TheLeong.com

For the second year in a row, had Thanksgiving dinner “down under” in Makuhari. But hey it’s turkey at least! In Japan! Beats going to KFC.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks to Bryan for finding a real American-Mexican style burrito place in Tokyo! It’s called Frijoles but it might as well be Chipotle because it’s pretty much exactly the same, which is a very good thing here in Japan, also known as The Land of the Rising Sun and No Mexican Food.

The place is near Azabu Juban station which is a little far from where I’m living now, but it was well worth the trip to get a ridiculously huge burrito made exactly like they do back in the US. They even had spicy salsas and the green smoked chipotle Tabasco. The staff members also all speak English, there’s free refills on soda, and most of the clientele seemed to be foreigners. It’s like being in the US.

Spent last week in Qingdao (Tsingtao), China for work. It was a pretty short and busy trip but it was nice to get to travel again, especially in a place where I’m mostly illiterate and unable to communicate without pointing at pictures or making Hadouken-like motions with my arms. That’s always kind of fun.

On Monday afternoon I arrived at Narita a little bit later than planned, but it didn’t matter since my flight was delayed over 2 hours. I got a 1000 yen food voucher that I used at Subway to get a foot-long smoked turkey and avocado sub, which was way too much food but it was free so no foul. Finally got to Beijing where of course I had missed my connecting flight due to the delay, but it was easy enough for Air China to put me on another flight to Qingdao. This was unfortunately also the very last flight out of the Beijing airport, meaning I had a few more hours to kill in an airport. It was pretty late at night so most of the shops were closed but they had a KFC open where I got a sandwich and “9 Lives Juice” which was a fruit juice blend and not a magical potion. There was snow on the ground in Beijing.

From the Qingdao airport I took a taxi to my hotel, which was like a 40 minute ride but since it’s China and not Japan the fare was less than USD $12. Slept and spent the week attending a conference for work which was fairly uneventful except for one night where I was taken out by a client to a really nice dinner with about 12 people, only 1 of whom spoke English. Chinese dinner parties are awesome because the theme always seems to be “let’s order more food than we could ever possibly eat.” Probably because food and things are so cheap, this is a good way to throw a good party and kind of show off to your guests. There was all kinds of different dishes including tons of good seafood since Qingdao is a coastal city. Got to try conch and sea cucumber for the first time. The restaurant we went to was also a few doors down from the Tsingtao beer brewery, so we had pitchers of fresh beer all over the table. I actually don’t really even like Tsingtao beer in bottles, but the 2 varieties they had at the dinner must have been different from what’s in the bottles. Had a wheat ale-tasting one and a dark lager that tasted a lot like chocolate. Both were some of the best beers I’ve had ever.

Everyday I’d be at the conference until the late afternoon, come back to the hotel to get changed, then walk around and explore the area. There was a Carrefour across the street and a Jusco down the road, plus some smaller shops and a lot of restaurants in the area near my hotel. Walked through a few market streets but nothing big like in Hong Kong. They did the sailing events or something for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in Qingdao so they city was pretty cleaned up – maybe getting rid of or at least relocating street markets was part of that. I saw 2 street markets that were more like flea markets, with hawkers setting up their stuff on tarps on the street. Probably so they can all pack up and run if the cops come to shut them down? Speaking of the Olympics, on my last night in town I walked to the pier area where the sailing events all took place and it was pretty nice. They had a huge boardwalk area with really modern architecture, and this sweet “Olympics” pier that took about 15 minutes to walk to the end of. The bottom level of this pier had restaurants and bars, but the top part was just a giant elevated walkway with the flags of the world, each with its own spotlight. It’s hard to explain but it was pretty awesome looking especially walking down at night.

No other big stories from Qingdao but my second night in town I walked into some random restaurant that had pictures of their menu on the wall. I chose a dish that looked like huge plate of beef and vegetables with some chili peppers. When it came out, I realized that the amount of beef and vegetables was almost equal to the amount of garlic and hot red and green chilies. This thing was ultra mouth-searing spicy, but it was amazing and I ate almost all of it. I’m glad I ordered a bowl of white rice to go with it. Also tried a kaiten-sushi in China for the first time ever, which wasn’t bad but was closer to American sushi than real Japanese. They had a lot of crazy rolls with random ingredients in them. Not as good as Kappa.

Coming back into Narita on Friday night I got an extra long inspection at customs. The officer even commented something like “so you’ve been to China quite a few times, huh?” I wonder if this was just a coincidence or if having the super thick passport has something to do with it. I don’t think I’ve ever had to even open my bag up at customs. Oh well.

I think there was a “blog boom”a few years ago, maybe like 2005-ish? A lot of my friends had blogs, I was posting a lot more on this blog, and blogs in general had, at least among my general circle of friends and acquaintances, become something a lot people did and made. Over the past few years this has gone down a lot: most people have stopped blogging as frequently, if they haven’t already closed up shop completely. I’ve definitely become guilty of not writing as much – not as if I do this blog for a big audience or anything. No, actually I mainly write this just for myself. But either way, somewhat often over the past few months I’ll be sitting at home relaxing on the computer when I think to myself that I should write a blog post. 9 times out of 10 I don’t.

OK enough babbling. To make a long story short, I blame Facebook, Twitter, and stuff like that for sucking people’s attention away from writing or reading long blog posts. The burst of the blog bubble, perhaps. This isn’t a bad thing really, but just a shift in internet habits. It’s a lot easier for most people to do all their updates, pictures, links to weird stuff, messages, etc. in a centralized place like Facebook. Everyone and their brother is on Facebook now so it’s convenient to keep track of friends’ updates, and for friends to keep track of you. It’s a lot more convenient than writing a blog on some other site that people aren’t going to check very often. Why write frequent updates or entries when you can write a quick status update on Facebook? The exception, of course, is if you have a blog with a purpose or a goal. TheLeong.com is not that kind of blog. Nor is it like a Xanga where I post short status update-appropriate messages on the blog.

I don’t really want to stop running this blog, especially after doing it for so long. Every now and then I go back and read past posts, which is great because blogging about stupid little things means I can recall those little things well past the time any normal person would remember them. I know there have been a lot of actual studies and insightful articles about how casual internet communications have moved away from e-mails and blogs to more interactive social networking like on FB, so feel free to go find those and read up. While you do that, I’m going to end this post with some pictures and short captions of stuff I’ve done over the past few weeks, in lieu of the usual multi-paragraph post describing my activities.

Japan Seafood Show at Tokyo Big Sight:

Giant 1:1 scale Gundam down in Odaiba:

Played park golf (kind of like mini-golf without the goofy stuff) in Shisui:

Went to Namja Town with Nick when he came up to Kanto last weekend. This is cheese fondue gyoza (with corn) and teriyaki mayonnaise gyoza. Both were actually way good.

Of course took Nick to Y’s. 伝説の参忍、再び集合！ (Thanks to Brian for the pic)

The end for now.

I ended up getting around a lot more than I had expected while in the US, which partially explains why I didn’t waste as much time as I usually might writing blogs, etc. I’m back in Japan now, and have been for almost a week. It was definitely a great time back this time, and I’m looking forward to my next visit (probably in December). I know within the next few years I’ll be back living in the US and will hopefully get to visit Japan now and then.

I spent most of my time in St. Louis, which was a lot of fun. Played video games at home, saw extended family, met up with friends, and got to drive a lot. You don’t realize how much you miss driving until you don’t do it for several months at a time. And having a GPS navigation system is an awesome addition, especially since I’m terrible at navigating beyond my immediate neighborhood in St. Louis. I blame not living there much.

Drove out to Indiana one day to grab lunch with Frank. Instead of driving all the way to Indy we decided to meet somewhat halfway and chose Terre Haute. Now, if you know anything about the region you know that T.H. is a pretty bad town (no offense….well….), but it was pretty funny I guess. At least I got to hit up the Steak there. The Mexican restaurant we ate in smelled like a public bathroom though.

I also headed to Washington DC for two days for a business meeting, which went pretty well. Also got to see the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian and rode the metro a lot. It was also on the metro that my dad and I saw this gross woman who was probably around 50 or 60 and had, I am not exaggerating at all, breasts on her stomach. It looked like she had two bowling balls strapped to her belt. It was horrible and hilarious at the same time.

At the end of my trip I stayed in LA for the weekend before heading back to Tokyo. It was great to see everyone in LA and hang out like old times. It also made me pretty jealous that everyone lives in apartments/houses that are several times (not exaggerating) bigger than my apartment here in Japan. That’s definitely one of the big things I’m looking forward to when I move back: having a big place with a nice TV and computer setup. Also having a place where more than one person can come visit at a time would be a major plus.

And I challenge anyone to find food like this in Japan:

…please?

Last Sunday I decided against just walking around aimlessly in Hong Kong (which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea) and decided to take the ferry out to Macau. Macau is technically a separate “special administrative region of China,” meaning that I’d need to bring my passport to go through customs. That worked for me, since my Passport is filling up fast and I want to get some new pages added soon anyway.

After taking the hotel’s free shuttle to the general vicinity of the China Ferry pier, I still ended up wandering for about 45 minutes trying to find the right pier. I asked someone and their answer was “go to the shiny gold building,” which made me think I was actually trapped in some kind of weird video game. Anyway after a detour through a pretty nice mall and eating Chinese-style curry for lunch, I arrived at the golden pier and hopped a boat to Macau. The guy I asked was apparently not lying. The ferry only takes about an hour, and the ride was really nice. I think I slept most of the way.

Of course the gold building is the boat to casino island.

Arriving in Macau doesn’t feel like you’re in a different country from Hong Kong at all. It looks pretty much the same, but they have their own currency. However this currency is pretty useless if you’re only going to the casinos like I did, since all the games are played in Hong Kong dollars. Macau is a really old Portugese colony and has a lot of historical sights and stuff, but I spent most of my afternoon at the Sands Casino, which is yet another huge shiny gold building. The inside was pretty similar to what I remember from Las Vegas, only without the cigar smoke and free alcohol. Also 90% of the people were Chinese/Asian, and 90% of those people were senior citizens. I put a limit on myself for the day’s gambling from the get-go, and was actually doing pretty good at one point playing roulette and $100 HKD a hand blackjack. And of course I lost most of that by the evening.

The games were pretty much what I expected, but baccarat seemed to be predominant. Also sic-bo and some dice game that I have no idea about. There was also War, as in the card game played by kids who can’t play real card games. Except in the casino the minimum bet is $100. There were also dancers on the bar most of the time (wearing clothes of course), but during breaks they were playing a BoA DVD. It felt weird to be sitting in China listening to a Korean girl sing in Japanese. Quick note: the McDonald’s inside Sands sells Egg McMuffins at any time of day, which is amazing. The HK ones do too, but this was where I made the discovery initially.

I started and ended my Macau trip at Sands, but in between I also walked around the Fisherman’s Wharf area there, which was mostly tourist traps but with some cool buildings. There was an old-style Chinese castle, a volcano, some funky stone gates, and a bunch of Babylonian architecture that was part of another casino. The volcano had an arcade in the basement that was dirt cheap so I played some Street Fighter there in the wrong aspect ratio. I felt like I was in high school through since you have to buy tokens to use any of the arcade machines. (Exhilarama in Crestwood Mall was pretty cool the first few years.) I also went over to the Golden Dragon casino, which is super local with almost no English signs or instructions anywhere, and almost exclusively baccarat. Also I’m pretty sure that everything in the building above the 5th floor was some form of brothel. Karaoke in China (KTV) is not the same as karaoke in Japan.

After getting the 9:30PM boat back to Hong Kong, I checked into my second hotel (cheaper and more stuff in the area). It was pretty late so I just went to Temple Street and got some awesome food at a street restaurant. Beef chow fun (乾炒牛河) might be one of my favorite noodle dishes ever. Also this whole big plate cost me like USD $3.