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.

If there’s one thing you can count on me to do, it’s post links to people’s Japan pictures. Here I go again.

This guy, who is apparently really cool (evidence: he likes Amigas, and has a Net Yaroze page.), has two galleries of pictures from Japan.

This is the picture that especially caught my eye:

Been there, played that! We put out the mayor. He was on fire.

A kitchen worker hits a water rat on the head to stun it before it is killed for a meal in a restaurant in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

Jenny found this site today, and sent me a link at work but I was all “whatever” and didn’t look at it. I SHOULD HAVE.

Ginger Wong’s Gingervitis

For one thing, she’s currently in Taiwan and has been taking lots and lots of pictures and posting cool stories. That would have been good enough. But then we noticed a link labeled “blatant self-endorsement” to Old Master Q Comics. WOW! She created the site for Old Master Q! You probably have never heard of it, but Old Master Q is an absolutely super famous and super good Chinese comic strip. Go ahead and read some, mostly you don’t need to read Chinese to get the jokes. Mostly.

They’ve made lots of Master Q movies over the years, from black and white to fancy computer graphics:

Then we explored further, and found this page explaining her involvement with Old Master Q. Alfonso Wong, the guy who created Old Master Q, is her Grandfather! Whoa!

The other day I noticed a LJ user linking to my Tokyo pictures. Today I have randomly found a different LJ user’s different Tokyo pictures.

She has lots of other content online too.

more

(via boing boing)

Here’s some pictures from 龍山寺 (Lungshan Temple) that I never posted. Each clicks to a larger version. You might be interested in some English background information about the temple.

At the end of one busy day in Taiwan, Jenny and I went to the temple to meet up with her cousin Yvonne. She was a little late, so we took the opportunity to take some night shots of the temple.

Here’s me by the waterfall in the courtyard. Lots of older people hang around there, talking with friends.

Detail of some of the carvings on the roof:

A peaceful scene, inside the temple. People seem to be there praying or making offerings all hours of the day and night.

A close up of a big incense urn:

Inside the temple there are many gods that you pray to for different things. Or, if you just want generic heavenly providence, there is a recommended course of gods to follow, culminating with prayer to 觀音 – Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and the temple’s main god. (the temple we visited in Tokyo is also for Guan Yin, who is called Kannon in Japanese)

We saw a pair of girls, maybe Japanese tourists, asking one of the other gods to bless their friendship. They were doing some little ritual with a monk there, I assume it was going well because they appeared to be happy. Jenny and I both have forgotten the exact details of what they did, we do remember it involved a piece of red string.

Yvonne eventually arrived, with Jenny’s Aunt. We all went out for dinner nearby, and then shopped in one of the seedier night markets for a bit. Jenny wanted to go rent some comic books that she had never finished reading as a kid, but I wasn’t ready to go home yet. We parted on the subway, and I was off to see what sort of extremely minor adventures I could find.

(via Geisha asobi)

Lucky for me I just subscribed to this crummy website the other day, because otherwise I would have missed out on his link to Sushicam, an excellent Tokyo photoblog.

And while you’re at crummy.com make sure to see Tonight’s Episode.

I had never heard of this until last time we were in Taiwan, and we went up to the top of the Shin Kong building, and I saw a park in Taipei I didn’t remember ever going to. I asked Jenny’s cousin Yvonne, “What’s that?”

Learn about 228 at the Taipei Times

The 228 Incident was a military crackdown on civilian protests that broke out on Feb. 27, 1947, against the KMT administration. Historians estimate that around 30,000 people were killed.

A a female cigarette vendor who was selling illegal cigarettes to make ends meet was caught by KMT revenue agents on Yen-ping North Road in Taipei City. The Tobacco Monopoly Bureau agents injured her and mistakenly killed a bystander.

Crowds demonstrated in protest, demanding punishment of the killers. They were, however, met with gunfire, igniting a fury of widespread public protest across the island the following day. To resolve the conflict, Chen Yi — then chief executive officer of the Taiwan Provincial Government — requested military assistance from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who later dispatched troops to Taiwan.

I found a new site, JapanNewbie.com, on the JvJ message boards. It’s run by Harvey Beasley who works for GE Japan in Tokyo. It’s got regular weblog type content, as well as tons of articles about how to live, study, and work in Japan.

And pictures.

A new weblog for your consideration. It should get good sometime next week.

Joe VS Japan

It’s real, and it’s spectacular. Next time we’re in Taipei, this is on the list, along with 好吃國 which we saw our first time there, but was closed to move the second time we were there.

I only wanted to go to 好吃國 because the name reminds me of 小人國.

This should be what computer science textbooks show when they try to explain what a deadlock is.

That picture is by Chuck @ China who has TONS AND TONS AND TONS of other pictures and stories about China. He seems to especially like high strangeness phenomena:

That picture was taken in America World, which he found near Hangzhou. They have a full size White House, along with replicas of other American monuments.

He also has a weblog, ch-ch-ch-ch-china.

I think this picture that I took is every bit as good as that fancy Reuters picture I linked yesterday.

I like weird buildings, so I like these buildings:

That picture is part of a travelog type page by this guy Peter Merholz, who shares my love of BroadVision. He even claims to have worked with BV at Outpost.com, although nobody there seems to remember him. Outpost is the same place where I encountered, and attempted to destroy, BroadVision.

As far as I know, buried deep under layers of Apache, JSP, and Servlets, hidden inside concentric spheres of page mungers, cron jobs, and Perl scripts, the black heart of BroadVision still beats at the very core of Outpost.

Update: Peter contacted me, it turns out he did a brief interface assessment for Outpost, and made some suggestions, but they couldn’t happen, because of course BV sucks.

robot wisdom today linked to a really cool night panorama of Tokyo. If you go to the homepage of that site, and can manage to deal with site navigation all in Japanese, you’ll be rewarded with hundreds of other equally cool Tokyo night scenes. This is extra interesting to me because for most of them I can say “been there”.

If you can’t deal with the Japanese site navigation, there is a backdoor to see all the images. Just go to http://tokyoyakei.cool.ne.jp/tokyo/ and browse through the directories, conveniently named in English (sort of).