UPDATE: more pictures!!!

We’ll be here until Sunday.

Al Gathafi Speaks! With solutions to everything from the Korea problem to the World Cup - but still no definitive answer on how to spell his name.

1) Who could possibly resist buying this after seeing it in the vending machine?

2) Nice to see they’ve finally captured Gamera.

3) No explanation.

We got here! The trip was fine, the room is nice, the internet works, life is good. Now we have to find some dinner and try to get some sleep.

We made it, flight was fine, car was fine, hotel is actually NOT fine! Some sort of screwup with the bookings has effectively “bumped” us from our room tomorrow night. Tonight they put is some really fancy room we clearly don’t deserve: the room has a name instead of a number. They offered to put us up for free tomorrow night in some other hotel (nice) and then ship us back here again for the rest of our stay (a bit of a pain). I’m asking them instead to just put us in the other hotel for the rest of the time. We’ll see what happens.

I officially decide that word of the day is on vacation, by the way. Fresh words starting again on Monday!

This is the lady that we followed to the best Dim Sum in Chicago! Jenny, Cassi and I got off the L at Chinatown, figuring that we’d walk around randomly until we saw a busy looking Dim Sum restaurant. She got off the L too, and happened to go the same way as us. A few blocks later, she asked an old man something in Cantonese. None of us speak Cantonese, but we did pick up one thing: Yam Cha! The old man started pointing in the opposite direction down the street, and was apparently giving directions. We quickly huddled and figured that if anybody knew where the best Dim Sum would be, it would be an old man on the street, and decided to follow the lady.

We tried to keep our distance, but still keep her in view. After a few blocks she made a turn and walked for a while, then stopped and asked somebody for directions again. Apparently she went the wrong way, because they pointed her backwards right towards us! As she turned, you can imagine the slapstick routine we put on, walking in circles while whistling and trying to act like nothing is going on while we waited for her to pass and start stalking again. This time she knew where she was going and led us straight to Phoenix. I don’t think she ever picked up on the fact that we were following her, even when Jenny went outside to steal this picture of her (I didn’t have the guts to do that).

I found the Joint Security Area in Google Maps. That is all.

The 2004 Puppet Cosplay Festival! Plenty of pictures here.

And the 2005 festival appears to be coming in November. Maybe a good time to visit Taiwan?

(found completely by luck via this photo at Flickr)

And by future, I mean later this month: Robots to offer warm welcome at Japan’s World Expo

NAGAKUTE, Japan (AFP) - Japan will welcome the millions of guests at the World Exposition opening this month with hosts trained to greet them in their language, entertain their children and perform rap music with them.

The gracious hosts are robots. […]

The robot may refuse to answer to sensitive questions for “privacy reasons,” making an X with her arms and bowing.

She also has a sense of irony. When asked if she is a robot, she says, “Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t” in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says “Just kidding” and starts a natural flow of movements.

I found Robin Hunicke’s Tokyo Game Show 2004 pictures today. They’re great! It looks like her experience there was almost exactly like mine. I started looking through the rest of her pictures, and saw that she was in Tokyo in 2003 as well. Scrolling down the page a bit, I found something amazing… pictures of insane ripped tights dancing girl! We saw her too, when we went to Tokyo in 2002! I wonder who long she’s been there, doing her insane dance? Is she some sort of Shibuya fixture? We came upon her partway through her routine. She was throwing herself around, jumping in random directions and crashing into the ground. The pictures only begin to convey her self-destructive energy. Eventually, she collapsed in a pile. We watched a little longer, and she got up, and we noticed she was bleeding pretty badly from her knees. She bandaged herself up, then left quietly.

Tired: Axis of Evil

Wired: Outposts of Tyranny

Pictures from day 2 in China are now up. It was a free day, and Chris acted as our “local guide”. We took the Beijing subway, and saw the Lama Temple, a nice quiet residential neighborhood, the Bell Tower, and Beihai park. To see my descriptions of each picture, start from the first photo and keep hitting “next in set”.

I’ve started posting pictures from our trip to flickr. I’m still getting used to their system, so they way I’ve arranged the photos might change. For now I’ve created one set, China - Day 1 - Beijing arrival.

If you’ve never heard of flickr before, it’s yet another online photo posting/sharing thing. Those sites are a dime a dozen, right? Flickr is different. I think it does for photos what Gmail did for email. They have a reasonably useful free service, and a practically unlimited “pro” service, which I signed up for after messing around for just a few minutes. I’ve been listening to the little kids on the internet rave about flickr for a long time now, and it turns out they were right!

The one problem is that you can’t order prints, but they’re working on that. But they aren’t greedy with the photos like some of those other sites. Want to print one of my photos? You can just download the full resolution originals and print away! Try that with Ofoto. They are also super geeky, with an open API and tons of other options. You can even associate a license with all your pictures. I’ve chosen this one.

Even though it doesn’t seem to be cool any more, here’s a Starbucks photo in Shanghai:

Plus bonus McDonald’s photo:

Plus secret double bonus Ellen photo for Ann:

Hey! The Shangri-La “Golden Flower” hotel in 西安 (Xi1 An1 - Western Peace) has free, open wireless! Network name: “Shangri-La”. And it’s fast! Faster than the wired connection at the New Century hotel in Beijing, anyway. The only (minor) problem is that emperical evidence indicates that both connections are subject to the “great firewall of China”.

Paul Frankenstein’s Condensed China: Chinese History for Beginners is good. That is all. (via)

For some reason I really get a kick out of this Chinese version of “Walk the Dinosaur” (you know, that old song, “open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur”) by 張善為 (Zhang Shan Wei): Listen (real media) - Lyrics (Chinese) - Listen to the rest of the album, he also has a version of “Kung Fu Fighting” - Buy the whole album

Here’s a rough translation of the chorus, words in italics are sung in English:

1 2 3 4 first turn, turn head! 5 6 7 8 start to dinosaur!
Relax your butt, get ready to twist! Pretend you have the tail of dinosaur!
Clear your throat, stand up straight! Breathe fire to the sky dinosaur!
One more two more, the whole world together! We are all cute dinosaur!

I can’t find any information on this other than this one photo at Yahoo:   Update: More on JewelEye

Dutch woman Deborah Boer models the ‘Jewel Eye’ in her hometown Driebergen, the Netherlands April 7, 2004. The ‘Jewel Eye’ piece is latest trend in body fashion and is implanted underneath the cornea of the eye. REUTERS/Michael Kooren

“Harajuku Hardcore”, part of the Hervé Guillaume web experience™. More of his pictures from Japan here.

Taipei Night Life, part of the Philo Vivero web experience™. He went to Taiwan in 2000, 2001, and 2004.

If it weren’t for the URL, I’d think this is fake.

(via Nelson’s Linkblog)

Elena is from Kiev and her favorite place to ride is the “Dead Zone”, the radioactive area around Chernobyl. Why?

Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those which left from 80th in fairly good condition.

The silence there can be deafening:

This town might be an attractive place for tourists. Some tourists companies have been trying to arrange extrim tours in this town, but people- their customers scared and have been complaining about silence which is hard to stand in empty town. They charged 210 us dollars for 2 hours excursion and town guard say, they all were leaving in some 15 mins, complaining that silense is tremendous as if one got deaf.

But it doesn’t bother her:

I don’t know how sound the silence to those tourists that they can not stand it, but to me after hitting a red line on my bike tacho it sound like all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin.

Really incredible pictures, and an interesting personal story as well.

(via dph)

Here’s a great free online guide to Tokyo, from Justin Hall. I liked the section on traveler’s japanese:

wakarimasen - I am unable to speak any of your language except to say “I do not understand” and if you say anything more I might repeat this word even if I’m better off shutting up and nodding and reading your facial expression to try to figure out what you’re saying but the jet lag is kicking in and all I wanted to know is if you have a room that doesn’t smell like forty years of accumulated cigarette smoke.

dozo - older lady carrying two large canvas shopping bags; you are standing up in a crowded subway car as young men and women who have seats fiddle with their mobile phones ignoring you. Locals will force you to stand in spite of your age, but I am a foreigner and I will stand up to offer you this seat. Please, please, take it!

domo - thank you, you have said many things to me that I do not understand, and it would probably be okay if I said nothing, but domo is a small gesture of my appreciation for this delicious muscat grape yogurt drink that I have just successfully purchased from you in this very fluorescent-lit convenience store.

arigato - domo just sounds too short, so I will say arigato to you, the eager waitress who just handed me a hot towel.

domo arigato - I am grateful, o subway station manager, that you have let me through this gate even though I lost my ticket and I could have been lying about it and I can’t speak your language but you figured out from my worried expression and gestures that I am a good person and I just want to leave your station.

I’d like to add one:

issho de - I know your sushi restaurant is very very busy, but do you think there is any chance that my wife and I could possibly sit together? What if I can prove my worth by remembering this small ungrammatical fragment of Japanese? We wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer, and I hope you can intuit that, because I haven’t the foggiest idea how to say it.

If there’s one thing my readers depend on me for, it’s linking to other people’s Japan photos.

I guess everybody takes this picture. Here’s my version.

Today’s album is by Francois Jordaan: Japan travel diary (Tokyo, Hakone and Kamakura)

DO YOU HEAR ME??!?! YOU HAVE TO GET THE NEW LIFE! OR ELSE!

He has a day by day breakdown of his photos (1000 in 10 days, nice job!) and subject specific pages. His food page is absolutely おいしい!

Now that’s a breakfast!

Here’s another cleanly designed and photography heavy weblog from Japan: jeansnow.net - Thrills, chills, and happy pills from the Tokyo front.

Monkey Mountain Chicken Farm - 猴山岳土雞城

According to the review, they make a mean tomato and egg, and an even better dragon whiskers (龍鬚菜). They also say you might have trouble getting there because taxi drivers believe the mountain to be haunted. I’m sold! Another one for the list next time we’re in Taiwan. (As if that happens all the time.)

Taipei Times: Cabinet says computers under attack

The Inquirer: Taiwan accuses China of waging Cyberwar

eTaiwanNews.com: PRC suspected as source of Trojan horse assault

I think they may have got it wrong: pretty much the entire WORLD is under “CYBER ATTACK” from China. Most of the hack attempts and spam I get (email spam and comment spam) are from China. I can’t even count how many times I’ve tracked back IP addresses and got something like “Hai-Ke Cyber Cafe, 123-432 Zhu Tou Rd, HuaiDan district of Tianjin, China”.

The very interesting story of an American’s trip to North Korea, along with plenty of pictures: Journey into Kimland

(found in the secret nooks and crannies of crummy.com)

This impossibly cool video appeared at Metafilter today. It is from a Japanese TV show called, as best as I can translate, (Joe, maybe you will see this and help?), All Japan Disguise Grand Prix. When we were in Japan, we saw that show on TV! It is the best show ever. Teams of people, I’m pretty sure they’re all amateurs, go on and perform various amazing skits and stunts that must have been painstakingly crafted and practiced for months. They mostly employ some sort of trick or gimmick or costume or optical illusion, it’s kind of hard to explain. Some are more artsy, some are very abstract, and some are just plain weird. Here’s the one that won the episode we saw. Does that give you a better idea of what it’s like?

There was another one we saw where they set up a bowling alley, with people as bowling pins. A guy bowled himself down the alley (he started as a regular person standing up, but as he went through the bowling motion he very smoothly pulled a black sheet over himself and rolled up in a ball and rolled down the alley) and struck the “pins”. They flew everywhere in a very natural motion. Then, they “paused” and “rewound” the action. The people acted out the pins flying back into place, and the guy rolled himself back up the alley, unfolding from a ball position, back to standing up. They did it again forwards and backwards a few times at different speeds, and with some freeze-frames, but always exactly the same. There were little flourishes like one of the pins flying away, and one last pin staying standing and another pin spinning on the ground to knock it over. All acted out by people in costumes.

As far as I can tell, Japanese TV is about 10,000 times better than ours. TV in Taiwan was mostly lame, except of course for PUPPET KUNG FU.

The DMZ dividing North and South Korea may not be quite like you think it is:

My visit today to one of the world�s most militarized zones included a Disneyland-like ride down into the earth, a luncheon in a touristy restaurant with a view of miles of barbed wire fencing and a soundtrack featuring Janet Jackson singing Nasty, and a little Korean boy whose aunties thought nothing of letting him bring � and incessantly use � a toy space gun that made loud machine gun sounds as we drove through checkpoint after checkpoint of armed guards.

From Geisha Asobi comes this: Japan Seldom Asked Questions. This is the site for you if you’ve ever wanted to know how the JR man gets home at night (he doesn’t), what does MOS Burger mean (Mountain-Ocean-Sun), why do we call it “Japan” when they call it “Nihon” (because in Chinese 日本 is pronounced “Zhr Pen”), and why do Anime characters have big eyes (because of Betty Boop!).

Somehow this reminds me of another site I found at MeFi recently, cultural and etiquette advice for countries all over the world. They even have tips for Taiwan! Also interesting are their tips for dealing with Americans. I could learn something here:

The only proper answers to the greetings “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “How are you doing?” are “Fine,” “Great,” or “Very well, thank you.” This is not a request for information about your well-being; it is simply a pleasantry.