the phones pretty coo. its swishy, lets me use my own wallpapers, and is swishy. it also has pretty lights and makes clicky noises for my amusement. oh, and i just checked. ive had my old phone since august 2003…crikeys.

this weekend i chilled with fish in joisey. i needed some suburban air, so we chilled in south orange. some yum southern comfort food for din, then coffee at a new hipster coffee joint where they was a live band playing “happy jazz”. the loud music fucked fish’s chess game…but that didnt stop me from fucking up and giving him the game. yar!

anyhoo, its already april…bugger. too much shit coming up…wahhh!

the weathers still being indecisive. do you want to be warm? cold? dude, throw us a bone here. after the blistering cold, then warm, then cold weather of the week, the weekend was somewhere in the middle. which was fine because i had to you know…actually go out in that weather. this weekend was (finally) 300 time…woot. 300 was originally pushed back from its premiere week b/c fish had to take care of his dog (it just had surgery), but still couldn’t make it this weekend. so the rest of us (me, my roomie fonz, and mel) soldiered on to the lincoln square imax for some spartan carnage…in imax! all in all wow. mass carnage, and enough plot to say “ok, the story wasnt shit”. it doesn’t need a plot so much as a skeleton from which to hang fight scenes off of. massive, bloody, holy shit fights that make you pee a little in your pants. and it didn’t hurt that there was both the graphic novel and you know…actual history…to progress its story.

speaking of the story, i heard iranians are thoroughly pissed at the movie. are you serious? b/c you know…were you offended at the fantasy portrayal of one of the ancient persian rulers? the inaccurate depiction of ancient persian saw-for-hands executioners? or maybe the grossly inaccurate portrayal of rampaging mutant rhinoceroses? crissakes it’s a movie…and a fantasy one at that (based on history)…but seriously, didn’t the oracle girl floating in mid-air give away its fantasy setting? on the bright side, i think i saw one of my chinky ancestors amongst xerxes’ horde…woot.

we got stuffed at kun jip in k-town afterwards too. oh, and i did nothing the rest of the weekend. hooray!

addendum | speaking of spartans, i also got in some god of war 2: every other game sucks this weekend. yea…wtf holy shit. penny arcade sums it up pretty much with the following excerpt.

h’ok, late posts. good thing i jotted down notes last week…woot.

LAST WEEKEND
we had our family new years lunch a week after chinese new years, since the parents were oot and aboot and sis was in another state. it was the usual panda house yummage, which is never anything bad. we also talked about my sis’ new house which they just bought. its bigger than my parents house…yar. and my sis said that if i ever fucked up my life majorly, i could always move in with her. super duper!

side bonus. before lunch, my mom was supposed to teach my sis her super-shecret recipe for her dumplings…except my sis got back late. so she told me the recipe instead, we made some, and i scarfed them before my sis even got home. yum yum.

i grabbed drinks with di later at nite too. di had to work the weekend, so some liquoring at decibel helped take the edge off. still can’t remember what sake we had…never can. yar.

THIS WEEKEND
wait, what did i do? oh right, met up with meltron friday nite for rairaiken. but first we went sneaker shopping at shoe mania in union square, where i picked up a new pair of adidas. woot. i was kind of hesitant to retire my old ratty formels til then, but finally tossed them when i got home…woot.

satty had two friends visiting town. we grabbed lunch at luca bar, chilled the afternoon away, then grabbed dinner at bone lick park…yar. id never been there for anything besides lunch, but it still rocked. texas bbq…yuuurm. i headed off afterwards to scratcher for seans berfday drinking. surprise guest of the night was little alice…who was in town. yar! she’s still waiting for replies from grad schools, so she came up for some r&r. cheers alice…and happy 27th sean.

oh shit…its already march?