Archive for February 2008

25 February 2008

Saigon




Saigon sort of looks like this, except there about 3 million as many motorcycles and they all want to kill me.

In Saigon, where I have never seen so many motorycles in my life (the most people I've seen perched on one is a family of four; crossing the street is like playing Frogger). I haven't had the chance to explore too much, but I think I really like it here even if I'm not quite used to having motor-scooters weave around me while I'm walking down the sidewalk. We're heading up to Hoi An this morning, so I will post more later, but just wanted to say hi (or xin chao, though that's pretty much the extent of my Vietnamese language skills at the moment).

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22 February 2008

Shinjiku




A few photos from around Shinjuku Station, which is where I went to end my single full day in Tokyo; not the most thrillingly original photos, but I'd never been there before and couldn't stop staring at all the lights like a slack-jawed yokel. They're pretty.








At the entrance to what my guidebook referred to as "Piss Alley" but what was actually filled with intriguing-looking food stalls.



Lights reflecting in a misty Piss-Alley window.


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21 February 2008

Asakusa









Stealth-taken because there was a no-photo sign over the shrine itself; I always try to abide by that but I thought it was okay here since I didn't actually take a photo of the inside of the shrine, where the plaque was...









Brushing incense smoke over one's head.



One more of the incense bowl outside the main shrine; there was so much smoke that I actually got dizzy.

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20 February 2008

ikura for breakfast!












I started my whirlwind day in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market, which - with its multitude of motorized tentacle bearing trolley/motorcycles (or "special vehicles" to read the sign, below) and giant plastic buckets bearing even more giant severed fish heads - was a pretty good way to wake up on a coffee-less morning. After almost two hours of wandering around in the cold amidst purposeful fish-shoppers, dazed looking tourists clutching their cameras (at least I wasn't alone?) and the catches of the day feebly fluttering their fins in their tanks, I ducked into one of the many (many) sushi restaurants and had amazingly awesome ikura nigiri for breakfast.





This warning should pretty much be dangled over my head all the time, but also especially here what with the special vehicles and their mikka death wish. Many, many more photos to come later while I've still got the awesome wireless.

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19 February 2008

take offs and landings



My airplane, as seen from the SFO terminal. Also pictured, sorta: my hands looking freakishly large (in a harbinger of what has come to characterize much of my time in Japan so far).



I landed in Japan on Monday afternoon, where I spent a frantic but amazingly full single day in Tokyo (which I loved, and now wish I could spend more time there) and am now sitting on my bunk in a hostel in Kyoto, where I am just barely getting wireless internet. I have many, many more photos of my too-brief time in Tokyo, but I thought I'd break it the posts a little, and also I'm exhausted, which is a predictable yet annoying side-effect of trying to pretend that jet-lag and circadean rhythms do not exist, and my right left has mutinied from the rest of my body and decided to stop working like a normal leg (important life lesson: magical eBay cowboy boots are NOT made for walking and are getting their butt shipped back to the States the second I can figure out how).


At any rate, these two photos are from my excursion into Asakusa my first night, during which I successfully managed to order a really cheap bowl of ramen (well, "managed" by pointing a lot and smiling apologetically, which works better here than it did in Paris). I feel kind of silly saying this after only two days, but I love it here, I love just walking around, I feel like I must be going everywhere with a ridiculous dopey grin on my face as I stumble through with my non-existent Japanese, but I am insanely happy to be here, on this tiny island so insanely far away from home.

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16 February 2008

Last Day



Not pictured: the couple trying to enjoy their romantic evening about three feet to my left; me, being an annoying, anonymous third wheel on about seven different dates.







From the parking lot at the Rockridge Long's Drugs.

A few last images of the Bay Area to last me till I get back; on Valentine's Day I drove up to Grizzly Peaks to take photos of the sunset, not realizing that the cliffs would be overpopulated with scads of couples trying to have a nice evening without me and my camera wandering around them. Because I'm a) scattered on the best of days and b) thoroughly braindead after the last not-awesome month and a half, I locked my keys in my rental car (left them dangling in the ignition, actually, right after congratulating myself on remembering to lock the non-automatic doors) and spent a few panicked moments thinking I'd be marooned somewhere on Grizzly Peaks in the dark and the cold all alone. Fortunately, because I am a) scattered and b) braindead, I did not, in fact, lock *all* the doors to the car, and so skirted extreme pathos by crawling in the backseat. I bet everyone is really glad I'm about to go wander all over the planet now all by myself, right?

I started writing this at the Rockridge Starbucks yesterday in the midst of running a flurry of last minute errands (extra memory card! advil! groceries for a gigantic dinner I decided to cook for everyone!) but the wireless kept flaking out, so I'm actually writing this in the international terminal at SFO (where I have about 2 hours left on my Starbucks-purchased T-Mobile access!), where I am drinking overpriced tea and trying not to get all panicky at the thought of being somewhere utterly unfamiliar for quite so long after spending a nice, soothing week at home with puppies and family and way too many excursions along Skyline. But it's okay, because in 12 hours I will be in Japan (Oh my god, I'll be in Japan!) and then I promise to start writing more coherently (ha) and not overusing astericks, "awesome" or parentheticals. Right.

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14 February 2008

Countdown: two days to go!

Driving on Grizzly Peaks.

In Starbucks yet again, as there is no internet to be had at my mom's place; am becomming quite the Starbucks Wireless connoissuer - Solano has the best outlet-availabilty; Rockridge has better parking but is unreliable. Running out of time here and feeling a bit frantic; stocking up on used books for my eleven hour flight (any recommendations are welcome; right now I've got the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, in the Miso Soup by R. Murakami, Persuasion by Jane Austen, the Cleft by Doris Lessing, and the Quiet American by Graham Greene) and enjoying my second-to-last day of (bad) driving and trying to pick up and re-learn a few Japanese phrases ("Hi, do you speak English? Lovely weather, isn't it? I am bad at Japanese.")

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13 February 2008

Berkeley (countdown: three more days!)



Lucy the new puppy!

Probably I need to start being more creative with my blog title posts; at any rate, I'm back home(ish) in Berkeley for about ten more minutes before I head to Japan for a few days before landing in Ho Chi Min City on February 23rd. In my short time here, I have already managed to fry my mother's computer into oblivion (I swear I just restarted it and now everything is gone. I should not be allowed to touch ANYTHING), get bitten by a teething labrador puppy, make my usual aimless drive up and around Skyline (and now Grizzly Peaks!) and spend way too much time at Starbucks milking the 24 hours of overpriced wireless access I bought in a fit of internet-deprived desperation. My last week in Brooklyn was cold and sleep deprived and nerve-racking, and it was surprisingly easy to leave it behind after a 24 hour stretch of frantic packing, painting, moving, cleaning, landlord-finagling and plodding through the abruptly freezing cold all over two bouroughs taking care of last minute detritis (yay, hepatitis vaccines).

Goodbye, best kitchen in the whole wide world.

So that's it, then; the Brooklyn existence is all packed up and painted over or, at the very least, languishing in a storage facility. I am slightly burned out and brain-dead right now, and prone to telling my entire life story whenever people make the innocent mistake of asking simple things that SHOULD be answerable, and probably are, for most reasonable people, such as: Where do you live? Oh, you're going to Vietnam? For how long? Probably this is why I got detained at Immigration when I arrived in London last fall, which I never wrote about because it was just that embarrassing, but it totally happened and it was actually kind of hilarious.

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