i checked out bye bye kitty this past weekend at the japan society…for once not on the last weekend it was open, which seems to be de rigeur for any exhibit i want to see. the artwork ranged from gorgeous to banal to downright disturbing (i’m looking at you, blood circulation video thingy). one artist though plain and simply blew my mind…manabu ikeda. his giant pieces of work are highly detailed compositions of surreal landscapes and environments, recognizable for their distinct melding of traditional japanese qualities with modern details. he draws the way i probably think i draw in my mind.
the piece i loved the most was the history of rise and fall (up top), which is obscenely detailed. i need to learn some oceans eleven style skills and acquire that thing somehow.
i didn’t actually know what to expect from my trip to beijing. for one, china’s been on the ascendant for the last decade, and this was also my first solo trip (though i did have friends there). but i’ll be honest, there weren’t terribly high expectations. my opinion and the opinions offered by my family were, to say the least, colored by our nationality (taiwanese) and the fact that china was (and still is) looked down upon as, well…hicks. yea.
first, the family history lesson. unlike a number of modern taiwanese who came in the 50’s to flee the civil war, my family has resided on the island since by my estimation, the early 1900’s (at the latest). we are fifth generation taiwanese, possibly older since my parents readily admit that anything before that is unknown since their ancestors then were pretty much illiterate. both sides of my family are thoroughly taiwanese, and have no familial ties to china whatsoever. it’s easy to see and feel the vast difference, socially and culturally, between someone from taiwan and someone from china. but nevermind all that…it sounds way too serious for the purposes of this post. the point was to establish that china was just like any other country i wanted to visit, and that i wanted to visit and see for myself what all the fuss was about.
BEIJING THURSDAY | i landed at beijing airport mid-afternoon. i’m still deaf in one ear for half the day as they still hadn’t popped from the flight…ow. beijing airport is massive. like…stupidly huge. there isn’t nearly as many people as where i came from (newark liberty), but the terminal is twice the size…wow.
i drop my things off at my hotel in dongzhimen and head out to wander around. people can’t seem to drive for dick…i spent the day dodging traffic. not just cars…pedicabs, bikers, even other pedestrians. seriously, fuck you. when cars have the right of way, it sucks donkey dick being a pedestrian.
what’s up with all the hairballs floating in the air?
i met my friends dora and erick later in the day at their architecture studio (dora’s a college friend and erick’s her bf who together run their own studio), but headed back out to let them finish up their work. i roamed the central business district, scoping out the cctv building and the burned out shell of the adjacent hotel (which a friend’s roommate had worked on…then cried about when it went up in flames).
the skies are perpetually gray…weird.
we hit up yunnan food for dinner (yum yum) with their friend, then went to a live concert at the austrian culture thingy (?).
FRIDAY | you know how to spot foreigners in the city? when it’s mid 70’s and they’re wearing shorts. seriously…beijingers dont seem to fancy wearing shorts the minute it hits the 70’s. i wait anxiously all year to break out my shorts. i first headed to the train station to grab tickets to shanghai. beijing main station…what the fuck is that place? it took me 15 minutes after wandering aimlessly to figure out that the ticket hall was a separate building. the main station itself feels like a halfway house.
i walked towards the forbidden city down the fancy-pants avenue leading towards tianamen. now i know where all their civic improvement money goes. i head into the forbidden city, and it’s immediately apparent that they don’t take care of it as well as i wish they did. it’s a fucking shame. i get the impression they’re not much for cultural preservation yet…everything just seems like a potential commodity. seriously…the forbidden city! hundreds of years of heritage? hello?
i headed out the north entrance of the forbidden city towards the hill to the north to get some pretty landscape photos of beijing and the forbidden city. after coming back down the hill, i walked thru some of the local hutongs, then up wangfujie (a main shopping avenue), then along whatever that road is called adjacent to it. my feet are destroyed…oochies. i meet up with my friends again at their studio and we headed to dinner at 1488? 1467? some year-sounding number. whatever…beef noodle soup place near sanlitun in a modern renovated hutong-ish area…that was yum. we then hit up sanlitun for drinkies at miga, then kokomo til god knows when. both were rooftop bars, and if you ignore the buildings beyond, the english being spoken and the nyc drink prices could’ve led you to believe you were back in manhattan. kek.
SATURDAY | i slept in late, because i don’t even know what time i got back to my hotel. we met for brunch at vineyard in…some new-ish hutong area. i wandered around afterwards on my own, then met up with alice who’d just gotten in from tianjin…woot! den mother’s here to lead the way! we drove to the 798 art district and roamed for a good while, checking out the art galleries and still-derelict factory spaces. even if they say it’s undergoing gentrification, i still think it’s a cool area to wander about.
we headed back into beijing proper to the area just south of tianamen (as you’re noticing, i don’t have the slightest clue what any of the areas are called). alice dragged me through the alleyways to a small shop that serves the best donkey sandwich. donkey! yea i was a bit apprehensive about eating a donkey…but it tasted pretty good! we didn’t nosh too much as alice had another place in mind…beijing pot stickers! (all counted as ‘appetizers’ before dinner proper). yea those were yum also. we headed out of the hutong back to the newly demo’d and rebuilt area that looked like a chinkified disney main street. there was even a ‘taiwanland’ nearby that i’m told is not associated with taiwan at all (in a cultural-exchange thingy way that is). so weird. we took in some fancy drinkies at the capital m with sweet views northward toward the qian men gates. swanky.
we met up with dora and erick later for dinner…chuan’r? i think that’s what they’re called. lotsa yum skewers and a big spicy fish that wasn’t meant to be big and spicy, so they had to take it back, scrape off all the hot shit, and reapply with normal non-spicy shit. still delicious though.
SUNDAY | dora, erick, and the third partner effi had meetings on sunday, so i strolled thru sanlitun a bit on my own before having to duck out of the pouring rain. i headed back to the hotel when the rain didn’t let up and just spent the rest of the afternoon vegging in front of the television.
worth mentioning…hearing english names ‘translated’ into mandarin…funny. hearing danny devito ‘translated’ to beijing mandarin…disturbing.
i headed to the southern train station in the evening to catch my night train to shanghai. shanghai…woot!
SHANGHAI MONDAY | so it’s not just beijing people…it seems like a significant portion of the population are seriously deficient when it comes to social etiquette. cripes. i walked from the french concession to the bund looking for some place to cool off, because my ability to determine scale on a map seems to be deficient. that was a long fucking walk. i hit up everything i could inbetween though…the parks, taikang lu, and whatever else my little guide book could offer up. pretty.
hmm, this place is humid as balls.
i gave terence a call once i hit the bund, who actually offered up lunch…woot! i taxi’d over to meet terence for lunch at jing tai fung. shao long bao…yum yum, that place rocks. afterwards i dropped my things off at his apartment and took a bit of a nap as terence headed back to work.
after composing myself, i headed back out to check out xintiandi. when that place lost my interest, i subwayed over to pudong, since i didn’t really care for the alternative…the super duper sightseeing tunnel pink floyd laser light show. pudong…wow, what is this place? it’s just full of lights, gleaming new skyscrapers, and wide avenues. having a plethora of towers to scale, i chose the jin mao tower since it had the clearest view out towards shanghai proper, with the oriental pearl dildo tower in view also. the newer bottle opener tower was right behind the jin mao. up on the observation deck, you could look out to the humidity hovering over the city like a yellow blanket…frightening. you could also peer down to the lobby of the grand hyatt 25 floors below. fucking scary…
i spent the rest of the evening strolling about the waterside, watching the lit boats make their way up and down the huangpu river like a parade. later at night, terence took me out for yunnan food at lost heaven, then drinks at a bar where you had to find the secret switch to open the door. cheeky fucks.
ps: chatting briefly with our waitress at dinner, i learned the following: if you look chinese, but you tell them (in chinese) that your chinese isn’t so super, they probably think you’re mildly retarded.
TUESDAY | i spend the majority of my train ride back to beijing reading the engrish on the broadcast screen. i’m having a “delighted voyage“, making sure to “watch my belongs“. lulz. the station announcements are also all preceded by kung-fu music.
of note too…those annoying people you usually encounter on trains talking obnoxiously loud on their cells? that’s everybody on this train. fuck you all.
i got back to beijing in time for dinner, and proceeded to get a call from dora asking if i could swing by their studio to help a bit on their competition (due the next day). suffice to say…i spent the rest of the night cranking out a rendering. i can’t seem to escape renders…lulz! i didn’t mind though. it’s the least i could do for them showing me around beijing.
WEDNESDAY | we met up for lunch near chaowei soho, then i wandered south past the second ring towards fancy-pants department stores. a dust storm kicked up that day though…i hate eating sand. not cool. hmm, my journal entries ended here. ah right…we had peking duck later for dinner, then headed out for drinks at…some hidden pub at the workers stadium. dora and erick retired early since they were pooped, so effi, mitsu (effi’s friend) and i continued on to go clubbing til some ungodly hour. it sounded like a good idea until i found myself crawling home at 4am. it’s worth mentioning i had to catch my flight home thursday. derp!
CONCLUSION beijing is a weird city. it took me a week to process all of this, and i came to the conclusion that it’s not a fun city if you’re on your own and if you like to wander around aimlessly. because a car will hit you. all my fun derived from my friends taking me around (this is expected of course). but various cities are wandering aimless-friendly. london, tokyo, barcelona, etc are all fun to stroll thru and take in the sights. beijing…not so much. shanghai was though, if not for the face-melting heat and humidity.
would i go back to beijing? meh, maybe in another 10 years. shanghai though may need it’s own proper vacation.
i found myself up this morning at an ungodly hour…not necessarily because i had something to look forward to doing (in fact, i just holed up in my apartment all day as not to assault my nose with outdoor pollen), but because i wanted to quickly jot down the exceedingly vivid dream i just had.
i’m in a cab going somewhere…the events prior to this are fuzzy (as if the dream really did just start with me in the cab). so i woke up in a cab where the driver, a girl, had taken a pitstop at their home(?). the taxi driver was actually accompanied by her cute friend who was riding shotgun. i suppose they needed to grab something? so we hung out for a bit at their apartment. it looked like brooklyn sort of…i assume anything not looking like manhattan is brooklyn. they lived on the 2nd floor of a building with a backyard and everything. it was raining out, and their apartment was cluttered with random things.
the girl (navigator) was cute, shoulder length hair, extremely fidgety, and liked to roll around in her underwear. she was becoming progressively undressed as we chatted, eventually just rolling around the couch naked (i’ll chalk that aspect up to my libido), but eventually settled into jammies. i even recall spotting her license? old yearbook? and caught her bday as 1985(?). odd detail…tho it’s good to know the dream-me is concerned with these things. as we’re about to head back out to the cab, the taxi driver heads down to the cab, but the friend is staying put. i forget something and run back in to grab it, chatting briefly with the cute girl. i’m about to head back out when she says that the back door leads to the taxi faster. so as she’s fiddling with the patio door out to the backyard, it crosses my mind to ask her for her number. and of course at that very moment i wake up.
beijing countdown…two days. word. and even now, i’m still trying to get decent directions to the goddamn hotel i booked. the homepage put a vague dot on its map, google has it in an adjacent city to the northeast, and now i’m relying on baidu to guesstimate where the hell the hotel is. currently the best guess is that plot of land under construction in the above image. i’ll find out soon enough i suppose. thankfully i’ll be traveling with my hiking bag…
i thought itd be funny to title my uber-quiet and uninteresting month with something that makes it sound awesome and exciting, which it wasnt. i believe its called irony. my writing skills grow in leaps and bounds each year, i must say…
i went home to sign my tax forms, had a nice brunch in brooklyn at di’s new place, and oh yes, a new air conditioner demonstration in our building, since many of us are interested in replacing our current super loud and thoroughly bleh units. i believe that is the extent of my month. oh, and my old roommate just moved back to joisey, so i will be spending this saturday in joisey painting walls. madness!
not much else to write, except i will be attempting to get a tourist visa at the chinese consulate…again…tomorrow. to say the woman at the counter the first time i went was unhelpful would be an understatement.
remember in the 90’s when annoying young people uSeD 2 wRiTe LiKe tHis, and you had wished you’d invested more in the prophylactics industry? or at the least in the louisville slugger company? thankfully these days we have an equally, if not more annoying variant around that not only young(er) people feel the need to use, but even grown adults who want to sound both dumb and internet savvy while blending in with the 4chan and gaming crowd. fuck you lolspeak.
this will most likely be a rant. it cant be helped…im exposed to it too frequently. i thought itd die away…but shit, those stupid lolcats just keep getting churned out. and having already been a closet grammar nazi, its slowly shaved away my sanity to the point of having to bitch about it here. for those fortunate enough to not be familiar with lolspeak, here’s a primer. if there’s a way to piss all over the english language, both spelling-wise and grammatically, hey piss away. for example, instead of saying “hey there good sir, can i possibly have a cheeseburger?”, the proper lolspeak vernacular would be ‘i can haz cheezburger?” it starts as a bundle of cute misspelling, especially when paired with kitten pictures. but after the dickjillionth time, it just becomes what it was to begin with…stupid. no really…youre intentionally sounding like an illiterate moron. most people sound illiterate naturally…you dont need lolspeak.
i had written a summation comparing lolspeak to a three year old. but then that wouldnt be fair to my niece, who IS three, and speaks more eloquently than lolspeakers.
i used too much fish sauce when cooking my dinner. now my apartment smells of something fierce.
its been a fairly quiet couple of weeks, now that works back to normal and im not staring at my work monitors for periods in excess of 12+ hours a day. im slowly resuscitating my dead social life too…tho its gotten incrementally harder as people decide to get married, make babies, and whatnot.
MAY AND JOSIE the past month saw my two nieces co-birthdays…conveniently sitting in the middle of january between my younger niece josie’s birthday (january 4th), and may’s (february 4th). god i hope those birthdays are right. if they were wrong and my sister saw this post, she’d probably kick me in the dick. before josie was born, may’s birthday would sit right on superbowl weekend. the conflicted look on my brother-in-laws face was always apparent, so the current arrangement works to everyones benefit.
VACATION(S) im sure i also went out a few times between then and now, but meh…my memory (and calendar) fails me. i blame all the relaxation i partook in this past week…taking off friday and monday for my comp time for all the extra days/hours id worked over the holidays. i did however refinance my mortgage…tho that is painfully uninteresting. i wont even bother with the details. what else…oh right. im in the midst of planning my forthcoming vacation. beijing! thats the plan so far anyway. i just need to get moving on booking things.
i actually get a second vacation as well in the summer…seattle for a friends wedding. i got decidedly lazy and booked the closest hotel to the venue (olympic park). im pretty sure its more posh than i had originally intended to book…
I DID STUFF hmm, still cant recollect the majority of what id done in the past month. ah well. green hornet was in there somewhere, with sally. that was fun to watch. and last friday we were supposed to try this pulled-noodle place called hung-ry (clever fucks), but the wait ended up being somewhere north of an hour and a half. so with all of us starving and such, we said ‘fuck it’ and headed north instead to menkui-tei, who would never make us wait that long. <3 you menkui-tei. and yesterday i met up with marisol and jess at barrio chino in les for some yum mexican. mexican-ish anyway. i had the pulled lamb and rice, along with a really nice soup that i couldnt recollect for you for the life of me. after having the grilled cornish hen jess ordered tho, hmm…i wish id ordered that instead. so yum…
random aside…and hey, first post of february! (possibly even the only one…who knows) i never understood peoples fears of saying what they felt, especially when it’s directed at random assholes they happen to come across.
we’re outside a bar discussing where we were off to next, and down the street, a retard is trying to park his lexus suv over mounds of snow and ice. we’re chuckling at the crunching sounds emanating from his vicinity, as he vainly tries to pose/park his suv atop his conquered mountain. the dude really seems to want to park there. whatever. a bit later, as we’re still mulling what we were doing, the guy from the lexus climbs out and starts hollering out “whats so funny??” in a douchey faux-intimidating voice. i hear it, but think to myself, dumbass can’t possibly be directing it at us…his skin can’t be that thin and his dick can’t be that inverted. he calls it out again, and i holler back “i don’t know??” more was to follow, but the people i was with started displaying nervousness and telling me to stop provoking him. i’m going….really? you’re scared some altercation will occur because the tool over there doesn’t like people belittling his shit parking abilities and i decide to yell back?? they press it anyway, so i refrain and we walk off, as i’m completely incredulous at their absolute prostration. “i’ve heard people get really beat up because of those situations!” one points out as i’m thinking to myself that this was unlikely, and i would’ve continued my jeering if not for their skittishness. i’ve also heard people get mugged in the subway, but i still take the subway anyway. i live in east harlem. it’s quaint, but not entirely super. i live in east harlem, and a yuppy jackass driving a lexus with new jersey license plates is hardly going to intimidate and/or faze me. east harlem, people.
i wish i could tell those friends to have a bit of faith in my ability to discern danger from bluster. they’re quiet easy to differentiate, you know?
…already. this holiday season didn’t even exist for me. aside from having to work the holiday week, it didnt feel like much of a holiday season anyhoos. just as well…2011 should be much better than 2010. that was a given already tho.
started the new year with brunch with sally at mon petit. brunch was just ok, but it was nice out…and i hadn’t left my apartment since grocery shopping friday. i was marinating in my apartment the entire time…i do <3 the days off. we then checked out yoshitomo nara at the asia society…and hey, it was the last day! lucky us.
working backwards in time…it’s been fairly uneventful. christmas dinner at the maxwell’s, a crazy office party at a fancy-pants vip club, thanksgiving at my sister’s, a product launch party with di where we saw martha stewart and she giddily skipped over to chat with her…etc etc. the usual. anyway, enough about 2010…bring on 2011…
edit | oh right, and i also saw tron legacy. which was just meh. the effects were amazing. everything else tho was meh. damn you kosinski…dont make a pg movie that was clearly intended for at the very least pg-13. it dumbs the story down…
