Tales from the frontal lobe, Part 3

Lately I've been caught up in all sorts of random affairs that, for a normal person with moderate levels of seratonin and a minimal daily percentage of Vitamin D, wouldn't have much of an effect on. But, for me, it leads to disastrous consequences.

One dire result of this neural lapse is my lack of ability to maintain a constant state of concentration on one person and/or thing at any given moment. Thus, my inability to post anything here other than random thoughts and otherwise not-so-random bullsh*t.

Thank goodness for headings like "Tales from the frontal lobe." Indeed, knowing that I'd experience days (or weeks, or months) wandering lost in a cognitive blur, it's the whole reason I started these posts. So, until I think of something better to write about or until Taiwan is officially besieged by the Red Navy (or whatever the hell China calls its sea-going military), on with the show....

The modern, rather art deco building to the left is Peking One is Tsim Sha Tsui. There are quite a few restaurants on the upper floors of this rather cool looking, sail-shaped affair. I'd stay away from San Fransisco Steak House though. Their waitstaff and cooks wouldn't know a properly grilled medium-rare ribeye if one jumped up their collective asses and began eating a watercress and mayonaisse sandwich. The Hard Rock Cafe (as cliche'd as they are these days) offers a much better steak, and is cheaper to boot. And you can watch videos of a nearly sextogenaric Brian Johnson prancing up and down a stage, eyes crossed and sweat pouring down from under his beret, as AC DC plays somewhere "live" in concert. Better yet, if you've got money to burn, a stomach and appetite the size of Indonesia, and a craving for fresh, impecably prepared food, head over to Morton's of Chicago inside the Sheraton. Just a hop, skip, and jump away from Peking One, it's well worth the price and nuisance of wearing slacks.

The two buildings to the right of Peking One comprise the Peninsula Hotel, the shorter one being the original building. If you can pull your eyes away from the array of Rolls Royces, Bentleys, and various Italian supercars parked around it's signature water fountain, allow yourself to be swept into the lobby by the gentle swing of the doorman's welcome. You'll be instantly transported back six decades to a Hong Kong untouched by McDonald's or Starbucks.

I remember standing on the rooftop terrace on a sweltering October night of last year, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice (warm after two minutes and sweating less than me) while waiting for the harbourside fireworks show to begin. Funny, to be standing on the roof of perhaps the ultimate symbol of Hong Kong's colonial period, to watch a show commemorating the day Mao proclaimed the PRC. I remember feeling both extremely cosmopolitan (on one side of me stood a British couple... God save the Queen, and on the other, a rich husband-wife team from Japan) and upper crust. If only the world knew the truth... that my meager monthly salary barely covers one night in the Peninsula's cheapest room. Good thing my relatives are retired and generous.

On the eve of the possibility of a return to Japan, I am already beginning to miss Hong Kong. The wet markets. The streetside vendors selling fish balls and cold intestines. The crazy mini-bus drivers. The signature green and white Star ferries that transport you across the harbour and leave you disembarking on the other side covered in a fine mist of sea spray (read: chemicals). I'll even miss the pollution: the attack on the senses of Europe, Asia, and Africa coming together in one big explosion. Turbans, saris, noodles with lung and pork melt (what the hell, exactly, is pork melt?), rugby, Thai massage for Japanese tourists, and the cackling of five different Mainland dialects (excluding Mandarin and Cantonese) of the old ladies, permanently clad in black silk pants and matching flower-patterned, traditional, silk tops (I swear, they ALL wear these. Every single, gold-toothed one of them. It's amazing) lined up in front of the free clinic. After nearly (and sadly, only) one year here in Hong Kong, it's become my kind of zoo. If indeed I pack my bags for the land of the rising sun, I'll miss this place for sure.

That said... man, you gotta love those nice, clean, quiet Japanese trains.

**Afterword**

"Home is where your credit is good at the corner store." -- Suketu Mehta

To PL: thanks to you, never has the question of "Where is home?" lingered so permanently in my mind. I've never cared so much, I think, to find my home. The feeling of coming home has always come to me, if only fleetingly. Hopefully, you stay somewhere long enough to comfortably accept that it's become home to you, or else you realize the place you came from last was indeed home, and you just failed to realize it, and you go back. Then again... it just could be that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Given that possibility... home just might be where you find the XTC gelato shop where the lady behind the counter knows you when you walk in the door.

Welcome Back

Blog: Eugene, where have you been?

Me: Out. In and out. In Hong Kong.

Blog: You haven't blogged in months.

Me: I know. I've wanted to. Really. But Hong Kong has a way of swallowing you whole. Especially people like me, who get so easily caught up in the riptides of life.

Blog: Welcome back, you lazy bastard. You've been both living life and letting life slip past. It's time again to write about it.

Me: Thanks. Nice seeing you again too.

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I'm back from a night of light (read: heavy) drinking in TST with a friend from Japan who is really from Vancouver. My head is thick from the martinis and merlot. It's both wonderfully contrived, strange, and fun to meet up with friends from another continent that you originally met in a third country. A globetrotter I am not, and yet it doesn't take too many countries to meet people you don't want to forget. One minute we're sharing the snow on the cliffs of western Japan. The next in Hong Kong sharing the drink and sweat of Hong Kong.

There is a girl that I know. She is from Malaysia, grew up in Hong Kong, and speaks perfect American English. That vexes me beyond words. She has large, dark eyes that enveloped me. Took me in, made me feel wanted. She is seven years my junior, and yet may be more awake and mature than me. Or maybe not. Maybe she is naive, but maybe I'm naive in believing so. It was my first experience not chasing a possibility with a woman. The first time that I can really say, "What could have it been like? What if...?"

I don't get drunk often. But when I do, I'm always... drunk. Life passes by quickly and unnoticed, in the form of footsteps, moving walls and signs, and people passing by like wraiths. I need to concentrate on not walking into them. Before I know it, I'm home. But not before waking up several times to make sure I didn't miss my stop on the train and bus and end up in China. If I breath hard enough, I imagine that I instantly sober up. Walking in a straight line is no problem for me. It's thinking in a straight line that kicks my ass.

After the rains, the frogs and toads come out. I nudge one with a stick, and it moves blithely along, annoyed by my prodding and poking. I have to remind myself not to step on it. Besides, it's fat, and would have made a mess of my shoes. My friends, the geckos, have been out of sight lately. Usually I catch them by my mailbox or on my kitchen walls. They like to shit in my apartment, maybe to remind me that I'm not alone. Thanks, gecko, for the parting gift.

In TST, there is a place called Chungking Mansion. It's a haven for all things African, Pakistani, Indian, Nepali, etc. Food, movies, phone cards, guest houses, and handbags. The moment you walk in, you're surrounded by men offering you discounts for curry and biryani. You instantly become a VIP, with a card to prove it.

A couple nights ago I shared a Vietnamese dinner with some Japanese, a Beijing person, a Hong Kong person, and a Frenchman and his wife. Six languages were spoken. Spring rolls and noodles with raw beef were eaten. Hong Kong is a place where all things come together. Not in a kaleidoscope, but in a mish-mash. Pakistanis selling you fake Rolexes and speaking to you in Japanese. Australians talking about Thai hookers in a California-themed bar.

It's 2am. With the right amount of alcohol comes clarity, fogginess, and regret. Guard your heart, she said. We're all wrecking balls, you know. We sweep through, by, and past hearts and minds. There is no stopping it, no avoiding, unless you choose to live in a bubble. The risk you take is... that you have an effect on those you encounter. Hope that you leave a good impression; pray that you don't leave too much damage in your wake.

Guard your heart, she said. Impossible. Better yet... to freeze it. Make it numb, inactive. If you don't allow yourself to live... why bother even breathing?

Long time, no blog

I've been distracted of late and thus have been neglecting my blog. So... as a sort of warm-up exercise... here's a little something that not only do I find inspiring but also reflects my current mood.

From one of my favorite American painters, Edward Hopper, perhaps his most famous work.


And from one of my favorite Counting Crow songs:

"If you've never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame."

Whether looking outward or inward... always looking for something and never finding. I had once thought I found what I was looking for, this in the form of a lovely woman. Yesterday I bid my final farewell to her. In the imagined permanence of my life, I'm reminded, rather unkindly, that love is ephemeral, and I'm left looking inward again... maybe to find my own debt of willingness to loneliness?

In a city of nearly seven million people, with an endless pulse that throbs with life and various degrees of fire and light, I can still find my nighthawks.

Life and the Village Banana

I live in a village. It is and is not what you might imagine. Villages in Hong Kong (and China, I'm sure) are small micro-communities. Essentially, a small bunch of village houses built on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. Houses, apartments, and larger "apartments" that could be considered condos are all called "village houses" when they are located in villages. Regardless of what kind, they almost always have their own individual courtyards. These can be either enclosed with a short fence and gated door or a low cement "wall" (rarely over a few feet tall) with an opening through which to walk. If it were not for these walls, you wouldn't be able to tell where one neighbor's courtyard ends and another neighbor's begins. Thanks to over population and development, most villages now are fairly accessible; they're located near major roads, have their own bus stops, and even have parking spaces for those villagers that have cars. It is a scant 10 minute bike ride from my village to the nearest McDonald's.

Having grown up in modern, middle-class, suburban America, I find myself quite out-of-sorts even just saying the words "I live in a village." For me, the word "village" conjures up images of chickens running about (with their necks wagging to and fro in that strange way that chickens walk), straw thatched roofs, dried meats hung up to cure, and bare-footed children fetching water from the well with wooden buckets. At least, this is what I imagine people think when I tell them where I live. Often, I expect them to compliment me on having discovered the sun blocking advantages of Oakleys over wide-brimmed straw hats.

For me, village life is an amusing juxtaposition of old vs. new. Some of my neighbors don't have front doors. At least, it seems that way. They almost never shut their doors except on the coldest winter days or during the heaviest rains. So I get a short glimpse into their lives whenever I walk past. An old man watches a DVD on a big screen television. His living room floor is cement, and looks just as dirty as a busy sidewalk. His wife, an old granny with skin as brown and dry as parchment, washes dishes outside at a spigot. Her peppered gray hair, streaked black with strands of hair that refuse to give in to age, reminds me of the white bristles of an old Chinese calligraphy brush, stiff and ink-stained from pages and pages of brushed strokes. She places the cleanly washed (or dirty?) rice bowls and chopsticks on the cement just as naturally as we'd stack them in our kitchen cupboards. Moments later, she might be chatting away on a cell phone in some strange dialect that I can't understand.

The family that lives in the house next to me has three generations sharing its roof. They eat dinner outside at a table in their courtyard through which I have to walk to get to my building. No matter how often I do this, no matter how comfortable my neighbors are with it, I never fail to feel both like a voyeur and an uninvited guest. The children sit at the table in the early evenings studying English. After dinner, the adults sit around and chat and play mahjong if the mood strikes them (which, for Cantonese people, occurs just about as often as the urge to eat and sleep). Sometimes, when I come home from work late, the older sister is out in the courtyard spinning a hula hoop around her waist while playing a Game Boy.

This dichotomy, this perpetual dance of notions old and new occurs from both within my own home and the outside world of the village. I have a Timex alarm clock that has a bluish Indiglo nightlight. Very high-tech for something so simple, although I've been using it since 1998. Even though I set it every morning, I rarely need it, as I wake up to the sounds of the village and the countryside coming to life. A distant rooster sounds his daily revely. My neighbors next door (the family of three generations) owns a small flock of geese. They are usually squawking away at each other (often, the geese and the children) only moments, it seems, after sunrise.

From my kitchen window, I can look down into the courtyard of another neighbor who runs a small catering business from his home. He specializes in box lunches. Three other chaps, probably his brothers and/or cousins, are there to help him out. Two take care of kitchen duties while the third delivers the food. I often see him ride off on his rickety bike with four or more orders in plastic bags dangling from his handle bars and another bunch stacked in a basket at the back. They're up well before the sun, chopping away at meat and vegetables and cooking up a storm. I have the distinct pleasure (a bit of sarcasm here) of waking up to the rap of a knife tapping away at a chopping block and the fantastic aroma of sauted ginger and scallions wafting through my open windows. They're so busy (must be decent cooks; I should give them a ring sometime) that I've grown accustomed to the din of their morning routine and can even tell what they're cooking. A crisp staccato means chopping vegetables. A slower, more controlled rhythm means meat. They're gone now; their door and windows are shut tight, the bicycles parked and locked up in their courtyard. The big Styrofoam boxes that they use to wash meat, huge bunches of vegetables and whole fish haven't seen any water in weeks and sit stacked, upside-down, by the front door. Must be on holiday, perhaps back in China visiting relatives and regaling them with stories about life in fast-paced Hong Kong.

Villages tend to have lots of dogs. Some are probably feral but most are people's pets. There are a few German Shepherds, some Golden Retrievers, and even a couple Lhasa Apsos but generally they're of an unidentifiable breed and of the large, wolfish utility or hunting-dog kind of build. I imagine they look much like their ancestors did back when they roamed the wilder parts of South China, hunting rats and shitting in rice paddies. More often than not, they're neither leashed nor confined to yards but rather left out to run free and leave turds anywhere they please. Sort of like Paris but without the cheese and cafes.

I think the Chinese have different standards with which they determine whether a dog is properly trained. In the West, we consider a properly trained dog one that sits and fetches balls on command, and only barks at appropriate times, those being either when given the command to "Speak" or when a burglar tries to break into the house. Here in Hong Kong, the standards are much, much lower. The only requirement for a dog to be "properly trained" is that it doesn't eat your small children. As it were, the dogs bark ALL bloody hours of the day. Incessantly. At anything. At nothing at all. Even the supposed "good-natured" dogs such as the Retrievers. One of my neighbors has two large ones (yes, I'm still talking dogs here). I've lived here for months already; they see/smell me walk back and forth from the parking lot to my apartment building on a daily basis and yet they still bark at me as if I was a complete stranger or a stray cat. The more viscous ones bark and growl at me as if they want to dip me in soy sauce and eat me (no doubt, some of them are probably waiting for that one perfect night when I come stumbling home drunk off my ass.)

What's worse is that if there isn't anything going on in my village to set the dogs off, then the dogs from neighboring villages set them off. These other villages might be miles away. It's as if they're talking to each other; an inter-village canine network. If only I could understand dog-speak, I'd imagine a conversation at around 2 AM to sound something like this:


Dogs in Village A:

"Hey, guess what? When the wind blows, the leaves on the trees rustle like mad! It sounds just like the mating call of a large hoofed animal. And for some reason, now we've got this uncontrollable, visceral desire to bark our heads off and go kill something! Isn't that some crazy shit?!"

Reply from Dogs in Village B:

"Get the fuck outta here! Dude, that's whacked. But strangely enough now we've got the same urge too! Let's all bark together! And let's not stop for the next hour or so, at least! Just to make sure it's all out of our systems!"


Another perk that comes with living in the country (read: jungle) is the wildlife. For instance, I have geckos. One in particular likes to hang out near my mailbox and scare the living bejeezus out of me when I walk up to check my mail. There are also legions of stray cats and kittens roaming about. Every once in a while, I see tropical birds flitting in and out of the trees on the mountain behind the village. I can hear their musical calls in the mornings. And, although I've yet to see one, I'm sure that there are monkeys living on that mountain as well. Throw in the rooster, the chickens, those damn geese, and the never-ending cacophony of raucous dogs, and you have a regular zoo. Orwell must have lived in a Hong Kong village when he got the idea for Animal Farm.

Historically, I believe villages were originally comprised of family members and relatives. Essentially, no matter how distant or close, you could say you were related to everyone in your village. You probably knew everyone as well. Of course, these days, outside of one's home, few people if any are actually related, but everyone (or most everyone) knows everyone else. Such is the charm of my village. You are friends with your neighbor, your neighbor's neighbor, your neighbor's neighbor's neighbor, etc, etc.

I didn't realize it, but it was big news when I moved into my apartment. It seemed that my landlord took it upon herself to notify the other tenants in my building that a foreigner had come into their midst. Apparently, she also felt it her civic duty to notify the neighbors as well. Thus the word spread. There's a guy living in our village that looks Chinese but speaks only English, dresses funny, rides a fancy mountain bike, rollerblades to and from work instead of taking the bus, and doesn't hang his laundry out on clotheslines to dry. Needless to say, when I met my neighbors for the first time, they all knew I was from America. Whenever I speak Cantonese to my neighbors, they speak (or try to speak) English back to me. They laugh when they see me riding to and from the office in tights (hey, it does get cold in Hong Kong in the winter) and a helmet, or coming back from town with grocery bags tied to my back pack.

Unfortunately, just when I started to feel like a celebrity, I discovered that, in fact, there is another foreigner living in my village. Just two buildings away from mine. And he's Caucasian, to boot. I've never met him nor have I even seen him outside. But I have to pass his building every time I walk out of the village to the bus stop and I see him in there every night, eyes glued to his laptop. Probably watching South Park Season Three on DVD or blogging about how cool village life is in Hong Kong. It's both strange and yet not surprising that the only person that I either haven't seen face to face or that I know, is another expat. Well, despite having lost the novelty and title of being the sole foreigner in my village, I can safely say that I am the only "banana" in my village.

Chinese marketing strategy at its best

I'm rather fond of Chinese snacks. I couldn't resist taking a picture of the English description for this particular bag of snacks:

"Chongqing Strange-Taste Horsebeans."

Chongqing is a port city in central China along which runs the Yangtze River. The name means "double celebration" in Chinese. Among it's sister cities include Seattle, Hiroshima, and Toulouse.

I've never been there, but I'd like to go someday. Not only to sample some more strange-tasting horsebeans, but to also see the monstrosity and affront to nature that is called the Three Gorges Dam.

Now that I think about it, I think if I were to ever take the nap that needs no blanket, and the cause of death was from choking on strange-tasting horsebeans due to being too big while my mouth was eaten (Thanks!), I'd like my epitaph to say:

Here lies Eugene. He was a kind man. He kicked the bucket one day whilst eating some strange-tasting horsebeans. May he rest in peace.

Better yet, if whomever wrote it were to mix up the words a bit:

Here lies Eugene. He was a kind man. He kicked the bucket one day whilst eating some horse-tasting strangebeans. May he rest in peace.

The fun that can be had with Chinese snacks... "and hijinks ensued."

Suggestion: don't choke to death. Thanks!

The warning found on the back of a bag of Chinese snacks:

"Suggest consumer: children are while eating, please don't be big the mouth is eaten, so as not to choke, thanks!"

Although I am a big fan of Engrish, the thing that I really loved about this warning is the show of gratitude at the end. The "thanks!" seems so casual, so non-chalant, so matter-of-fact, so... instant messenger chat-like. The feeling I get when I read this is not at all the tinge of fear at the mere thought of a child's potential death by asphyxiation (a crappy way to go for anyone), but rather an "Oh, I see." The same feeling I get just as if I read a sign in a park that said "Please keep of the grass, thanks!"

Tales from the frontal lobe, Part 2

Some randomness....

On McDonald's in Hong Kong:

Red bean pies. Not bad. They have apple pies too. Delicious, as they still deep fry them over here.

Can hear Tom Jones whilst dining on your fish sandwich.

Motto: "Food safety and quality - our first priority." Quality. Okay, no problems with that. But food safety? Shouldn't this be implied and not necessary to be explicitly stated for the consumer? Sort of akin to the police saying "We'll try our best not to let you get killed."

On scars:

I have a round one on my left elbow from when I fell off my bike as a kid. I was on my way to 8th grade orientation during the final week of summer before school started up again. I hit a large rock with my front tire and flew ass over teakettle (I don't know what that means, but I like the way it sounds) over my handlebars.

I once was completely sure about the woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I asked her to marry me. She said no, and I didn't know what to do after that. I still think about her. A lot.

Some things never fade.

On ATM machines:

In the US, we have drive-up ATM machines. The buttons have braille on them. How exactly do blind people use drive-up cash machines?

In Hong Kong, the ATM machines have signs warning you of hidden cameras and devices used to copy your PIN or steal your card. (I think I prefer braille). They also tell you to beware of people peering over your shoulder as you enter your PIN.

In the US and in Japan, people stand a respectful distance behind you in the queue while you conduct your transaction.

In Hong Kong, they stand so close they are practically inside you. Guess one needs to pay attention to those warnings.

On Hong Kong mini-buses:

Some of the most fun I've had since moving to Hong Kong.

They have large digital displays mounted for all the passengers to see. The displays show the speed that the driver is going. When the driver exceeds the speed limit, the display starts beeping and a red light comes on to alert the passengers. Some drivers stay over the speed limit, and the passengers are forced to listen to the beeping until they get off at their stop.

They swerve in and out of traffic, run red lights, and take corners at high speeds. People and the government say they are dangerous. I say they are exciting but not for the timid or those suffering from heart conditions. Plus, you rarely hear about accidents involving mini-buses. If they were so dangerous, the media would be crawling all over even the most minor incident involving a mini-bus.

Some of the drivers are the rudest people I have met in my entire life. Some are polite, a rare few even cheerful and will smile at you or give you directions or advise you when to alight if you're not sure. Almost all have faces that tell some story. You can see it when you watch them drive, when you know they're not paying much attention to anything except the road and what's on their mind at the moment.

To be continued in Part 3....

Beef jerky? What's that?

Perusing the aisles of my local grocery store results in some interesting finds.

In the box on the left are dried snake skins. To the right are dried lizards, which apparently were sliced open down the middle and splayed open after their fateful demise.

These are boiled in various herbal soups and other concoctions used in traditional Chinese medicine.

But I'd much rather imagine little kids running around on playgrounds, waving their miniature lizard kites about, and laughing hysterically. Or perhaps old women fanning themselves on a hot day; they had better hope the tail doesn't come off.

There was also this box of dried ducks. Not only were the ducks completely whole (minus the feet, which are eaten separately as snacks) but they were also completely flattened. I took this photo with my mobile phone camera so the quality isn't great. However, look closely enough and you can make out the legs, wings, neck, head, and bill.

I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of eating flattened duck so I can't honestly say how it's used in Chinese cooking. I will say that, when I saw this, I suddenly had an irresistable urge to play ping-pong.

Is that SARS on your tie, or a just a bread crumb?

I wasn't in Hong Kong during SARS, but I had heard that people were afraid to touch doorknobs and elevator buttons for fear of contracting some deadly disease. Like SARS. To minimize the chances of contamination, people used keys, pens, or whatever they had on hand to push the buttons instead. (The really lucky ones used either telekinesis or paid their housekeepers to push the buttons for them).

I suppose that wearing surgical gloves everywhere you went might have been a bit too drastic, although if you were already knocking about in public, you were probably already wearing a surgeon's mask as well, so why not complete the look?

Living in post-SARS Hong Kong, and with avian bird flu the current pandemic in Asian news and on people's minds, I often see signs that Hong Kong people have turned to a culture of fear. Specifically, this fear of the unseen. I took this picture of the elevator in the Consular Visa Office when I went to apply for a visa to travel to China. (A word about Chinese bureaucracy: it is less devastating and far less nerve-wracking to contract a deadly disease than it is to apply for a visa to enter China.)

Of course, I'm a cynical guy. So I highly doubt that someone actually cleans the elevator buttons every single hour in every single day. That's just too difficult for me to believe, knowing how lazy people can be. I imagine, at best, that some cleaning lady gets in the elevator every 4 hours or so and arbitrarily wipes the buttons for some floors, and ignores the buttons for the rest. To be honest, I can't blame her. If I had such a mundane task as that to look forward to every morning I rolled out of bed, I'd try to make it as interesting as possible too. I'd sterilize my phone number, followed by all the phone numbers of my friends and family, followed perhaps by the GDP of all the countries beginning with the letter "U" between 1965 to 1988.

What is strange is that I didn't really feel better at all after seeing this in the elevator. I mean, after all, heaven knows what lurks on door handles to public bathrooms, payphones, and restaurants.

Restaurants. I need a whole new blogsite devoted just to talking about Hong Kong restaurants. It is an experience in and of itself to sup in a Hong Kong eatery (in this case, I'm referring to the shadier dumps... uh, I mean establishments... where you get cheap and fast food). In Cantonese, they're called "Tea Cafes" or "Tea Restaurants." I remember when I was a little kid, I used to eat lunch with my uncle at one particular tea cafe near his office. We shared our daily gastronomic enchantment with old men who sat with barefeet propped up on the chairs, picking away at rotted or dead toenails, coolies in filthy uniforms, lit cigarettes, with an inch of ash threatening to fall into their rice, permanently affixed to their lower lips, brass spittoons that were more often than not, overflowing, and... cockroaches. Everywhere. On the floor. On the walls. Dangling precariously from the ceilings (if I had paid more attention, I probably would have seen them drop like silent ninjas into the soup of some unsuspecting lunch-goer).

Nowadays, restaurant health codes are a bit stricter. (You can still find some roaches here and there if you look carefully enough. Which is to say, so long as you have at least one working cornea, you're bound to see one). What you do find now in most tea cafes is a large bowl of hot water to "wash" your chopsticks, spoon, rice bowl, etc, before you eat. I would highly doubt that water at well below boiling point makes for an effective sanitizer of eating utensils, but I could be wrong. But, I suppose, more important than the actual sterilization, is the notion that you are cleaning something before you put it in your mouth. The Placebo effect, as it were.

Sorry. I'm just not fooled. Besides, regardless of how clean and bacteria-free my chopsticks might be, doesn't it all kind of just go to hell anyway when I have to use them to pick a dead roach out of my soup?

Housecleaning

Just to minimize any confusion, I want to explain the current mess that is called accidentalmandarin. All of my earlier posts were originally posted to my MySpace page and I just copied them over to accidentalmandarin when I started this blogsite. Unfortunately, the links to them in the Archives sidebar were broken, or never established in the first place. So... being the somewhat OC person that I am, I've reposted them (again). The Archive links should work now but... there really isn't any point in that anymore, since they all show up as new posts, and thus have no real need to be archived anymore. Fuck all.

Of course, if I was smart, I would have just gone into the code and fixed the links. Well, that's assuming two things. That I could have figured out how exactly to do that (it seems the code doesn't explicitly state each blog as an linked item, or at least that's what I gather with my limited knowledge of HTML). Far worse is assuming that I'm smart. Which, I would like to clarify to you and the rest of the www now, that I am not. I assure you... if my synapses were to fire any less than they already do... I'd be dead.

I don't want to hear the words "Copy and Paste" again for at least the next 3 months.

Dipthong me high, dipthong me low

Originally posted Jan 13, 2006:

During the week, I usually eat outside. I mean, literally, outside. As I work at a university and have to share an over-crowded cafeteria with students and faculty alike, and being the IFSP that I am, I usually take my food outside to the picnic tables just adjacent to the building.

On one particularly fine day, I was sitting at a picnic table, sleepily digesting and soaking up the sunshine of the seventy degree January afternoon. Awash in my post-luncheon stupor, I had not noticed that I my jacket had slipped from the back of my chair to the ground. Fortunately, a civil-minded girl walked past and said “Three plates”. I turned in my chair and looked up to face her, thinking “Three plates?” Before another synapse would fire, I probably would have said “What the [insert colorful metaphor here] are you talking about?!” Luckily for the both of us, she pointed down at my now crumpled jacket splayed on the concrete.

Cantonese is a tonal dialect consisting of about six to seven tones. Actually, this is even under dispute, as many Hong Kong-ers have told me there are at least eight or nine tones in total. See, you know stuff gets confusing when native speakers of the local dialect don’t even know how many tones there are. Anyway, I digress…. Speaking the same words using varying tones will vary the meaning of the word. So, in my case, when spoken using different tones, the word for “three” means “clothing” and the word for “plate” sounds like “fall.”

Just to add to the mayhem, let me clarify something here. The word for “clothing” in Cantonese can mean sweater, jacket, t-shirt, button-down, polo, etc, etc. However, you cannot use it to indicate pants or shorts. No freakin’ way. Waist up only, pal. Crazy foreigner. So, taken in context, and with a little imagination thrown in, what I had heard was not “Three plates” but rather “You dropped your jacket.” Elementary, my dear Watson.

I’ve read countless books, magazine articles, expatriate discussion forums, etc, about foreigners voicing their frustration at the difficulty in learning to speak Cantonese. As an American-born Chinese who rarely spoke anything but English growing up, I can attest to this complaint, and seemingly, on a day-to-day basis. The fact that the common Cantonese or Hong Kong person you run across on the street is more likely to either ignore you or laugh at you than correct your pronunciation only exacerbates this linguistic gem of a problem. So, allow me to present just a smidgen of a sliver of a microscopic cross-section of a mere sampling of common tonal mishaps that occur when foreigners try to speak Cantonese.

You want to say “X”, but you actually say “Y”:

X= buy Y=sell (can be hell for stock brokers)

X=expensive Y= strange

X=small Y=wash

X=charity Y=You’re crazy!

X=dozen, open Y=hit (Let me expound on this one a bit… Imagine you are in cafe, and you motion to the waiter and say “cigarette lighter” but what you really said was “Hit the waiter.” Done with the right facial expression and enough times, this can provide hours of fun. That is, until you booted from the restaurant or assaulted.

X=new Y=first (not so bad, this one)

X=dog, nine Y=um… male sex organ (Okay, you know that I know that you know what I’m thinking so… let’s just get past that, shall we? I’d like, once again, to take some liberties with this. Imagine now you are standing at a street-side food vendor. You want a “hot dog” but what you really say is “hot male sex organ.” Depending on which way the, uh… meat handler… swings [no pun intended], you may or may not end up with a date for the evening.)

Mind you, this is only a sampling of what could happen.

At the risk of sending this blog straight to the gutter, I’d to point out another possible candidate for embarrassment by picking up where “Hit the waiter” left off. Ignoring for the moment my incorrect Romanization of the Chinese, “Hit the waiter” in Cantonese sounds like “Dah foa gay”. Literally, it means “Open fire machine.” (Personally, I think “fire machine” is a whole hell of a lot cooler than “cigarette lighter.”) If you were to happen to confuse the sounds, and instead were to say “Dah fay gay”, everlasting laughs would ensue. “Dah fay gay” in its literal translation, means “Hit the airplane.” Okay, not such an odd thing to say, linguistically speaking. But, what does it mean, you ask? Ay, there’s the rub. Oops. Again, no pun intended. Well, let’s just say that it’s synonymous to one of my perennial favorite sayings, especially at the dinner table, “Punch the clown.” Should I clarify by mentioning something about choking chickens, or need I say more?

God, you gotta love language. By the way, you dropped three plates.

Peanut butter saved your ass, curry!

Originally posted on Jan. 11, 2006:

Last night I purchased a jar of red curry sauce from a local grocer. I should mention that Hong Kong isn't noted for good curry, as this was a local brand of curry sauce. Being the finicky "gourmet" that I oft try to be, I scrutinized the ingredients carefully: turmeric, salt, chili, onion, star aniseed, cassia. Okay. Sounded good so far. Not exactly your typical red curry sauce, but seemed like a good combination.

However, what sold me was the last ingredient, and I kid you not: antioxidants. Well, who could ask for more? Not only would I flavor my soup base, I'd be making my dishes healthier than they would be without sauce.

Needless to say, upon returning home, I felt like wretching after actually opening the jar and taking a whiff of the curry. How can I describe it... fetid. And I didn't even know the meaning of this word until I stuck my nose within smelling distance of this stuff.

Let it not be said that I don't try things even once. So I did. Let's just say I thought I had just wasted a bowl of perfectly good noodles. For no known reason, I decided to throw in a heaping spoonful of peanut butter, and guess what? Miraculously, the taste improved 300%! The noodles were actually bordering on downright delicious! In fact, I was reminded of West African food, which often uses peanuts in it's dishes.

So, to you, jar of stank-nasty red curry, you've been spared being pitched. You have Skippy (the good stuff is hard to come by here in Hong Kong) to thank for that. Cuz' he saved your ass.

The ABC's of Me

Originally posted Jan 11, 2006:

Recently, at the behest of a friend, I subjected myself (for 5 terribly grueling minutes) to an online personality test. I realize there is a plethora of different types of personality tests based on various psychologies and sciences of the brain; off the top of my head, I don’t recall the name of this particular one. Briggs Meyers maybe. Jungian perhaps. Or was it Duncan Hines? Anyway, not important.

What is important is how I scored and what it means. So, after answering a few questions using the online questionnaire, I click “Finish” and tremble nervously, with abated breath, for the results. Guess what? I’m an IFSP! Yup. Really. It’s that simple. That’s me. Obviously. The psychological and neurological effects of nearly 30 years of experience on this planet summed up in one 4-letter acronym. Of course, those of you that know me probably knew this about me already. Probably could tell by the way I tie my shoelaces or butter my toast.

I suppose it’s better than ASS.

IFSP, for those of you like me who have never been inculcated in the dark world of personality evaluation, stands for Introvert, Feeling Personality, Sensing Personality, and Perceptive Personality. Within these personality spectrums, I am weighted 88%, 12%, 12%, and 11%, respectively. Meaning, of all things, I am an introvert most of all.

Hmm. Okay. I agree so far. I consider myself fairly introverted. I do like to keep to myself. I’m rather shy and avoid the limelight when at all possible. I do prefer quiet walks in empty parks over raucous, over-crowded parties or family get-togethers. And… I will admit that one aspiration of mine has always been to have “Does not play well with others” tattooed on my forehead. But, as for the other three results, I’m not sure as to their accuracy. It’s hard to believe I score less than 15% for having feelings and being sensitive and perceptive (to other people’s feelings, I presume. Because, otherwise, I’m sensitive as hell. Half a pint of beer and I’m out like a light.)

I daresay I consider myself a fine specimen of the more sensitive and emotionally in-tuned human being. I’m a good listener. I try to consider other people’s feelings before I comment about them or their situations. I hold back when it’s necessary, and am blunt when it’s required. In addition to the uncanny skill of brushing my teeth, shampooing, and conditioning my hair simultaneously while in the shower, I also happen to have quite a knack for perceiving facial expressions and other forms of non-verbal communication.

Those tell-tale signs that clue you right into a person’s mood or daily fiber intake. In other words, I can read a person like a book.

Made in China

Originally posted on Dec. 14, 2005:

You can pretty much buy anything in Hong Kong. Authentic, fake, legal, illegal, or otherwise. If you are in the mood, and if you have the money, you can spend thousands of dollars on LV, Prada, Gucci, Rolex, Armani, and all the other stuff coming out of Europe that you wished the Chinese could make for a fraction of the cost to the consumer.

Wait a minute. Back up the truck. The Chinese DO make that stuff for a fraction of the cost to the consumer. Of course, there arises the dubious question as to the legitimacy and authenticity of these pocketbook-friendly goods. But, when it comes down to it, who really cares, right? I mean... except for the most extreme (read: expensive) cases, everything is made in China anyways. Who's to say that the "real" stuff that is made in China and the "fakes" that are (of course!) made in China isn't all coming from the same factory?

Imagine, if you will, a multi-storey factory building in some remote, polluted corner of China. On the 3rd floor, we have the Calvin Klein production floor churning out boxer briefs that will later be sold for $25 in Calvin Klein boutiques in upscale malls across the globe. On the 7th floor, we have some nameless company (well, not nameless, just something obscure like the Hung Duck Wang Clothing and Textile Co, Ltd.) churning out the same boxer briefs (indeed, both companies share the same materials distributor, use the same brand of sewing machines, and hire the same underpaid kids... er, I mean, adults... from the same neighboring village). One slight deviation from the "real" thing: the "dot" that dots the "i" in "Calvin" is a small oval instead of a small circle. These will be sold in some street market for around $3 USD for a pack of three.

After you've been shopping in Hong Kong for a while, the line that deviates real vs. fake tends to get pretty blurred. Especially if you so decide to give even an ounce of thought as to where these items come from and how they came to be made.

Love as defined by Hollywood and regurgitated by me

Originally posted on Oct. 17, 2005:

A good friend of mine asked me a while back kind of an odd question: if love can be defined by something you can feel, touch, taste, smell, etc, what would it be?

Well, the following is my reply. I wish I could say that it's all original but, despite my best efforts, I'm sure most of what follows is right out of some book I've read or some movie I've seen.

So, here goes...

"If love (for now, I mean love for that significant other person in your life, not love for say... dark chocolate with 70% cacao) is something to be heard, felt, seen, smelled, etc... what would it be?

Hmmm... love is...

that electric feeling in your chest (butterflies in your stomach?) that you get when he/she enters the room (ok, from this point on, i'll only type she; you know what i mean anyway), or when you catch sight of her in a crowd... if you didn't have this feeling everytime you saw her... you would know that you were dead.

the sensation of her hand in yours... when you are strolling along together, watching a movie in a theater, sitting across from each other at the dinner table... and, automatically, so naturally, your thumb gently caresses her hand while you're holding it... as if you are trying to feel the texture of her skin under yours.

the scent of her perfume on the bedsheets, on her blouse, or in the bathroom, and you walk in, and it's still in the air, so fresh that you can even taste it a little bit... and the first thing that comes to your mind is her... you might have just seen her 10 seconds ago, or maybe she's in another room... but you smell or taste her perfume... and your thoughts go from drifting and floating (maybe you are thinking "how long have i been shaving with the same razer blade... must be getting dull") to intensely focused on the image of her in your mind... the memory of her smell... as if you hadn't seen her in years.

the feeling of the blanket falling over your shoulder as you take a nap... because you were cold, and she came to the bed and covered you... and even in your sleep, you know she is there.
it's the feeling of being lost... of never wanting food or drink or sleep for the rest of your life... if you are apart.

the anger and shame at yourself that boils up inside when you know you lost your temper with her.

the feeling of the melting away of that anger when you see her laugh and smile... to tell you she's not mad at you.

the feeling of being tired when you spend hours cooking her a fancy meal as a surprise before she comes home... the feeling when you remember that you wanted to do it for her, and it doesn't matter how much of a pain in the ass it is... because you want if for her.

the frustration when you build her a shelf... and it doesnt come out exactly right... and you have to start all over again.

the feeling like you are falling off a cliff... when you see tears come to her eyes... and you want to reach out and grab her, comfort her, and make the tears stop... but maybe you can't... maybe comforting her is like grabbing the air as you fall.

the sound of her voice when she calls you buy your pet name... her voice that fills every cavity inside you, fills the air underneath your skin... the connection with your heart that her voice made... so you don't even realize at all that it was your ears that heard her voice first.. and not your whole body.

the weight of her head on your shoulder as she sleeps next to you on the couch

love is... stimulating every and any possible sense... and sometimes, whether it's the waves of passion or the stinging pangs of loss... it's too much for you and your fragile body... and the feelings have no where left to escape to except in the form of tears... and love with the force of a billion tons becomes embodied by just a few drops of water."

5 Minutes on a Hong Kong Sidewalk

Originally posted on Sept. 10, 2005:

Hong Kong is crowded. You notice that immediately, and everytime you take to the streets. People are swarming everywhere: on the sidewalks, in the streets, poking their faces out apartment windows, standing around handing out flyers, taking surveys, hawking cheap towels and plastic goods....

Let me paint a picture for you to emphasize what I mean when I say "crowded."

Imagine yourself standing in a fully populated elevator. Packed well above it's occupancy limit for fire safety. Also keep in mind that all these people have just finished playing 2 hours of pick-up basketball and have yet to shower or clean up. Now... imagine that you and everyone else sharing your personal space (and possibly bodily fluids) now start trying to walk around. Over half of them at the brisk clip of an Olympic speed-walker (that is an actual Olympic sport, right?). What's that? You say you're one of these types yourself? No worries. By the way, did I mention that the person in front of you is a little, gray-haired, weezened old woman, barely managing to stay upright, shuffling along at about 2 feet per minute? (She opted out of the basketball for today.) The other, non-speedy half, is walking at a normal pace, perhaps talking on their mobile phone, eating a fish-ball kebab (that's for another blog), picking their nose, and just generally walking like they've no place to go, and have no particular care to get there.

Displacement doesn't happen. If you are so intent on moving, you'd be better off either climbing up on someones shoulders, waving your arms around above your head, and screaming like a chimp, or spinning around in place like a top. That, essentially, is what walking around Hong Kong is like. You spend more time dodging and dancing around people than actually moving forward towards your intended destination.

When you are not having a ball doing this, you are constantly fending off people standing around handing out flyers for some newly-opened restaurant or massage parlour or insurance company. A few words about this job. It is both tiring and thankless. Generally, people are too busy to even pay attention to the fact that they are standing there, handing them something, let alone to stop and take a flyer and actually read it. As it were, these people have adopted a unique method of distribution: as you walk closer towards them, they shove the flyer at you, as if thrusting with a bowie knife at your mid-section (the shorter ones aim for a somewhat more vital region of the body). Before you even have a chance to react, nay, before you even have a chance to think about diverting your gaze from the above-mentioned gray-haired lady... the hand holding the flyer is gone. No sooner than when you look down does the paper-gripped hand begin it's cobra strike at the person behind you.

You see... they KNOW that you aren't going to pay attention to them. So they don't actually try to GIVE you the flyer. Rather, they just go through the motions, creating the illusion of distribution. Well, it certainly takes the sting out of the constant rejection and brush-offs. However, it seems, just a tad, to defeat the overall purpose.

Being the noble, considerate bloke that I am, I've also developed my own little technique for dealing with these flyer-wielding geniuses. I actually take the flyer. Often I find myself snatching it out of their hands, as I know they have no intention of actually surrendering it to me. Rarely must I even break stride as I collect them. I drop off my collection in the next waste bin I pass. Sometimes literally a few feet from the last person that I got a flyer from. I never actually read any of them. Most are in Chinese (which I find cryptic, since I don't read Chinese characters) and rarely do they advertise anything of substance worth checking out (e.g. the grand opening of yet another fast-food noodle shop serving... gasp! Chinese noodles!)

But, after spending an afternoon walking around, depositing perfectly good flyers into the trash, and probably pissing off a lot of tree huggers, I find that I am content to know that I've helped someone accomplish their task for the day. I actually helped somebody make a buck or two. I can't help but pat myself on the back for that one.

Postscript: Another sight commonly encountered on Hong Kong sidewalks is homeless people and other such "unsavoury" types (I say this not out of disdain for the homeless, but because they are so often quite dirty from not having a place to shower or bathe) picking through the public waste bins. In addition to collecting plastic bottles and aluminum cans for recycling, I notice that, quite often, they are also collecting flyers and other such waste papers found in the bins. For what reason I can't deduce. Paper recycling perhaps? Lining their pet hamster's cage? Not likely. Lining their own (usually cardboard) bed for increased insulation and padding? Hard to say. But, what I can say is: life would certainly be a LOT easier for a whole lot of Hong Kong-ers if the homeless people and the flyer maniacs got together and cut out the middle-man.

Flying by the seat of one’s pants

Originally posted on August 30, 2005:

I just read this short passage this morning on the train ride into the "office". It really... moved me. I feel it aptly describes the state of my current life.

"...[she] would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.... I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

This is from Kerouac's On The Road. It's a great book. Wild. Free. Reckless and scary. Well, hey, this was the Beatnik era. What else would one expect? This is only my first Kerouac novel, and I'm not even half-way thru with it. A good friend told me once that she doesn't read Kerouac because "he's too depressing." So I started thinking (a rarity for me) about this. He is kind of depressing. And, if I am not already depressed about something else or at the moment of reading, I find I am on the verge whenever I dive back into the book. On the verge of expecting everything to come crashing down on the free-spirited characters (of course, the characters are Kerouac himself and a supposed real-life buddy of his.) In other words, I'm waiting, with abated breath, for real-life to catch-up with them.

This is what is depressing. To me, at least. Why? Is it because I am NOT living the life that Kerouac did? (of course, I don't necessarily need the sex, drugs, and craziness that marked his life) So it's both depressing and a relief to me when the fun ends and reality hits home. Because that's where I am now. Whatever I call "reality", a practical life, etc, etc... it's where I safely reside, where I shelter myself from the fantasies.

I guess what I am saying in a very awkward way is that this book remind me of what I am not doing with my life. And I'm depressed by that fact, and by not knowing what is "right" and "wrong", in terms of "should I live this way or not?" My cousin reminded me last night (like so many others have) that I am already 29 (thus, old) and don't have time to waste anymore. She said stop jumping around and finish something that I've started. Of course, she said all this because I told her that I was considering quitting my job and either moving to a completely different country to be with my girlfriend or to move back to the US.

Yeah, the unfortunate side-effect of being reckless is disappointing your friends and family.

Despite the shadow of familial disapproval, the mistakes, the hardships, the emotional rollercoasters, and the lack of financial security... maybe there is something to "flying by the seat of one's pant's." Maybe everyone else that plays it safe is just too scared to try to realize this.

I'll trade you my burnable plastic for your non-burnable plastic...

Originally posted on April 25, 2005:

Even before my trusty alarm clock has a chance to rattle me out my slumber, I awake to the sound of music. No, really. Loud, tinny-sounding music (like the kind you hear from a PA system) emanating from the street below. Elevator music, but less invigorating. Along with the music, I hear a woman's voice speaking some Japanese I don't understand. Oh, what could it be?

Ahh, yes. The garbage truck. Here in Fukui, our garbage truck makes music. Melodies for your listening pleasure, whether you want it or not. As it makes its rounds through the neighborhoods, picking up bags of carefully sorted trash (more on that later), it merrily blasts it's tunes while making some vital community announcement from the city sanitation minister (I can't say for sure that there is a minister heading up the sanitation... uh, ministry, but, they like those kinds of titles in Japan).

In Japan, all trash is pre-sorted by the consumer. Paper, plastics, glass containers, metal cans, etc. Each is then respectively recycled or reused by the area recycling centers, and what cannot be recycled is, I assume, dumped in landfills or out to sea. Well, seems pretty straight forward, right? It is, until you actually get down to doing it. Keeping your life simple while simultaneously following ALL the rules for proper sorting of trash is virtually impossible; either you buy and use only things that come in edible packaging, or you keep 4-5 different trash bins in your tiny (read: Japanese) apartment.

Let's say you've got this sorting thing licked. You still have to figure out what day is the trash pick-up day for what items. A quick trip to city hall provides you with a schedule of pick-ups for your neighborhood. Great. No worries, right? Well, where does the trash actually go? I mean, where do you place it for the garbage man to pick up? If you're lucky, you have a cage specifically for trash that is centrally located within the neighborhood. If you aren't so lucky (and your phrasebook doesn't include "Where do I dump this?"), then you need to walk around (with your trash in tow) and look for piles of trash along the streets or on the sidewalks.

Though more often than not, you've stumbled onto the right pile of trash ("Eureka! I recognize that banana peel from Apartment 404!), you need to ensure it's the trash pile for your IMMEDIATE area. Why? Well, perhaps in order to make things more interesting for unsuspecting foreigners, even within neighborhoods there are different pick-up days. So, Monday could be paper day near your apartment building, and less than a block away, it might be metals day.

Invariably, you're walking around with a bag of paper trash, sweating profusely due to the day's relative humidity of 300 percent, attracting lingering stares from passing motorists and old ladies out for a walk (you bow slightly as if the sight of someone walking about with a bag of trash slung over his shoulder is completely normal), trying not to drip old coffee grounds on her, and stumble onto a plastics pile. Not the sort of situation to be relished. By me, anyways.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky to live in Fukui, where it's ok (I hope) to sort paper milk cartons with regular paper trash. And there is only one category of plastic waste. In Nagoya (and other big cities, where I suppose a greater variety of waste materials can be found), where I have had the memorable pleasure of throwing away trash, there are several categories of "combustible" waste. At least two categories each of combustible paper and plastic, and several categories for plastic containers (is it me, but isn't EVERYTHING on this planet, diamonds, titanium, and asbestos aside, combustible?). Not to say this should present a problem to a person of average intelligence; to the non Japanese-reading foreigner, the signs and pictures on the trash bins can sometimes be sufficiently explanatory enough to follow.

However, if there are instructions in English, beware. You will soon experience a bout of confusion, light-headedness, vertigo, and blurry vision. One bin might say combustible clear plastic bags. The adjacent bin will say non-combustible clear plastic bags. The bin next to that might just say combustible clear plastic (bags OK). One bin for clear Seran-wrap type plastic. Another for crinkly-type plastic. Another for crinkly Seran-type plastic. Yet another for crinkly plastic that doesn't really crinkle that loudly. And I've only just covered the plastic bags. There are also bins for plastic bottles with a certain symbol, bins for symbol-less bottles, bins for bottles with symbols only seen under UV-lighting. No bottle caps, please. These go with the plastic bags (combustible or no?). Foam trays? Covered. Those from the grocery go into the red bins. Those from convenience stores also can go into the red bins, unless they're from the convenience store up the street; those you must take back to the store and dump in their bins. Aluminum cans? No worries. Dance a jig, snap your fingers 3 times, rinse them out, and put them in the red bin (but the red bin is for...).

The significance of such complicated garbage disposal methods is lost on me. I suppose I can imagine how miserable life would be as a garbage sorter for the sanitation ministry if the public didn't at least help out by pre-sorting. But, here's what I think really happens anyway:

The garbage truck arrives after its rounds through the city, its music still blaring. From the truck, the garbage gets loaded into the sorting area, where it it comes under careful scrutiny to make sure no shred of paper is sorted with the plastics. Finally, the trash ends up in the incinerator room, where it is loaded into separate bins to be dumped into the flames. Now, imagine the actual incinerator itself. An enormous black box, charred and smoking, the front of which has multiple access doors. One door for each category of trash. Are we starting to form an image yet? Open all the doors, and you still get the same fire. Welcome to Japan.

Of course, with time, you figure all this out, and life becomes blandly routine again.

Spring in Fukui

Originally posted April 14, 2005:

Fow now, I am on respite from summiting Himalayan peaks, dodging bullets in the Darien Gap, and trekking along the bottom floors of Hawaiian volcanoes.

So, take a stroll with me from my apartment along the Asuwa River into the heart of Fukui City...

It's a beautiful spring day. The cherry blossoms along the river have been in full bloom for just over a week now, and the flowers are starting to shed their petals. It's like it's snowing, minus the cold and the ridiculously popular (and stylish) rubber boots worn by all Japanese.
A note on the rubber boots: Fukui hasn't quite caught on to the phenomenon of snow plows yet. As such, during the heavy snows (i.e. most of winter), sprinklers are installed along the sidewalks and side-streets. Major roads have permanent sprinklers which appear as nothing more than small holes along the center medians. Woe to the ignorant foreigner to bend down to peep into one of these holes at the exact moment the water is turned on. Of course, if such a person were to be THAT unlucky, and to be that dim-witted as to be found standing in the midst of traffic peering down at the pavement as if in search for a lost contact lens, then a good spurt in the eye may be just the thing the doctor ordered.

I digress....

So, you can imagine that the water emitted from the sprinklers combined with snow makes for some fairly slushy and wet sidewalks and curbs. Some curbs can treacherous to the unwary pedestrian, as it's often difficult to tell where the dirty slush/water ends and the wet pavement begins. They're like punji pits, I tell you. Thus, the rubber boots. All knee-high, and always made in bright colors. Some display their brand or manufacturer's name along the side (which in Japan, it seems, could be anyone or anything). Wilson. Good Year. Panasonic. Blind Mice. Fetid Toe. You name it.

Of course, even knee-length boots can't protect the innocent commuter from the numerous sprinklers that haven't been, ah... calibrated. Many send their streams UP INTO THE AIR, often at angles greater than 45 degrees. Perhaps to melt the snow before it even hits the ground. The unlucky by-product is, you can imagine, a nicely drenched shirt or pants-leg. Paying attention to where you walk in Fukui in winter is KEY.

Anyway, where was I... oh, yes, spring.

Japanese people of all ages are out in hordes, strolling, biking, or sitting along the river-walk. Most have cameras; those that don't use their mobile phones to take snapshots of the trees and the scenery. Ahh, technology.

We continue along, noticing the large sign advertising Romanian hostesses at a local adult establishment. It's always pleasant to know that the Japanese are so cross-culturally friendly.
The sidewalks, might I mention, are all paved in tile, often in various hushed tones and patterns. The manhole covers have meticulously carved dragons and phoenixes emplazoned in bright reds and blues. We are hard-pressed to find any sign of littering, the sidewalks are immaculate.
Making our way into the heart of downtown, we see that the main street branches off into a left and right. On the left, we find the banks and the major finance district. Which comprises of..., well, the few banks and the central post office. To the right, towards which we now head, is the shopping district. A couple hundred-yen stores (equivalent to the dollar store, depending on how the exchange rates are doing), a McDonalds, a few coffee shops, some small clothing boutiques and, the two crown-jewels of Fukui, our department stores: Loft (nothing Lofty but the prices) and Daruma Seibu (the 'Daruma' indicating something to do with Buddha. The connection is lost on me).

On warm days such as today, we can see a van parked outside the front entrance of Seibu. A couple Iranian chaps, dressed to the nines but still somewhat shifty in appearance, are out hawking knock-off watches and leather goods. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Rolex.... We turn off to the right for a latte at Seattle's Best Coffee, where we will later see the same Iranian fellows picking up lone Japanese females. They are, we note, fairly aggressive in pursuing phone numbers. We decide their charm lay in their broken Japanese with Middle-Eastern accents.
There is a large clock in the small square dividing Loft and Seibu. Called the Century Clock, it displays the time by years, starting from 2000 to 2100. 2005 is barely a tick in the clock's movement. We both ponder the relative insignificance of our existences compared to that of the next 95 years, and decide that the 350 yen we each paid for our small lattes was well worth the cost.

It's lunchtime. We see legions of salarymen walking here and there, off to some cafe or eatery for a quick lunch, then back to work. Many have their phones glued to their ears. Even more smoke cigarettes as they walk. Cigarette smoke, we find, is hard to avoid in Fukui, and indeed, all of Japan. School children are also out and about. Most wear the same uniform: black or navy blue suit coat, matching pants for the boys, skirts for the girls. I innocently remark how short many of the skirts are, as the really short ones barely cover the, ah, necessary parts. Later, after some casual observation, we find that all the girls wear athletic shorts or tights underneath. Much to the discouragement of the dirty old men that roam the trains and buses.

I have read that Japanese girls (and women) wear short skirts to make their (relative to Westerners') legs look longer. The same applies to their fanatacism in wearing high-heeled shoes and boots. To their defense, it seems to work (from what I hear).

However, and call me crazy, but the sight of a woman in a mini-skirt and 3-inch stilettoes walking (read: stumbling) in half a foot of snow on a brisk, snowy day in the middle of January, as stimulating as it may sound, involves more than a bit of lunacy. Vanity, it's been said, will kill you.

Often, we see teenage boys decked out in gangster rap attire and sporting crew-cuts or corn-rows (invariably, dyed blond regardless of the mode of cut. I suppose they have a hard time deciding whether to emulate African Americans or Caucasian Americans. Or, maybe, the youth of Fukui all just want to be Kid Rock.) On weekends, we see them milling about on the sidewalk, posing, smoking, yakking on their phones, and hoping to be noticed by the passing girls. At night, they can found in the many underground walkways, listening to hip-hop and practicing their break-dancing moves. Who says all the Japanese are hell-bent on getting into college?

Of the same genus of teenage boys, we often see a different species dressed in loose-fit, billowing pants. Loose, is, I need to point out, a loose description of these pants. Suffice it to say that if any one of these young men found themselves on the edge of a cliff and needed to dive off, they needn't worry about having enough material to make a parachute.

For some odd reason, this style of pants is that worn by the Japanese construction worker. Try to picture a house or an apartment building being built by these fellows, and you will conjure up an image of a small army of blond-haired, crew-cutted, Japanese MC Hammer impersonators, walking to and fro on gangplanks, carrying tools and slabs of wood. Most likely, they will ignore your stares, as their attention is much too invested on perfecting their moon-walks and inverted neck-spins.

Post Card Woes

Originally posted March 26, 2005

Running errands in Fukui brings new meaning to the the phrase "taking one's time."

Once I tried to mail a post card to a friend in Hong Kong. Having sampled life in the rat race back in the US, I was (am) accustomed to rushing in and out of the post office, bank, etc in order to rush to accomplish the next thing on my daily list of things to do (which, invariably, involved sitting in traffic.) This, of course, was possible due to my fellow Americans' knack for paying as much attention to getting the job done right the first time as they would to watching ice melt. I'm not saying anything about the efficiency of the US Postal Service; all I am saying is that they can get you in and out of the building faster than you can say 'lost mail.'

In Japan, things happen at a slightly slower pace. In this particular instance, I was mailing out a post card with a hole in it. In the shape of a puzzle peice, with the words "Wish you were here" printed below it. (Don't ever say I'm not a sentimental guy.) Apparently, this hole caused a minor crisis with my local post office. The woman I initially handed it to inspected it for a good 5 minutes, turning it over from one side to another, maybe as if she was just imagining that she could, all of a sudden, magically see through paper.

She then consulted with some other postal clerks. Which then led to an intra-office conference. On heaven knows what. The possiblility that this post card was, in fact, a portal into another dimension, and that they were about to send it off to some poor schmuck in Hong Kong instead of using it for their own good. Or perhaps, puzzle-shaped holes were in violation of some Japanese postal code. Or maybe, they were considering whether the puzzle-shaped post card that they had confiscated from someone else last year was the missing peice to my post card.

At any rate, I wasn't too happy while all this was happening. I was already in a rush, and had planned to catch a bus that was scheduled to leave a scant 15 minutes from the time I entered the post office. Now, I had missed the bus, and had no idea why. Other than the fact that my post card was creating a disturbance in the universe that is Japan Post.

Well, sorry to say, but this entire experience remains a mystery. Eventually, the woman to whom I had originally handed the post card comes back to me, puts a stamp on the post card, and informs me of the cost. 80 yen for my time. I wanted to reach across the counter and leave deep imprints of my ten fingers on her soft, white neck. But....

She was more than apologetic. I sensed that she was really sorry to have taken my time, and that she wanted to convey to me that everything was fine, and that, indeed, my post card would make it to Hong Kong in one peice (I guess they decided not to insert the puzzle peice-shaped post card taken from that poor fellow last year.)

All I could do was to pick up my jaw from the ground, stammer out a "Arigato" and walk out to catch the next bus. The sincerity with which the Japanese people complete their work and get through their days will forever be an astounding mystery to me, and an object of my admiration.