Kitty-doken!

301: We've moved

2010-03-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

We're going to keep our updates from here on out on nickandjerry.com

This blog will stay up mostly for posterity's sake. And the following is more for google's benefit than anything else:

Thanks!

USA! USA!

2010-02-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

So Nick and I are sitting in Terminal 2 in LAX waiting to board our flight to Vancouver. We've never been to Terminal 2 before, and it's really small--about 6-8 gates total. Nick called it the terminal for unimportant international flights, since Air Canada flies out of here.

I re-dyed my hair red last night so that it looks more vibrant...and then it occurred to me that people might think that I'm rooting for Canada since my hair is only red (or China, I suppose). Had I thought about it earlier, I might have tried doing a Red/Blue combo for my hair. I mean, it's not like that would make me look like a crazed USA fan in comparison to the shirtless USA fans in Whistler--and no, we're not doing that.

Last night, we watched the second day of Men's luge, which was sort of sad because of the tragic death of the Georgian luge competitor just before the Olympics started. Knowing how fast they go down the track made me appreciate the sport more, and cringe more whenever a competitor fell off. One luger actually fell off his sled and managed to get back on it...it was amazing! The Americans didn't do very well, although I think one of the new guys, Chris Mazdzer, is sort of cute :) Nick thinks I have a strange taste in men (what does that say about him then?).

Once we've found where we're staying in Vancouver, and are more settled in, we'll post some more info and pictures of what it's like being at the Olympics. But for now, you can listen to this, 'cuz it'll be playing in my head the entire time we're there...

Fourth of July Weekend

2009-07-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

So I know that I'm a week late in posting about our fourth of July weekend...we spent our free time at home playing mah jongg with my parents (with my dad being the only winner out of the four of us).

On the 3rd, we met our friends at Woodland Park Zoo. Nick's never been there, and I seriously think the last time I visited was when Merak, Erin, Emily, Janet Miller, Katherine Nordell and I (actually, I'm not sure if that's right) had to do some tourism video for Australia as part of our 8th grade social studies class. Back then, we hit all of the animals that originated from Australia and made a short video of that animal with Emily providing narration. Unfortunately, what we didn't realize was that there was a lag between the time the 'record' button was pressed and the beginning of the actual recording. This resulted in nearly all of our video clips being very, very short, with almost no narration because Emily spoke before the camera started recording. The one moment that I remember quite vividly was the clip of the emu, which was really a split second of the emu, with Emily saying "mu." It was sad, but very amusing...I think we actually got an A for the video in the end.

Anyway, back to this year's visit...we started off seeing some of the farm animals. We got there before they opened, so we couldn't actually pet any of the animals, but we were able to see them. One of the chickens was very talkative and was striking up a conversation with anyone that walked passed (admittedly, it was a very one-sided conversation). The bunnies were cute too, but we found the choice of this rabbit's friend as being a bit strange:

We then went and saw cows, flamingos, and the new penguin exhibit. There were peacocks roaming the grounds, and Nick was able to catch this picture of one 'flying' down:

Later on, I got to feed some birds, which was really fun for me. The seeds were affixed to a popsicle stick, and if you just held it out, a bird (or two) would come down and start eating the seeds. I loved watching the birds up close. They were totally fixated on eating the seeds, and once the seeds were gone, they left (no love...). Seriously, I could have fed them for an hour. Merak, Nick, and Emily had to drag me out of the room 'cuz I was about to buy another feeding stick.

We then headed home for the day. Later that night Nick and I went to the Dahlia Lounge for dinner, mainly because I love their freshly made doughnuts. Their food is good too, but really, I go for the doughnuts. The come freshly fried and in a paper bag filled with sugar and cinnamon. The server shakes the bag, cuts it open, and then places it down on a plate with a side of homemade jam (it was apricot that night) and vanilla mascarpone. After I devoured them, I was contemplating ordering another one, but Nick convinced me that I would totally regret it afterward.

For the 4th, we drove up north with my parents to my aunt and uncle's home in Burlington. It's roughly a one hour drive up I-5, with great views of various mountain ranges that surround Western Washington. Our day's activity was going out on their 20' boat to catch some crabs. It was just the guys on the boat 'cuz that's all the boat could really fit, my mom and aunt stayed home to prep the kitchen for crab cooking.

We untied the boat from the dock and made the long, slow drive out of the 'no wake' zone. I think it was 20 minutes of us going like 3 miles an hour...but if we went the other way to get out of the marina, it would have been 30 minutes. After we cleared the protected marina, we quickly zoomed to the crab trap location, loaded three crab pots with bait (apparently, crabs like turkey legs and chicken), and dropped them in the water. We had to wait an hour, so my uncle took us through Deception Pass to a location with seaweed, which we were going to harvest (yes, my family harvests seaweed from the sea...). Did you know that even though seaweed is very plentiful in the waters, you're only allowed to take home 10 lbs. per trip?

After that excursion, we returned to pick up the crab pots only to find that all of the ones that we caught we too small (in WA, I think the minimum size is 6 1/4 inches). We released them back into the water, loaded the traps and dropped them in again and waited. Our second attempt was more successful in that we caught three large Red Rock crabs, but that was it...and Red Rocks aren't very tasty, so we weren't going to eat them later that night. My parents took them home to make soup.

So in the end, our crab excursion was a failure. For dinner, we ate Dungeness crabs that my aunt and uncle caught earlier in the week (Nick had pot roast since he's allergic to shellfish). And then we went back home and played mah jongg.

If you want to see pictures, you can find them here. I hope all of you had a great fourth of July as well.

Memorial Day Weekend in Vegas

2009-05-26T18:35:00.000-07:00

Before I start on our recent trip to Vegas, I wanted to let you know that our photos from our trip to Puerto Vallarta can be found here.

So since there was the long weekend, I decided that it would be a good time to go to Vegas again. This time, we stayed at the Bellagio in a penthouse suite. We knew that there was a special lounge for checking in, but we couldn't find it at all. Nick asked one of the people at the counter (she was just standing there but wasn't available for check-in) and she showed us the very discreet, unmarked door to this area. We were checked in immediately and so we headed off to our room. The suite was huge, with a really large living area (which, in retrospect, is not something that we really need in a hotel room--it's not like we're entertaining anyone when we're there), and two bathrooms off the main bedroom, both with TV's in them. Nick took a video of the room, which we'll share with you once he's uploaded it.

Our trip was actually very busy, which Nick liked 'cuz that meant less time for me to lose money gambling. After we dropped our luggage in our room, we headed off to find a snack and then to our spa appointment. Nick had the watsu again and I went with the raindrop therapy, which involved drops of oil being dropped on my back, followed by a massage. It was interesting, but I'm not sure I'd do it again. I liked the sensation of the oil being dropped on my back, but that was only like 20 minutes of the entire session...I wished it was longer. Afterwards, we had dinner at Michael Mina, which was wonderful (but we were very, very full), and then we walked to the Venetian to see the Blue Man Group. I had never been any of their shows, but had seen them on TV, so I was expecting 90 minutes of them hitting pipes which they would move in order to change the tone. But they incorporated a comedy routine, which fit very well with their concept, and overall, it was very enjoyable.

The next morning, we woke up rather early for us on a weekend to get ready to be taken on a helicopter ride of the Grand Canyon (photos can be found here). Neither of us have ever been in a helicopter, and I was incredibly scared I would get sick due to turbulence. But there was no reason for me to worry at all...yes it was bumpy, but it wasn't a left/right bumpy, which gets me very sick. And even though it was turbulent, I wasn't scared at all like I get in airplanes sometimes...I actually felt safe in the air. The views from the copter were amazing and flying through the canyon to see the layers of rock was incredible. We landed and had lunch before flying back and taking one pass over the Vegas strip. It was a wonderful experience and now I won't hesitate to fly in a helicopter again.

After some shopping (did you really think I would go to Vegas and not buy some Vosges?), we headed for the Wynn to see Le Reve. According to Nick, it was theater in the round 'cuz the water stage was in the center, and the seaters were essentially rings radiating out from the stage. The show was amazing, with wonderful artistry and an impressive stage that went from a pool and transformed into a multi-tiered fountain. There weren't very many acrobatic sets though--the show seemed to focus more on the story of a woman trying to find her love (I think), so there were many dance segments.

When the show finished, we went to the MGM Grand for our dinner reservation at Joel Robuchon. Our thinking was, it's a three star Michelin restaurant that has availability for us, so why not? We had the crazy 14-course degustation menu and were not disappointed (although, I'm not sure if it was really worth the $385/person cost). There was an amazing bread presentation with something like 15 different types to choose from. The dishes were fantastic and their sizes were appropriate given how many courses there were. We had frog legs for the first time there, and really, it tasted like chicken. Really good, tender chicken though (also, I kept thinking that I'm eating Kermit, which sort of made it harder to eat it). One of the last courses was a dish of spring root vegetables, but what made it special was the very miniature size of the vegetables. The carrots were, I swear, less than an inch tall, and there were onions that were the size of a pea. It was all very, very cute, and very delicious. After the dessert courses, we were presented with the ice cream selection and then an insane confection tray with 45 different items to choose from, all made in-house. If my stomach wasn't on the verge of exploding, I would have tried one of each, but instead, I had the apricot gelee, coconut marshmallow, and fleur de sel caramel, all of which were fantastic. If they were available in a box to take home, I would have sooo purchased one.

The next day wasn't too exciting. We had a couples massage at the spa. The massage was nice, but it was disappointing that the Bellagio spa didn't have more options for couples, or a longer massage option (the one that they had was 50 minutes long). I looked at the Wynn's spa menu, and they offered various other treatments which could be added a la carte to any couples massage. We had lunch at Noodles, which was the Chinese restaurant in the Bellagio. It was overpriced for what it was, but the food was good. I spent the last 45 minutes before leaving for the airport on Roulette, where I had awful luck and lost all my money. But at least I was able to last 45 minutes. One man came up to the table with $500, asked for $25 coins. He put $200 down on the first spin of the wheel and lost (in fact, everyone lost), and then put the rest on the next spin and lost again! And then he left as if nothing really happened...it was quite amazing to watch really.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention was that a few of the casinos had the new Star Trek slot machines (unfortunately, the Bellagio was not one of them). The seats had speakers in them, so if you won, your seat would vibrate, which made for a very strange sensation. One thing with this game that was different from the ones that I've played so far, and admittedly I haven't played that many, was that you could create an account with the game so that if you left and came back, you could sign in. The reason being was that there were certain bonus games (you started out with two games) that you could unlock by winning medals, and the only way that medals seemed to be awarded were through bonus games. You needed 40 medals to gain a rank, and I think unlock more games. To give you an idea of how hard it was for me to get medals, I was lucky enough to win the bonus round twice, and only got 5 medals. I would have needed to play for a lot longer if I wanted to gain another rank. It was still a very entertaining game, but since there were only 4 machines in any given casino, it was hard to find one that was open. Maybe next time when we visit, there'll be more open seats.

So that was our Vegas Memorial Day Weekend...I hope all of you had a great long weekend as well. The next trip that we have planned is in the middle of June to Boston for Nick's cousin's wedding.

dolphins, statues, and good food

2009-05-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

Howdy again!

After a nice rest, we woke up early this morning to get some breakfast and then head over to a water park with dolphins. As it turns out, starting in May the water park doesn't open until 11, so at first we had a few minutes to kill.

But once we got into the tank with the dolphins, it was all worthwhile!

We have photos and videos to prove how much fun we had, but those are for later. Anyway, after that we headed back to the hotel to change and rinse off the salt water a bit, then headed into the town for lunch.

Puerto Vallarta is a cute town, with lots of little shops and cobblestone streets. One of its best features is a boardwalk that runs the length of downtown, called the Malecon.

The first thing most people notice about the boardwalk is the series of statues down the northern section. A couple of these were truly breathtaking, and some could better be described as unique. I took a lot of photos, so we'll post them to picasa when we have a better connection.

One of the other things we noticed down there were intricate, beautiful sand sculptures. The artists were there, touching them up, as well as asking for tips, actually. I tossed in a fiver. Five pesos, that is. Okay, I'm cheap, but these artists appreciate every penny.

This photo does not do justice to the level of detail involved in these sculptures. Le sigh.

In some ways, this town reminds me too much of the US. It's got Home Depot, Costco, Walmart, the usual car brands, and all the chain restaurants you expect (Starbucks, Chili's, Baskin Robbins). We've been having authentic mexican food, risking our digestive tracks by eating salsa and blended margaritas (yes, Jerry had one too, though he didn't quite finish it). Trust me, the local food is worth the risk of food poisoning.

Speaking of chains...

After all was said and done, Jerry had a spa appointment involving a chocolate wrap, and I did some reading by the beach. We had a fantastic dinner by the marina at a restaurant called Tikul. It was delicious, and the kind of service that always serves from the right and clears from the left. The asparagus soup with garlic flan [sic] was delicious.

Bienvenidos a Puerto Vallarta!

2009-05-02T20:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it took longer than we hoped for, but we're here! We were harrassed a bit on our way out of the airport by different groups trying to sell stuff. Canopy tours, fishing trips, that kind of thing. I may have agreed to listen to a 90-minute schpeel from another hotel in exchange for a 4 night stay voucher (must be used in the next year and a half) and two free massages at their spa. I think I'll bring a stopwatch with me to enforce that 90 minute time limit. Their rep was just so convincing!

Anyway, once we got to the Westin, the first thing we noticed was the view.

Nothing to complain about there. They have three pools dotted with palm trees inside. Apparently the location was a palm tree farm before they built the hotel, so they preserved 600 of the trees. Even the ones where they wanted to build pools. The trees are numbered. The numbers are painted on the side. Number 192 is pretty nice.

By the way, the local style is heavy on bright colors, such as pink. And Jerry is very excited to be here. Though we're a bit tired and frustrated at the trip. Oh, the beach is just gorgeous.

We wandered out of the hotel and found the marina nearby. It's funny, we went from one marina to another for vacation. But it's more tropical here after all. Kind of makes me wish we had a yacht to sail down here in.

The marina has a ring of shops, realtors, massage places, realtors, restaurants, and realtors. By the way, want a condo for $100k? Anyway, we found a non-sketchy ATM, which charged a 7 peso fee. Thing is, all the exchange places were offering much worse rates than the banks do, and 7 pesos is about 60 cents. So, um, that's about the best ATM fee I've ever seen. :-) It feels weird seeing such big numbers for prices, since everything looks like it costs 10 times as much, and they use the dollar sign here to mean peso. Of course, it's actually a bit cheaper than things would be in the states, since it's about 13.25 pesos to the dollar.

Some places even have a good sense of humor about this whole flu thing.
By the way, no flu for us yet! We'll keep y'all posted.

While we ate dinner outside by the beach, there was a wedding going on. It was pretty. Especially with this sunset as a backdrop:

Later, the happy couple fired off some fireworks, which we intended to watch from our balcony jacuzzi, but we had gotten dried off and ready for bed by the time they actually fired them. Still, we had a nice view from our top floor bedroom.

...and so our trip to Puerto Vallarta begins!

2009-05-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

So we're here in LAX waiting for our flight, but I wanted to write a short post about our adventures in LAX. First, we woke up at 7:10 this morning, which is really early for us on a weekend, and then got ready to leave for LAX (but not before I sold all my turnips in Animal Crossing...I don't want them to spoil while we're gone). We walked into the international terminal, and noticed that there was a huge sign that said "Mexicana" with an arrow pointing away from any of the ticket counters. It made us wonder if LAX was separating them from all other airlines due to the swine flu. The Mexicana ticket counter is actually two floors down where arrivals are. It looked like a permanent location for them because all their signage was up and they had the plasma TV's with flight statuses installed. It's a strange place to have a ticketing counter in an aiport...

Anyway, when we arrived at the Mexicana ticket counter, we noticed that our flight was cancelled, making us very concerned that we wouldn't be able to go at all. i started thinking about what we would do if we couldn't go and how we really should have checked our flight status before leaving for the airport. Fortunately, Mexicana had transferred our reservation over to Alaska Airlines, and their departure time was only an hour later than our original flight, so it really wasn't that bad of a situation, just a little bit of inconvenience.

While we were eating breakfast, we were wondering what the time difference is between Los Angeles and Puerto Vallarta and we discovered that it was two hours. However, Nick found out that the area of Puerto Vallarta is actually located across two Mexican states, Jalisco and Nayarit, each located in different time zones (Puerto Vallarta itself is in Jaliso, but borders Nayarit). Jalisco, which is where our hotel and the airport are located, is in Central time, but Nayarit is in Mountain time. Tomorrow, we are going to the Sea Life Water Park located in Nayarit, but they have informed us that they follow Puerto Vallarta time. It seems like this could be very confusing for people not used to so easily crossing time zones, but I guess the locals get used to it.

That's all for now, we'll give you an update tonight when we arrive at the hotel.

Take Your Kids to Work Day

2009-04-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

So today was "Take Your Child To Work Day," and one of the activities was a performance by the Peanut Butter and Jam Band. They performed last year with Rob K. as the singer, but since he moved to New Jersey, he couldn't sing with the band this year. So the band asked me and Jane to sing instead, and we agreed (seriously, why do I agree to these things?). The first practice session was yesterday night with me, iRob and Brady. iRob had some beers already, which made the practice rather unproductive. Seriously, I think we spent like 30 minutes getting through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because Brady and I would start playing and then Rob would too, but then start wailing away on random chords. In fact, we had practiced that so much, that when we went on to Mary Had a Little Lamb, we were playing it to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Since we were having such a hard time getting through the rest of the song list, we were joking that we should just play everything to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Right before today's performance, the band got together to practice. Francis, one of the field techs showed up too and his piano playing skills were much better than Brady's that he decided to let Francis play instead. We quickly went through our song list, and then the children arrived and it was showtime!

Some of the children came up to the front to sing with us, and we would hand them the mic occasionally for them to sing. For "Where Is Thumbkin?" we showed them the hand gestures that went along with the song, and they followed along with us. We did Old McDonald and had them give us animals to use. Although I was really nervous at the start, once we got through the first couple of songs, I realized that children don't care whether you're hitting the right notes...they just want to be entertained. So I started to relax a bit more and had a lot of fun performing in front of them. I think everyone else in the band had a lot of fun, but we learned that for next time, we are soooo practicing earlier than the night before.

Weekend trip to San Diego to see a pool tournament

2009-04-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm actually a couple of weeks late on updating the blog about our trip to San Diego, but it's better late than never, right? We left for San Diego around 3PM on the 4th and the drive was fine, until we hit the area around the Marine Base. Traffic was quite bad, and we weren't sure why, but our guess was that it was the time that people were leaving the beach. Nick really needed to use the bathroom, so he took the exit for Oceanside thinking that there would be a Starbucks in that city. Well, he was wrong, and not only was traffic bad on the freeway, it was also horrible in the direction that we were headed (towards the ocean). Nick decides that it would be faster for us to park somewhere and walk around, so he turned down the next street that he came across and parked. We started to make our way towards the water and much to our surprise, there was no Starbucks at all.

I felt rather out of place in this city. Since it was so close to the Marine base, there were many military people in Oceanside (all donning the usual military buzzcut). Knowing that the military tends not to be very accepting of gays, I was a little nervous that Nick and I were two men walking around this city and didn't look at all like we were in the Marines. This made me very motivated to find Nick a restroom, so we quickly walked to the beach where there were public restrooms (yay). We then walked back to our car and left Oceanside (and will probably never return there).

Traffic was still bad, but it only lasted for a couple miles or so. Before we arrived at our hotel, we made our annual stop at the Fashion Valley mall. Usually we go there to grab a drink at D'lush. It's this high end drink place that does boba (bubble tea), but what we really know them for is their over the top sales people. The previous times that we've walked past their location, we were usually accosted by perky people shoving drink samples in our face and then literally grabbing our arms to go into the store. It worked 'cuz that was our first experience with them and we actually ordered drinks for ourselves. And then after you finish your drink, the person (usually a young woman wearing a tank top) gives you a straw and says very enthusiastically "Try it, make sure you love it!" Here's a video that might better explain the craziness of it all.

However, this time, there were fewer people attending the booth and no screaming samplers. The sound of the blenders were still there, but there wasn't as much screaming and hollering. We didn't get drinks because we had dinner reservations and wanted to be able to eat dinner, so instead we tried out their donut holes, which made for a good snack. It was all very sad to see that Dlush was no longer that lively of a place...but maybe we showed up on an off day. Anyway, we'll probably go back there again next year.

After a quick walk around the mall, we drive to the US Grant hotel. We have only stayed there once before (last year for the same pool tournament), but the system remembered us because the woman welcomed us back. It's a nice hotel with elegant decor and furnishings. It's a stark contrast to the W San Diego, which is a few blocks away, whose decor is more sleek and modern, but still nice as well. The reason we went with the US Grant was because for the same price, we could get a bigger room.

The next morning, after having breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel, we drove to Alpine for the pool tournament. We tried not to make the same mistake that we did last year when we showed up at 1:02 only to find out that the first game had started already. This time, we showed up with 5 minutes to spare, which meant that available seats were rather slim. For some reason this year, they didn't install bleachers for one section, so we ended up sitting in the middle row of chairs where our view was blocked by the people in front of us. I spent a lot of time looking at the large TV screens, but next time, we are soooooo showing up earlier.

The tournament was fun, as always. It's amazing just how personable the competitors are before the matches when they warm up. We were watching Ga Young Kim who, on TV during competition, is very focused on the game. But during warm ups, she was answering questions from the audience, making fun of the tournament referee, and even showed us a trick shot at the request of an audience member. There were a lot of amazing shots during the semis and finals...one game that we both remember quite well was when Monica Webb broke and made the 1 ball, but had no shot at the 2 ball. However, the 2 ball was hanging in the pocket, so she had to jump over a ball in order to pocket it, but not jump so hard that the ball would follow into the pocket. She made that shot but then had to jump for the 3 ball, which she also made. And then after that, it was a cakewalk to win the game.

I think the tournament airs on ESPN on 5/3. If we're on TV, we would be near the back of the venue. I think this time, we'll be in a lot more TV shots than we have been in the past.

Anyway, it was a great tournament and we will be coming back again next year!

My dad is a US Citizen!

2009-03-31T21:13:00.001-07:00

My dad took the US citizenship test this morning and passed! Yay!

It's a happy day for my family...maybe we should go on a cruise to Europe :)

Men's World Figure Skating Championships

2009-03-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday night, Nick and I went to the Staples Center to watch the men's free skate at the World Figure Skating Championships. It was the first time that either of us have watched professional skating, so we weren't sure what to expect. We did know that the first group of skaters weren't ones that were the best of the best in the world, so when we showed up 25 minutes after the start of the competition, we weren't too upset that the first skater we saw the the 5th person on the list.

It took a while to find our seats because they weren't located in any section that was listed on signs. Our ticket said PR6, but every number we saw were in the hundreds (Section 101, 201, etc.). We finally asked a nearby attendant where our section was, and he told us to go to the nearby doors and show our ticket to the lady standing in front of it. We did so, and she opened the door for us and told us to walk upstairs and knock on the door that we arrive at and show the person up there our ticket. We thought that this was very strange and started to wonder where we were going. After going up two flights of stairs, we reach the door and show the woman our ticket and she lets us in. We notice that the floors are carpeted, the walls have wood paneling, and there was a full service restaurant in front of us (which made us feel really strange because we were carrying around our 'dinners' from Nate and Al's downstairs). It was all very swank and completely surprising to us since we had no idea that there was this section in the Staples Center. We also noticed that this was the floor with access to the private suites, which were mainly empty for this event. We finally reach our section and were told to wait until the skater finished his routine. We were eventually led to our seats, which were quite comfortable. They were fully padded and the good thing for Nick was that the walkway was in front of us, so Nick could stretch out his legs if he wanted to. While we weren't at the floor level, we still had a good view of the ice.

After watching the first couple of groups perform, I realize that technically, these skaters weren't as bad as I had expected. With the exception of one skater, all of them attempted a triple axel, and some of them even landed a quad jump. Their speed and artistry may not be up to par with the best in the world, but they were still exciting to watch.

There was a skater from Kazakhstan, Denis Ten, who was 17th after the short program, but skated an amazing long program. Two triple axels (one in combination) and no falls on his other jumps, great spins and flexibility, and a wonderfully choreographed routine to one of the famous classical composers (I want to say Bach, but it may have been Rachmaninoff). We gave him a standing ovation for his great performance, and at the end of the night, he ended up in 8th place.

Another touching moment was from the Japanese skater, Nobinaru Oda. He also skated cleanly and received high marks for his program. It was easy to tell that he was happy with his performance because he was crying from the joy of doing so well at one of the biggest skating competitions out there.

And then we got to the final group, with Canada's Patrick Chan, France's Brian Joubert, and the USA's Evan Lysacek. There was also the Italian skater, Samuel Contesti, who had a very interesting performance to a cowboy theme...at one point, he was skating to Cotton Eye Joe. We thought it was a great routine, but the judges didn't see it that way.

But the night belonged to Evan Lysacek. He skated a clean routine, landing both of his triple axels and was so excited about his performance that during his final combination spin, he was pumping his arms. He got a rousing standing ovation and the best free skate score of the night. The leader after the short program, Brian Joubert, had the difficult task of following Evan and he did very well for the first 4 minutes 25 seconds. He cleanly landed his quad and a triple axel, triple toe loop, but stepped out of his second triple axel, which wasn't too serious of an error. However, with 15 seconds left in his routine, he performed a double axel, which he over-rotated so much that it caused him to fall on his stomach and slide towards the wall (fortunately, he was able to stop himself from hitting the wall). He got up to finish his routine, but after the music stopped, you could see the disappointment on his face as he stood on the ice, shocked that he lost the world title at the very end of his routine. It was sad to watch, but for the Americans in the crowd, we were thrilled to see Evan Lysacek win his first world title. Hopefully this will is a good sign of what's to come at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver :)

The Huntington Library

2009-03-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody! I'm Dr Nick. Okay, never did finish that doctorate. Anyway, I wanted to tell y'all about our trip to the Huntington Library on Sunday. It was sunny and in the 80's, a bit hot to be traipsing around the gardens, but with everything in bloom it was beautiful.

One of the main reasons we wanted to go back was that the Chinese pavilion would be complete. It was rather impressive, with a large Chinese-inspired house, a pond, bridges, and even an Asian-themed cafe.

One of the weird things was this giant rock.

Anyway, the whole place was very pleasant, and I got a number of good shots of the pagoda.

In addition to Chinese-themed gardens, we also spent a while in the (not kidding) "Bonzai-a-thon" and later in the Japanese gardens. The Bonzai-a-thon had a number of demonstrations and bonzai for sale, but we just strolled through and took some photos. There were some very artistic ones.

All told, we spent a long time looking at Asian-ish stuff. In California. Heh.

Quick update

2009-02-26T18:33:00.000-08:00

So I know that I've totally been slacking on updating our blog...sorry :( It's mainly because I don't think that I have much to say that's interesting, but I should probably post something just to keep y'all informed of our lives.

So over this past couple of weeks has gone by rather quickly. For Presidents Day weekend, we went up to Tahoe to visit Nick's parents and his brother's family. Apparently schools on the east coast get this entire week off...during my entire school life in Seattle, we never got this week off from school. It was good to see everyone again, especially Simon. He's grown a little since we last saw him for the holidays, but he's still just as cute. And this time, we didn't have to change his diaper :)

I came back to LA on Monday, but Nick stayed there for the entire week. It made nights at home really lonely for me, but Kitty did her best to keep me company. When he arrived on Saturday, we made a quick stop at home and then we had dinner with Beth, Rob, Kate and Beth (yes, there were two Beth's). It's been a long time since we all had dinner together, and it was great to see everyone again and hearing about Bakersfield--a city that neither Nick and I have ever visited, and the four of them weren't doing a particularly great job of enticing us to visit :). Afterwards, Rob and Beth and the two of us went to the office so that Rob could take some photos of the booth. We ended up having a great time sitting and chatting...and then before we knew it, the time was really late and they needed to wake up early to catch their flight back home. It was sad, but we'll try to go to NY to visit them and Nick's family sometime this year.

On a completely different topic, Street Fighter IV came out last week. There was some drama with the UPS shipment not arriving at our office on time, but eventually I got my hands on my pre-ordered copy. I've been spending a lot of time recently unlocking new colors for the character that I play, Rose. I also spent waaaaay too much time trying to complete her combos in the hard trials, and have been failing miserably on the first combo. It should look like this, but I can't get the soul spiral to connect after the series of crouching punches. Fortunately for Nick, I was doing these trials when he was gone, so he didn't have to hear my constant failure. Overall though, the game has incredible graphics, and the gameplay is very smooth and fast. I've been enjoying it a lot...now I just need to find people in the office who want to play it.

And finally, Saturday morning I went to the Willow Spa in Santa Monica and asked for the Thai Herbal Escape. I wasn't sure what to expect, and the minute I walked into the treatment room, I knew that this wasn't going to be anything like a traditional massage. The masseuse was this petite asian woman, and this particular treatment involved passive stretching. So I was lying on my back and she'd grab my leg and press it into me, pull it out, pull it over my head, etc. There was this one move that I remember the most because it hurt my arms...she had me sitting up with my legs stretched out, and she was behind me. She put her foot on my back and took my arms and pulled them towards her. After each stretching session, she would apply a bundle of steamed Thai herbs on the muscles to help relax them. While it did hurt at times, it was nice and did make me feel energized and my muscles weren't sore.

So that's all that I have. I hope all of you are doing well. On the 8th of March, we'll be attending the wedding of one of Nick's teammates. We haven't been to a wedding in a long time, but I'm excited about it. I get to break out my blazer again :)

Happy (belated) Chinese New Year!

2009-02-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year was last Monday, so I'm incredibly late in wishing you all Happy Chinese New Year. However, it's better late then never, right? This year is the year of the Ox, but I have no idea what bearing it has on how this year will end up being. I suppose the Ox is the same animal as a bull, so maybe this year will be a Bull Market?

My friend Jane and I organized a hot pot party at our place in celebration of the new year. (If you don't know what a Chinese hot pot is, please look here for more information). We have never hosted a hot pot before, and were lacking some necessary items, namely a portable burner and a pot. We eventually got around to purchasing all the equipment and Friday night, we did some massive shopping with Jane and Rob at 99 Market for all the food.

We spent a lot of time on Saturday cleaning up our place, which was a good thing because it desperately needed cleaning. Since people would be crowding around a table, we decided to use our large metal rolling table in the kitchen. The only problem with that was that it's really tall, so anyone cooking there needed to stand (we warned guests to bring comfortable shoes). We had two pots going...one with seafood, and one without seafood (for those allergic to shellfish). Once they started boiling, the fun started. Everyone made their own dipping sauce and began throwing things in the pot to cook. While the food was really good, I really enjoyed the communal atmosphere of hot pot. Everyone's sitting/standing around the pot and it's all very interactive. We comment on how hard it is to grab a pork ball, and that quail eggs sink to the bottom and are hard to find...it was very nice to experience.

After the eating was over, people started playing Rock Band, SingStar, Lips, pool, and/or mahjongg. We hadn't thrown a party in a while, but even though it can be a lot of work to prepare for one, Nick and I truly do enjoy them. It's great to see people outside of work and to socialize with them when there isn't a computer nearby.

I realize that I haven't updated this blog with any substantial posts lately. I'll try to do a better job of updating it, and adding more pictures. Oh, I should so post a photo of Kitty laying all over Nick's keyboard last night. It was amusing 'cuz she was hitting key combinations and opening random files. Fortunately for Nick, she wasn't able to hit the right combination of keys that reply to emails :)

Our wedding pictures

2009-01-20T17:21:00.001-08:00

We finally got around to posting our wedding photos online. You can find them here.

Even though it was over two years ago, we still remember it very well, and seeing these photos brings back a lot of wonderful memories :)

Thanksgiving on St. John

2008-12-04T18:36:00.001-08:00

So, for Thanksgiving, Nick's family decided that they wanted to get away from the cold weather in New York. They decided that we should all spend a week on St. John, one of the islands in the US Virgin Islands. I had never been to the Caribbean before, but Nick's family's been to the British Virgin Islands before.

Our trip started by flying out Friday night on a red-eye flight to New York. I think I got 30 minutes of sleep, and Nick didn't get any, although he seemed to be very entertained by Iron Man. Thanks to some good tailwinds, we actually arrive at JFK 45 minutes early. In fact, we landed before 5:00, which is when the groundscrew starts their shift, so for a few minutes, we were at the gate, but waiting for people to guide us in and also for the jetway to be attached to the front door. Fortunately, it only took five minutes, but Nick and I were amused that we landed with, essentially, no crew on the grounds.

We then pick up our bags and then head outside to grab a taxi to Nick's parents' apartment. What Nick forgot was that we would need to be outside for this part and forgot to bring a jacket to protect him from the 24 degree weather in New York. So we scurried as fast as we could to the taxi line and got our taxi. After a couple of hours, the entire family headed down to St. John, where it was 80 degrees and sunny.

We didn't do very much on the island--relaxing on the beach, relaxing by the pool, going to the spa, etc. For lunch, we tried out the cafe on the resort. The food was fine, and Simon seemed to enjoy it as well:

I like how in that photo, there's a huge keg with the words "Cruzan Rum" on it.

The resort had tennis courts as well, so I signed up for some tennis clinics. With the exception of the first day, I was the only one at the clinics, so it was like I had a private lesson, but for a much cheaper price. It was good exercise, and with the high humidity, I was sweating after the first five minutes. The courts were also quite interesting. It was as if they wanted to be grass courts, but the resort didn't want to deal with the hassle of maintaining a grass court, so they used astroturf instead. I couldn't tell if there was a huge difference between playing on a hard court versus playing on an astroturf one, but it was still odd to look down and not see cement.

On Wednesday, we took a trip to St. Thomas, which is the most developed island of all the Virgin Islands. While there is a huge shopping district in Charlotte Amalie, we discovered that it was all jewelry stores, which didn't appeal to us too much. The "80% off sale" promotions really made us suspicious...why are they selling their jewelry for so little?

After some wandering around, we decided to head back to St. John. On our way to the ferry docks, Nick took a photo of the Moving Bar:

He didn't get anything from the cart, but I think he was amused that this man had a portable bar.

We were fortunate that we were taking the ferry during sunset, which allowed us to take this picture of us and Nick's dad:

Nick's dad seems fine and was happy to have the entire family together, so that was great news.

We also noticed the large cruise ships:

Seeing how large they were and how insane the city was when all the tourist descended on it made us less enthusiastic about taking a cruise anytime in the near future.

On Thanksgiving day, we went to one of the restaurants on the resort. They didn't have turkey, but they did have duck, which all of us agreed was much better than turkey.

It was a great trip, and the scenery was wonderful. There were some cloudy days, but the majority of the time we were there, it was sunny. And the sunsets were spectacular:

It was great having the entire family in one place again...and Simon was cute as always. We flew home to LA with Nick's parents because his dad had an appointment at Cedars-Sinai. The MRI showed no growth in the tumor, however, there is some small bleeding in the brain. I asked Nick if there was anything they could do for that, and he said that there wasn't. Hopefully the bleeding doesn't get too severe...

Prada Beverly Hills Wallpaper

2008-11-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

So a couple of weekends ago, we went into the Prada store in Beverly Hills and found ourselves captivated by the wallpaper on one of the walls within the store. It follows the Fallen Shadows theme that Prada has been using for the fall/winter season this year (I think it might be connected to some of the fragrance collections, but I'm not sure). But besides the fact that it ties into the theme of the short video clip, we also noticed that the wallpaper incorporated various architectural and design features from the store itself.

One example is the concrete beams that run across the roof of the store. At the point where the beams meet the wall, the design of the wallpaper continues to carry the beam into the painting. I can't remember what the beams were in the wallpaper, random geometric shapes perhaps, but it was clever how they were used. Another example was the men's shoe display, which is sort of like a conveyor belt. In the wallpaper, it transitioned into a staircase which one of the shadowed women walked on.

We talked with Mariko, our Prada retail therapist :), and she told us that these wallpapers are specially designed for their stores and that a local artist is commissioned to do these works. I'm impressed with how much Prada supports the art community, with the Fondazione Prada in Milan, and the various architectural pieces that bear the Prada name around the world.

Halloween 2008

2008-11-03T20:55:00.001-08:00

So, a week before Halloween, I decided that Nick and I should dress up as Mario and Luigi, but not just Mario and Luigi, I was planning on being Fire Mario in a warp pipe. The plan was to make a pipe out of something ring shaped, such as hula hoops, and to make 'fireballs' out of tennis balls covered in red and orange tissue paper. Oh, and we needed to find white overalls, white painters hats, and red and green long sleeved shirts.

First we tried to find materials to make the pipe, and discovered that hula hoops are not as common as we thought they were...Toys R' Us and Target didn't sell any. We then decided to focus on the clothes, and ordered our hats and overalls online, mainly because we knew that we wouldn't be able to find them in any stores.

Monday at work, I had the idea that we could use chicken wire (which is currently known as poultry fencing) to make rings as the frame. We found mesh fencing instead, which was fine, however, it was still too flimsy to hold it's shape, so we decided to paper mache it all. Neither of us have paper mached since elementary school, so we completely forgot just how messy it was. Fortunately we covered the floor with newspaper, but I managed to fling paste on the ground, on my PJ's and my feet. But, it really helped to give stability to the mesh fence rings.

We then used dowels to connect the top and bottom rings in order to give a solid, cylindrical frame. In order to make the lip at the top, we duct taped a lot of floral foam bricks to the outside of the top ring. Then we covered the entire thing in green felt, which was also connected with duct tape (seriously, duct tape was our friend on this costume). Nick used the leftover felt to make straps for me to carry the pipe on my shoulder by sewing hooks to the end of the straps and crazy gluing the hooks to the top ring. He also created a pouch from some more felt and taped it to the inside of the pipe so that I could carry my 'fireballs' while walking.

After some worrying about getting the pipe into our car, we showed up to the office with a fully intact pipe. Nick helped me get into it for the costume parade where this one picture was taken:

I thought we looked great, and a lot of people were impressed with the construction of the pipe. Unfortunately, we didn't win any of the categories for the costume contest, but hey, we gained a warp pipe, which is currently sitting in my office. I have no clue what we're going to do next year, but I'm thinking that expectations are that we need to construct something with moving parts...

4 hours of tennis and this is what happens...

2008-10-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

I think I need to buy titanium strings :)

Plants are nice

2008-10-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

Over the past month or so, Nick and I have decided that we needed to spruce up our place a bit, particularly our patio. After our trip from Europe, we realized that we forgot to ask someone to water our plants, so when we got home, we discovered that all of our plants on the patio were dead. We never did anything with them, so for a few months, we had a few dead plants and a grill on our patio, making it oh so pretty to look at, especially when it's the first thing we see when we open up our curtains. Anyway, we decided it was time to do something about that, so we went to a couple of nurseries around town and to buy outdoor plants, as well as some indoor plants.

Whenever someone asked if we were looking for anything in particular or if we had some type of theme we were trying to work with, our answer was basically "something that you can't kill very easily." I was thinking that we would be shown a lot of cacti, but I was surprised to see just how many varieties of trees there were that didn't require continuous watering and could withstand many days of sun.

One type of tree that we purchased was nicknamed the "Oriental Pom Pom." It looks like some type of bonsai, since each 'pom pom' looks very neatly pruned. They were cute, so we actually got two of them, plus a couple of house plants. They arrived a couple of weeks later, which resulted in our patio having two living Oriental Pom Poms and a bunch of dead plants. We decided the Pom Poms needed friends because they looked really lonely, so we went to another nursery and purchased some larger trees to fill up our patio space, as well as a couple more indoor plants.

They were delivered last week and I must admit that having living plants on our patio has really made a huge difference. It's really nice to open up the curtains to see green (as opposed to dead plants, or the huge concrete wall that is on the other side of the fire lane that our patio is on). Also, the indoor plants really give our place some character. We're not entirely sure what Kitty thinks of them though...we're fairly certain she thinks they're toys because we've noticed some bite marks on some of the leaves.

So, we're both happy with our decision to add greenery to our place. I just hope that Nick's able to take care of them for longer than a year so that we don't have to go through this process all over again next year.

Kitty likes plants:

Blue Cheese Truffle

2008-10-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

So a couple of weeks ago, I get an email from Vosges Haut Chocolat saying that Katrina's newest collection will involve cheese and chocolate. So for a short time, she was offering samples of her working recipe for a blue cheese truffle, with a purchase of anything. According to the description, the blue cheese is combined with white chocolate, which is then completely enrobed in dark chocolate. At first, I had no interest in it, mostly because I really don't like blue cheese...but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Katrina could actually make me like blue cheese. So I placed an order of some boxes of chocolate and made sure to enter the promotion code to receive my blue cheese truffle sample, and then patiently waited for my order to arrive.

A few days later, I receive my order, which came in a huge cardboard box (I don't have the exact measurements, but it seemed like it was almost 3 feet cube). And then I open up the box to find an equally large styrofoam box inside and begin to wonder how big my order actually is. I discover that the box is 80% full of those plastic air pockets...it feels like a huge waste of resources, but it might have been because I ordered a cake, which needed to be heavily insulated to survive the delivery. Anyway, I open up the order to quickly find the blue cheese truffle that I've been so anticipating for so long. I sort of wanted to try it then, but decided that I would wait until I got home so that Nick could enjoy it with me.

I also changed my status message to reference the blue cheese truffle, which elicited a few IM's asking if I had already eaten it yet. Eventually, the work day ended, and we went home. I immediately show Nick the blue cheese truffle, which is neatly packaged in a small cellophane envelope tied with a purple ribbon. Nick takes the truffle out of the envelope and takes a bite out of it, and produces a look of sheer disgust...it was as if he was about to spit out the truffle, which didn't make me think that I would enjoy it at all, especially since Nick's the one who actually likes cheese. However, I bravely took a small bite of the truffle. I seriously could only taste the blue cheese at first, and then the dark chocolate kicked in later. It was a very interesting taste, and one that I did not want to have again anytime soon. We threw the uneaten piece of the truffle in the trash :(

So, in the end, it was a crazy taste experience. I'm wary of the full on cheese and chocolate collection, but I think I will get it just to taste the other flavors.

Our anniversary at the spa

2008-09-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

Our anniversary was actually last Tuesday, the 9th, but we celebrated it on Saturday. This year, we decided to have a couple's treatment package at the spa in the Four Seasons Westlake Village hotel. We chose the Ultimate Indulgence package, which included an aromatherapy wrap, a massage, a facial, a manciure and a pedicure, lunch, and a fruit smoothie. It also came with a private couples suite, which included a patio with a plunge pool.

We started off our morning fairly early so that we would be able to make it to our appointment on time. We checked in at the front desk and were immediately greeted by our spa concierge, Meridee. She was basically our personal attendant for the entire day--we could call her if we needed anything, like a drink or food. She showed us the entrance to the men's lounge, and we then met up with her on the other side. Next, she showed us to our suite, which was far better than anything we had imagined. First was the treatment room:

This was where all of our treatments would take place. These beds were actually quite amazing. At the foot of the bed, you could pull up the sheets and the cushion to reveal a sink. The head of the bed could be tilted up allowing us to sit at a 45 degree angle with our feet soaking in some moisturizing solution. The only problem with the room was that if any of us walked to the right of the front bed, we constantly kept hitting our shoulder on the fireplace mantle :(

There was a separate bathroom, and also a separate shower with 13 shower heads:

We tried to use the 12 shower heads on the walls, but they started to make some strange noises, so we turned them off.

In between the shower and the bathroom was a sitting area with a daybed, fireplace, and TV:

And then outside, our room connected to the public garden where the featured attraction is a pagoda:

According to Meridee, the pagoda was shipped from China and reconstructed once it arrived at the hotel. The garden itself was a nice place to walk around. It even housed a greenhouse which contains all the orchids that are used within the hotel itself.

And finally, here's the picture of our private patio:

There were 6 lounge chairs and a table. We wondered why there were so many chairs, but we found out from the women doing our nails that this suite is sometimes rented out by groups of women for group mani/pedi parties. I guess that makes sense, although they'd have to take turns using the pool since the two of us felt cramped in there.

We could have spent all day there, but we didn't plan for it. Next time though, we might bring some more reading materials so that after out treatments are over, we can sit by the pool and relax. Even though the drive was only 40 minutes, it was so far away from the city that it felt like an escape...and it made for an awesome anniversary.

We have more pictures posted on our Picasa web album

Shopping...in an alleyway!

2008-09-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

Sunday, Nick and I had an interesting shopping experience at Commes Des Garcon's Guerilla Store in downtown LA. Commes Des Garcon is actually a Japanese fashion house, and has numerous stores in Japan and Paris. In fact, the reason we even visited the LA store was because we liked some of the clothes that we saw at the Paris store, and were hoping that there were some clothes that would interest us here.

When we returned home, I started researching the label to see if they had stores in Los Angeles. It turns out that they don't have a permanent store here, but they did have a Guerilla store. What is a 'guerilla' store? It's a concept store where Commes Des Garcon rents out a space for one year (and one year only), and places them in the less fashionable areas of certain cities, which is why the LA one is in downtown and not in Beverly Hills. They spend very little money on decorating the stores, since they're planning on closing them down after one year.

So back to the experience of finding the store and shopping there. We find a parking space on the same street as the store, however, Nick needed to parallel park on the left side of the street, which was a new experience for him. We get out, and see this:

Yes, the entrance to the store is a metal door that leads to an alleyway. We go through and see this:

If it weren't for the traffic cone and the door which are both covered in the Commes Des Garcon Guerilla Store posters, we probably would have missed it. The dumptser at the end gives it a certain...charm...

The inside of the store is very small. In fact, it was, and still is, a small artist's studio. There were some interesting art installations, which we think were there before Commes Des Garcon rented it out. Here's a tower of shopping carts, which has some items for sale hanging off of it:

Here's another photo of the inside, showing more garments hanging on the racks, as well as a drum set, which had some wallets on them.

And another photo:

The clothes weren't too similar to what we saw in Paris. After reading up about it when I got home, I found out that the Guerilla stores carry clothes that are exclusive to those stores. What was also interesting was that it was difficult to determine which clothes were for men and which ones were for women. The clothes were mixed in with each other on the shelves, and this label tends to be non-traditional with their fashion. For example, there were numerous skirts for men...skirts that would have also looked fine if a woman wore them, but they had the label "Commes Des Garcon Homme Plus" on them. Nick and I had to constantly read the label to make sure that we were finding the men's clothes and not the women's, although, I think the point of this organization was that if you liked it, you should get it, no matter who it was intended for.

The only problem with this store was that because of it's small size, they didn't have many items in our sizes, so we were limited on what we could buy. However, we were still able to find a few shirts that we liked.

The store opened up in February of this year, so we have until February of 2009 to go back again. We might do so to see what their Spring/Summer selection is. But after taking a look at Commes Des Garcon's Spring/Summer 2009 line, I'm not sure that there'll be anything tame enough for me to wear...and no, I'm not buying one of those skirts :)

Dinner at Matsuhisa

2008-09-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

So I thought I would actually update this blog with entries that don't have to do with our vacations :).

Saturday night, Nick's parents and the two of us went to Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills. It's owned by Nobu Matsuhisa (we're still not sure which one is his first name and which one is his family name), who's been featured on Martha Stewart numerous times and has many restaurants around the world. We chose this restaurant because we wanted Nick's dad, Fred, to enjoy a very nice dinner at a Japanese restuarant while he's still in LA--while New York might have many more Michelin starred restaurants, LA has far better Japanese food.

As we were walking to the front door, we noticed Nobu himself standing outside. As we walked closer to the door, he graciously opened the door for us. At the time, Fred and Jan didn't know who he was, so as we sat down, I told them that Nobu was the one who was standing outside. This brought a wonderful smile to their faces, and we knew that with Nobu in the restaurant, that the food would be exceptional...and it was! We're definitely going back there again when we have a chance.

Sunday night, Nick and I went to Jane and Rob's apartment to play SingStar, which was a lot of fun, although I can't help but feel a bit guilty for making them download two songs that only I knew. Apparently, this means that I need to come over more often to sing Ace of Base's "Life is a Flower" and the Spice Girls's "Who Do You Think You Are?" Later, I suggested that we play Mario Party 8, which resulted in everyone, but me, wanting the game to be over as fast as possible. Next time, we're playing 10 rounds, instead of 15.

And that was pretty much it for our Labor Day weekend. We spent a lot of time with Nick's parents, which was great. Fred's doing much better now, and is able to walk without any help...in fact, I can hardly keep up with him! I think the current plan is that sometime next week, they'll fly to Tahoe to spend some time there until Fred's next appointment at Cedar-Sinai. That'll be good because Fred really misses Tahoe and it'll be nice for him to get away from the craziness that is LA.

That's it for today's post. I'll try to update it more regularly, although I'm not sure how amusing my posts will be :)

Versailles, palace of spoiled French monarchs

2008-07-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

We started today with a trip to Versailles (which was a bit difficult to get to, particularly if you include getting on the wrong train for a few stops), and we got to the little town outside of Paris by lunchtime. After some crepes at a tourist trap, we headed into the area of the château itself.

There was a long line for tickets. A very long line. An hour and a half long, to be precise. In the sun. But, that was that. Had we realized this in advance, there were some alternatives I'd recommend to future travelers (french museum pass or paying extra for the guided tour). Anyway, we continued onto the gardens, which were amazing.

There were pathways hidden among the trees, canals, flowers. It was a shame the fountains weren't turned on. People rented bicycles, golf carts, segways, and rowboats to get around. We walked. Since the gardens themselves are free, any Parisian looking to relax on the weekend should head out there for a picnic; bring wine, bread, and sunscreen. Anyway, we had some ice cream and enjoyed the outdoors before heading off to the old house of Marie Antoinette (before they beheaded her).

She had her own private estate near Versailles, where she liked to think and whatnot. I have a feeling she never really appreciated what kind of luxury she was living in. She had a private theatre (in a separate building!) where she and her friends could see a play, she had a private garden with fake rocks, ponds, and gazebos, and she had more well-groomed trees than you can shake a fist at.

Anyway, after that we saw the other non-château estate, which may have been for more official functions, I'm not sure which was used for what. It's the Grand Trianon, whereas Marie's place was the Petit Trianon. It had a lot of nice rooms, and it's own set of lovely gardens. One thing I've noticed is that they must have all been short, judging by the beds.

We took a mini train back to the main château, though it took as long as walking and was, for me, far less comfortable. Trains simply were not meant for uneven cobblestone surfaces.

Anyway, back at the real palace at Versailles, we got a look at Louis XIV's chapel, his bedroom, and, of course, at the hall of mirrors:

It was an overall very impressive estate, with more pomp and circumstance than anyone ever needs. Louis couldn't have any corner undecorated, from the fireplaces, to the candelabras, to the ceilings.

I also liked the use of wall paper, gilding, and sculpture to emphasize the importance of gratuitous opulence.

He also liked marble:

On our way out, I noticed the railings had little emblems on them, particularly sun emblems. (He was known as the "sun king", after all.) I thought that was a nice touch.

We took the train back to Paris and had a simple dinner. Despite how tired we were, I wanted to go to the top of the Eiffel tower before leaving the city. There was a long line, despite the late hour (oh, this was a day of waiting in lines!), and it had gone from hot to cold as the sun was setting, but we made it up to watch the sun set from the second level, and to see the city lights in the twilight from the top.

Afterwards, we walked back to the hotel exhausted from our full day of walking and waiting in lines. Tomorrow we head to London for our last day in Europe. The only thing we have planned is a spa appointment at the Mandarin Oriental London, which is a nice way to end our European vacation.

The Louvre (large Mona Lisa storage device)

2008-07-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

Going to Paris for the first time without seeing the Louvre at least once would probably be some form of cardinal sin (see yesterday's post for more interesting sinning you can do in Paris). To get it out of the way, we were just going to hop in, see Mona Lisa, and pop out for some tea, but then we got distracted by some art. Okay, I'm being all tongue-in-cheek here; we really did want to see all the other art here, but we did start with our favorite Da Vinci diva. Unfortunately, so did everyone else:

We didn't get a great look at it, but there are plenty of much better shots of it online. Afterwards, we wandered off to the sculpture parts of the Louvre, particularly the greek and roman sculpture. I particularly enjoy seeing emperor Hadrian looking at a bust of himself:

We also saw Da Vinci's famous Venus de Milo, which wasn't in the best of shape, all things considered.

There was even a bit more of the Parthenon here, though as you might remember from before, most of it is at the British Museum. (I'm sure there are some pillars in Greece, too.) After the Roman/Greek sculpture, we wandered into the basement where they had some parts of the original, medeival building that was there originally.

It was pretty cool that most of the structure is there. The original structure in that location dates from the 12th century, as a fort built by the French king of the time. The building above ground that's there now was mostly built in the 16th and 17th centuries and was the seat of government until Louis XIV moved to Versailles. It was still technically a royal palace until the revolution. I've noticed this about a number of museums, gardens, etc here; they were owned by the royalty right up until the revolution. Ah, the joys of beheading all your royalty. Anyway, because it used to be the royal palace, it contained the apartments of Napolean III:

After a lengthy tour and seeing a bunch of French royal opulence, we headed down to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian part of the building, which had some cool sculptures, Sphynxes, and many things with hieroglyphics and other ancient forms of writing. Particularly, they had the original code of Hammurabi:

"An eye for an eye" and all that. I'm impressed at how many things are just sitting out in the open, in the warm, humid air. The Mona Lisa was well protected, of course. Anyway, that was pretty much the high-level version of our tour.

We left and had ramen for lunch. Yep, we went to a ramen-ya in Paris, when that's something we could do any day of the week back home. But, it's comfort food for us. Not to mention it was interesting seeing a nearly identical ramen shop in Paris to the ones we're used to. They spoke Japanese, Chinese, French, and a bit of English. I think more people should be such polyglots. This led into an expensive shopping foray, since we're in Paris.

We hit up the big names: Prada, Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, and others. Yeah, these are all Italian designers, though we did go to Comme des Garcons and Hermes, and looked in the windows of Givenchy and miu miu. It was a busy shopping day.

At the end of the day, we wanted to go to L'Atelier du Joel Robuchon, but I botched the reservation (accidentally called his other restaurant, the "Table", instead). After an unpleasant conversation with the maitre d, we went off to the Marais to find something else. With some great luck, we stumbled on a delicious southern French place:

For a hidden gem near Bastille, it was just fantastic. The waiter (there was only one) was very warm and friendly, and spoke great English. My favorite dish was grilled asparagus with prosciutto and shaved parmesan served warm over a bed of cold greens with a balsamic reduction. Or, as they called it, "grilled asparagus with parmesan" (except in French).

We got too caught up with other things to visit the Eiffel tower (even though it's open until midnight!), so we'll do that tomorrow before leaving.

Paris!

2008-07-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Paris yesterday afternoon after a short train trip from Brussels. It was nice and sunny, and our hotel, Hotel Sezz, was a short trip from the train station. It's in a good location, in the 16th arrondisement, across the bridge from the Eiffel Tower. The decor is very sleek and modern--in fact, when we were shown to our room, our first thought was "where's the bathroom?" All the doors were closed when we arrived and it really looked like they were all for a big closet, but the woman opened the door to the bathroom and we were immediately relieved. Here's a picture of our room, with the door to the bathroom open (the leftmost one), all the doors on the wall look like the ones that are shut.

We also have a small balcony with a view of the Seine:

It's a really nice room, and we're happy with the location of the hotel. After we settled in for a bit, we made our way to the Arc du Triomphe. Our first view of it was this:

We found the staircase that took us under the street to the Arc, but as we were walking, we noticed a huge line of people, so we walked up to the end thinking that it was the line to get out. As I waited in line, Nick walked up to the front to see what it was that we were in line for, and it turns out that it was the line to buy tickets to go to the top of the Arc du Triomphe. We got closer to the ticket booth and noticed this pictures of things not to do:

Do they get a lot of visitors in bathing suits? Next to the booth was another warning saying that the climb to the top involved climbing up 284 stairs...and also descending 284 stairs. The stairs weren't that bad, but the staircase was a tight spiral staircase, which made it very claustrophobic and it sort of got me dizzy constantly moving to the right:

But the climb to the top was worth it for the view: Since it was a nice sunny day, we could see for miles:

We could see many of the landmarks from the Arc, such as the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, and Notre Dame. Afterwards, we walked around the base of the arc and saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

I don't know how many of there there are in the world, but we also saw one buried in Westminster Abbey. We then walked down the Champs Elysees and saw Louis Vuitton's flagship store in Paris:

It's huge, spanning at least three floors above ground. The mens section is huge and so I spent some time looking at the clothes, and according to Nick, as I started to look as if I was seriously interested in purchasing something, one of the saleswoman took a quick glance at my clothing (which was 50% Prada at the time) and decided that I was worth helping. So as I took a pair of shorts off the rack, she immediately asked me if I needed help and if I needed the shorts in my size. She came out to apologize that they were out of my size, but brought me another style of shorts, so I tried on a few. According to Nick, she stood outside the door as I was trying all of them on. I purchased one (as it turns out, it was the cheapest one), and as we were waiting for our shorts to be bagged up and brought out to us, she offered us drinks, which was great because we were really thirsty. Anyway, we were impressed with the service and it has serioiusly changed my mind about Louis Vuitton.

We continued down the Champs Elysees and walked through a park and ended up at Place de la Concorde. From there, we walked across the bridge and found ourselves at L'Hotel des Invalides, which used to be a hospital for injured soldiers. Since it was Bastille Day, there was some sort of military celebration there, so we walked down the street and saw parked helicopters on the lawn.

From there, we walked to the Parc du Champ de Mars, which is where the Eiffel Tower is located. A huge crowd was already assembled at 7:00 on the park grounds for the fireworks show, which was scheduled for 11:00. We continued walking and finally made it to our hotel for a quick rest. After asking the concierge for a dinner recommendation, we made our way to Le Tournesol, a French restaurant two blocks away. We ate outside starting at 8:00, and finished at 10:30...apparently, the French spend a lot of time at dinner. But we were in a mild hurry so that we could see the fireworks. We meant to go to the hotel to grab a jacket before the fireworks show started, but as we started to walk, the Eiffel Tower went dark, music started, and fireworks were being blasted. We made our way through the crowd to find a decent viewing spot and saw a decent amount of fireworks. And then the Eiffel Tower started to sparkle:

It was an impressive fireworks show lasting over 15 minutes, and was probably much better than what we would have seen on the 4th in LA. Afterwards, we called it a night.

This morning, we woke up at 11:15. We've noticed that many of our hotel rooms don't have clocks in them, and the curtains are quite effective in blocking out the sun, so it remains dark in our room. We made our way to the Louvre. As we exited the subway, we noticed that we were in a shopping mall. Nick didn't remember the mall existing when he was here last time, but it was quite nice because we needed breakfast and had a quick pastry and coffee. As we walked to the entrance to the Louvre, we saw this:

And then we noticed that the entrance to the Louvre was blocked off, so we made our way outside and discovered that the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. That sucked, but Nick, decided to take some photos of the outside of the Louvre since we were already there.

Since we were planning on spending our day at the Louvre today, we didn't have any other plans, so we quickly had to decide on where to go next. Nick said that Notre Dame was close, so off we went. It took a while to find it from the subway station though. There weren't any signs and the maps weren't helpful. However, we were able to see one of the two belltowers which guided us towards it.

It was built in the 13th century, and is very well preserved. The stained glass windows were very impressive, with the windows in the four cardinal directions laid out in the famous "rose" pattern. Many of the stained glass panels tell a story, but we were so far away from them, that it was too difficult to make them out. There was also a chandelier on display:

As we left, the children's choir began to sing, so we stopped to take a moment to listen to them. Very beautiful, angelic voices. Next, Sacre Coeur.

[Nick talking now.]

We took the subway over to the closest possible stop. I had heard there was a funicular from the bottom, but we didn't see it and decided that it couldn't be too many steps to the top.

Okay, it was something like 85 degrees in the hot sun; we were hassled by panhandlers, and we had no water. Somehow we had a fun time climbing up the hill nonetheless. We found our way into the church, but unfortunately no pictures allowed. Also, they asked for silence, and to make the point, a guy kept banging on the wooden railing and demanding "Silence!" (in French, that is). The thing is, to my ears he was the only one making any noise. Oh well. It was a pretty church, but Notre Dame is more impressive. The best thing, after all those steps, was the view!

Afterwards, we were a bit hungry, so we wandered the streets of Montmatre and found a boulangerie on the street. I had a Croque Monsieur and Jerry had the Quiche du Jour. I love that this is the sort of food you can get at a street cafe here. By the way, did I mention we've had every meal in Belgium and Paris on the street, outside? I like it.

We walked through a big cemetary that's supposed to have lots of famous people buried in it. Impressive looking mausoleums. We found ourselves in the Bohemian part of town, where the Moulin Rouge is:

Mostly it's full of strip clubs and sex top shops. Also, relevant to the area, is a museum:

Seven floors of erotic carved objects, big statues, and artwork. (Open until 2am!) It ranged from south america to France; Africa to southeast asian; ancient Greek to modern Japanese fetishes (of which there were a couple floors). There was a silent movie porn from the 20's on a loop (the dialog, when there was any, was written on the screen, just like all other silent movies!). It was interesting, and full of young couples. Though, the grand majority of the stuff in there was from the last couple centuries. Which is sad, since there was lots of porn on greek ceramics back a couple millenia, and they had all of 2 bowls. I guess that stuff is hard for a low-end museum to come by.

We tried to go shopping, but at this point it was getting late and the stores were starting to close. We finally went off to get some dinner in the Jardin du Palais Royale:

It used to be the garden for the nearby Royal Palace (by the Louvre), but I guess after the people chopped some heads off and reclaimed all the royal stuff, they made it public. What's nice is that it's surrounded by a building (made it hard to find), so there's very little traffic noise. It's mostly full of playing children, joggers, and couples eating outside at the many restaurants. We had a fantastic meal, and Jerry ate a large mound of beef tartare.. which their English language menu translated as simply "raw ground beef". It was much more appetizing in person, however.

Tomorrow: back to the Louvre, and we plan on climbing Le Tour Eiffel!

Big day in Brussels

2008-07-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the late post on Brussels!

We discovered there's quite a bit of a hill in Brussels, as we walked up and down it a couple times. The big discovery of the day was the land of chocolatiers, known as the Place du Grand Sablon. As you can imagine, Jerry was quite happy to find this:

Jerry definitely enjoyed shopping at a number of chocolate stores, I think five in total. And we quite enjoy eating it all ourselves. Just kidding! We'll bring some back for everyone (we hope it survives the flight).

We also discovered Brussels to be the land of weird museums. There's a sewer museum, a lamppost museum, an american civil war museum (known as the confederate museum...), and the ones we went to, the Brewery Museum and the Chocolate Museum.

The Brewery Museum was pretty lame; for 5 euros, we saw the room they had. It had a video of how beer is made, how much people like beer, and how to cook with beer. Yeah, kind of a cooking show. Anyway, the room also had old brewing equipment with some signs as to what it's for. Lame. At the end, however, they did give us each a beer. So, I drank both of them. Not bad, but not great for Belgian beer.

The Musee du Cacao et Chocolat was much better. It had three floors all about cacao, from when it was discovered (and where) up to manufacturing and modern concerns such as environmentalism. Everything was in four languages (everything is at least bilingual, and often trilingual -- french, dutch, and english -- in Belgium). Also, they made some shells for pralines, but then we just ate the shells. I guess the chocolatier did not have time to fill them.

The other museum we went to was the Musical Instruments Museum. It had a wide variety of instruments, and particularly a wide variety of accordians. It didn't have too many truly antique instruments, but the neat part was the headphones. They give you a set of headphones to wear around the building, and in front of each case of instruments, it plays you a sample of music featuring that type of instrument.

One of the important tourist attractions in Brussels is the Mannequin Pis:

Yeah, it's a boy pissing. There are a number of stories as to what this is all about, but in the end, it's just an important spot in Brussels that a huge group of Chinese tourists were in front of.

We also saw the royal palace:

We couldn't go inside, but the old royal part of town is very pleasant. There's also a beautiful royal park:

We had Italian for dinner. One thing I absolutely love about Brussels is that even the most casual of restaurants has beers like Duvel and Chimay on their menu. Here, Leffe and Stella Artois are the boring/cheap stuff. I'm kind of glad that InBev bought Anheuser Busch; maybe they'll make the beer finally taste decent.

After dinner, we spent some time with old friends from grad school who now live out here.

It was a long day, and at the end Jerry was tired (note that it's still sunny at 10pm here):

(He doesn't know I've added this to the post. Ha ha!)

Tomorrow: Paris!

Brussels!

2008-07-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

And we aren't talking about the sprouts that few people like.

This morning we got up early (rough after the Kylie concert!) to catch a plane from Manchester to Brussels on none other but Brussels Airlines (who knew?). They have an interesting theme that plays on the letter 'B'. For example, their lunch boxes say (yes, they gave us a light lunch on a 1 hour flight!): And the drinks say: The barf bag says "b. tidy". As I said, it's an interesting theme. Anyway, they got us safely to Brussels, where we whizzed through customs and immigration. We're staying at a nice hotel, Hotel Bloom!. It's in a businessey area more than a going-out area, but that's fine, since it's quiet. The view isn't particularly exciting, but we're on the 8th floor, so we can see pretty clearly out over other buildings. Much of Brussels is exactly the kind of classic European city I just love, with outdoor cafes open until late, and pedestrians meandering the streets at all hours. There's a chocolate store every ten feet in this city, and you can imagine how Jerry feels about that! Also some beer stores: Anyway, the big thing we did today was to find the Atomium, built originally for the 1958 world's fair, the first world's fair held after the second world war, according to them. (The wikipedia entry disagrees...) It's big. Bigger than you think, at over 330 ft tall (102 meters, they said).

Six of the eight vertices (or "globes") were accessible from the inside. Each one has two floors. Two of them have restaurants, including the top one with the nice view. The connecting pipes are a bit claustrophobic, and I had to duck repeatedly (maybe nobody was tall in the fifties).

Also, as insane as it seemed to us, people were riding down from the top on a zip line.

We also visited the land of miniature Europe, nearby. I think it exists to showcase every member country from the EU. Everything is built to a 1/25 scale. It's the best place to see the Eiffel tower and Big Ben at the same time.

I believe they did a particularly good job of capturing Copenhagen:

(All the miniatures were amazing and, as far as I can tell, highly accurate.) Anyway, despite feeling under the weather, we had a nice first day here. Good night!

The Kylie concert

2008-07-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

This will be a quick post since we're about to go to sleep soon. I (Jerry) woke up this morning feeling like I had a cold or a flu, which was especially bad since tonight was the Kylie concert. Nick went out to a pharmacy to get me some medicine, and I spent a lot of time in bed in order to rest up for the concert. After drugging myself up, Nick and I went to the Manchester Evening News Arena--appropriately enough for a Kylie concert, the arena's acronym is MEN. We were seated in the middle of the floor and the people next to us, Natalie and Paul, were very outgoing, and were impressed that we flew from the US to go to the concert.

The concert was fantastic! It was visually spectacular, with LCD curtains (strings of LCD beads, I guess, hanging from the ceiling), a video floor, seven costume changes, and numerous half naked male dancers. Nick took a bunch of pictures, which we hope to post soon. The cool thing about the concert was the last song, which was an acoustic version of "All I See." I'm not sure if that was on the playlist, but it was a nice ending.

And now we're off to Brussels!

----

Update (by Nick):
Jerry may only remember the Kylie concert, but we also saw a bit of Manchester today. Particularly, we saw the Museum of Science and Industry. Here's a bit from a working set of steam engines that they run every day:

Also, we saw some Roman ruins.

Anyway, Kylie was fantastic!

Now on to Brussels...

Off to Manchester!

2008-07-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

Today we left London, hopefully having seen all the bits we should see. On the way out, we passed by Marble Arch and Madame Tussaud's (which had an amazingly long line).

Off to the train station, where we caught a train on the Virgin line. Yep, same Virgin as all the other things. But, more about Sir Branson's insanity later on in this post. We headed off for the 2 hour, 20 minute ride to Manchester, where we saw some amazing scenery:

Also, the train interior was quite nice. If you're ever travelling around England, I'd recommend Virgin for price and quality. Jerry napped a bit on the train, and I got some work done that kind of needed to get done last week.

We arrived in Manchester and took a cab over to our hotel, the Lowry. It's probably the nicest hotel in the city (which costs as much as mediocre hotels in London, and I guess that says something about the two cities). The view out our window is fantastic:

We wandered the city a bit and found the shopping district. There are about a half dozen enormous department stores in a very contained area. Not to mention a mall that takes up a big chunk of the city area, the Arndale. We actually walked under it, since it crossed a large road. The weather kept varying between beautiful sunlight and dreary rain, very British. Here we are between two department stores:

We then found an amazing modern museum, the Urbis. It only has room for a few exhibitions, but the biggest one right now is all about Manga. It was awesome. Not to mention the architecture, which this photo cannot do justice:

There was also an exhibit on urban gardens, which was chock full of actual plants, but of course.

After the museum we wandered back into the commercial parts of the city. We found a few more interesting tidbits in the city. Does this look like anything familiar?

I took a real doubletake. But, I'm guessing it's a different company.

Above I mentioned how Sir Richard Branson has a company for just about everything in this country. For example, we saw ads for Virgin Active, which is a gym chain. We rode in his trains. We would have taken Virgin Atlantic, but BA was more reasonably priced. Harvey Nichols (one of the big department store chains) offers Virgin Adventure vacations, such as a week for two at Necker Island in the Carribbean for a mere $25,000. Well, wandering around Manchester, we found one more Virgin enterprise. Jerry thinks it's somewhat inappropriate:

Sorry for the poor photo. Yep, that's Virgin Brides.

Have a good night! Kylie concert is tomorrow!

Last full day in London

2008-07-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

To finish off our stay in London, we had a bit of an eclectic day. It started with a walk across the new millenium bridge over to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

Except, it was raining and the globe is an outdoor theatre... so we walked next door to the Tate Modern museum instead, mostly to stay dry. In there, we saw a couple classic Mondrian pieces (did you know? he never used green), as well as some boxes and things that were just a bit too abstract for our tastes. But, it was very entertaining nonetheless. If you ever have time to kill in London (and you like art), I'd recommend the Tate.

Next, we headed off to the Google office to meet up with Sam for lunch. It's conveniently located next to a tube station, however, it's in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. You could either walk out of the way to either of the crosswalks, or run across the street and hop over the metal fence along the way--we chose the crosswalk due to safety concerns. We noticed here that cars don't really stop for pedestrians, and some of the intersections do not make it easy for the pedestrians to figure out when they should walk. For example, there's this one fairly busy intersection that's currently under construction. There is no walk signal on either side of the crosswalk, and you can't see the traffic lights for the cars going either direction from the sidewalk so you can't see who has the right of way. We basically guessed and almost got run over by the right turners.

Anyway, back to lunch with Sam. The office is located on Floors 3-5 (which is really Floors 4-6 because the first floor is the Ground floor) of the building. It has a similar feel to that of the New York office, so that was cool...and their telephone rooms are in the shape of a london phone booth:

And for those wanting proof that Sam did make it through immigration this time around, here's a picture of him in front of one of the Google London posters:

After spending some quality time with Sam, we headed off to Greenwich. You might know the name from a common phrase: GMT. Yep, it's the home of the prime meridian. We briefly stood astride the two hemispheres, and then realized that it's a fairly arbitrary choice of lines.

Greenwich is a quaint little town just a stone's throw away from the ultra modern skyscrapers of the Canary Wharf area. It was raining, so meandering about town wasn't exactly the best idea. We did find possibly the quirkiest part of our trip so far, the fan museum. Jerry is a big fan of fans, so it was fun. They had an exhibition on fans and fashion through the last few hundred years. Finally, we had some tea at a very nice tea house up a hill there.

Tea is a great afternoon staple; we should bring this back to the states with us. Anyway, off to Manchester tomorrow; the weather's supposed to pick up, and we're looking forward to it.

The Tower of London

2008-07-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

The Tower of London is really more of a castle. The name stuck because the original building there was just a three story tower. It was built 950 years ago, or thereabouts. William the conqueror wanted to make sure he could control the anglo-saxon folks he just conquered, and also wanted to defend the Thames and its main crossing point. Anyway, we spent the majority of our time in that area today.

We walked into the center of the tower grounds via a bridge, which we think used to cross a moat, but is now covered in grass:

We walked into the first tower that we saw, and then walked outside on one of the walls. It gave us a wonderful view of the Tower Bridge:

I kept thinking that the Tower bridge was London Bridge, but I was wrong. London Bridge is apparently the next bridge west of the Tower Bridge, and is a generic and boring looking bridge, so we didn't take a picture of it. Anyway, back to the London Tower, we made our way into the White Tower, which is the oldest tower on the grounds. It houses various exhibits of weaponry, ranging from swords and lances to guns and cannons. It was quite impressive, but also strange because they were reproducing exhibits of exhibits, because such weapons were actually displayed on the walls. Towards the end of the White Tower tour, we came upon this:

According to the sign, suits of armor that completely covered the entire body were very rare. Also, you could purchase this for your own display at home for around $10,000!

We also saw the crown jewels, but they wouldn't allow photographs. So, here's an example of what they would look like (actually replicas):

There were a couple enormous diamonds among the crown jewels. And I mean enormous. One of them was 530 karats. To think, the royals have been complaining they're short on cash. Well, I suppose the crown isn't exactly a liquid asset. Strangely, my favorite part was how they put you on a moving walkway, so that nobody could just stand there and block the way. Very efficient.

We left the Tower after the jewels. I mean, we could have gone and seen some torture chambers and the like, but we were tired. Crossing the Tower Bridge left us some good shots of the Thames and all the modern construction going on around there.

On the other side, there are a slew of ultra modern buildings being built by and for the new mayor's office. They have this logo that neither of us understand:

Mayor of London

After seeing the London bridge, we headed back. The last thing we did was to go have high tea. We attempted to go to the Ritz. As it turns out, we should have checked their website, as they have a dress code. And we didn't exactly pack a jacket and tie for tourism. How sad. Anyway, we instead had afternoon tea on the fourth floor at Harrods, which was actually fantastic. I love those little tea sandwiches, and scones with clotted cream and jam are possibly my new favorite snack.

Sorry for the short post today; it's late and we need a good night's sleep. Have fun!

---------

update on the Prada umbrella situation: We still haven't gotten one, but we really didn't need one today because it wasn't raining hard enough to warrant an umbrella.

Day 3: touristy stuff + theatre!

2008-07-07T15:03:00.000-07:00

We headed down to the (relatively) new jubilee park area. The main purpose of this was to take a trip on the London Eye, as well as to see those well-known tourist spots.

As you can see, it was rainy again. London weather, of course. Actually, it was much worse than normal London weather; there was some lightning and thunder. And the hotel ran out of umbrellas, so I guess I should have let Jerry buy the Prada one. Anyway, Jerry didn't feel good either, but he tried his best to keep a smile on.

Anyway, way up on the Eye, we had a fantastic view of the important bits of the city. Which is great, because that will help me segue to what we did next.

We passed right by Big Ben, then attempted to go into Parliament, but they weren't open to the public until 2:30 for a debate, and the guard by the door warned us that during debates there's often a very long queue to get in. (Look at me, using British words like "queue".) Instead, we hopped right across the street to Westminster Abbey.

It was interesting. There were lots of famous British folks buried or commemorated there, not the least of which included Dickens, King Edward I, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary, Mary, Queen of Scots; and others. Also plenty of stone and stained glass. They charge quite a bit to get in and don't allow photos inside (full monopoly on photos inside the church there), so I only have the one outside shot. But, supply and demand: there's only one 1000-year-old church in London, and plenty of tourists wanting to see it. It included the oldest "functioning" door, which was from the original section (consecrated by Edward the Confessor just before he lost to the Normans in 1066 AD; William the Conqueror was the second guy coronated there).

Anyway, after that, we headed off to get lunch at a place called Inn the Park. British food, to be precise. I gave in and had fish n chips.

I felt sick to my stomach later, but it was worth it. After lunch we saw the Churchill Museum and the War Cabinet. Basically, they turned the bunker from which Churchill ran the English part of the second world war into a museum. It was pretty cool if you're a history buff. They also try to portray Churchill in a more balanced way, including some interesting German and Japanese propaganda that made him out to be a nasty warmonger. But, most of it was, of course, very positive. I was actually surprised by how much they discuss the US involvement and its importance. I had always thought such talk was just US bias in the history texts. It's good to see the British perspective.

On our way out, we passed through Trafalgar Square, which had only a few pigeons. I guess the birth control campaign (and the ban on feeding the disease-infested birds) is successful.

Finally, we ended the day by seeing Wicked at a beautiful theatre near Victoria train station.

It was great. We were amused for a good three hours. Must be doing well; the theatre was full on a Monday night. The actors were great singers, though in some parts we couldn't understand the words. Well, we'll have more tomorrow! Halfway through our London escapades.

Seeing the best of Greece and Egypt... in London

2008-07-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

Howdy again! Today was lovely, yet rainy day in London. [comment by Jerry: So, had we purchased the Prada umbrella yesterday, Nick wouldn't have had to carry around a large umbrella that said "The Beaufort Hotel" on it, making it completely obvious that we were tourists]

We started late with a breakfast / lunch at Paul Patisserie. It's a chain around London with decent French food. If only we had chains this good in the states! And to think, people told me British food was bad. Good French for lunch and great Thai for dinner; we ate well today.

Anyway, today's only major task was to see the world. Or, at least, the parts of it the British stole and put in the British Museum.
The British Museum. 15 acres of land covered with three stories chock full of mummies, reliefs, statues, and everything else Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East have to offer. The first thing we saw was the Rosetta stone. Not so exciting in person.

It was in the middle of the Egypt section. It turns out, all the dead royalty from ancient Egypt were very carefully mummified and apparently shipped off to England. Maybe the air is better for you here. Cold and damp. Anyway, ignoring the tongue-in-cheek comments, it was really quite morbid to see. Lots of mummies and skeletons.
After that, we found the parthenon, none of which is in Athens, contrary to my previous understanding.

They had almost the entire relief found on the exterior of the Parthenon, which, as far as I could tell, told the story of men fighting centaurs...oh and someone was herding cattle. It makes us wonder what the actual site of the Parthenon has right now if the British Museum is housing a lot of it. Another thing that we noticed was that separate portions of a specific figure were housed in different museums. For example, the body of a centaur was in the British Museum, but the head was located in Wurstburg.

From Greece, we headed to Rome. There wasn't anything too memorable in their exhibit. Some busts of people, jewelry, and housewares:

We ended our visit to the museum in the Asia collection. Seeing the Japanese collection was particularly underwhelming given our trip to Japan last year--we had seen everything that was being shown. Afterwards, we passed through the west end and saw some theatres:

We bought tickets to see Wicked tomorrow night. You know, pretty much all the same shows are here as on Broadway. That's cool, though. We've been wanting to see Wicked for a while, so we're excited. We had good Thai food for dinner, as mentioned at the start of this one. Forgot to take a picture, but on the way out, I couldn't but help notice the following "Bistrovich":

Mm, borscht. Anyway, more from us tomorrow!

Now arriving: Nick and Jerry's flight from Los Angeles.

2008-07-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

Today we made it to London. The flight was pretty reasonable, though sorry for the lack of pictures. On the downside, since the flight left at 3:40 PM and arrived at 9:50 AM, it's theoretically a nighttime flight. Except that in LA time, we arrived barely after bedtime. We couldn't really sleep. So, we're kinda tired right now. But, I'll do my best to summarize today.

I should start by mentioning that yesterday we dropped off the cat at the kennel. She fought me tooth and nail about getting in the car, but I think she'll do just fine there. And we had a nice time hanging out in the oneworld lounge at LAX. Free wifi and quite good food, including authentic (according to Jerry) chinese food. Anyway, we then got on the plane, dithered away our time on board and got out in London with no fanfare. (Unlike our trip last year, what with the famous folks and all.)

Another minor downside: BA lost our bag. Strangely, according to them, it got lost somewhere between the plane and the carousel. (I bet it fell off the truck.) But, BA loses bags all the time, so they're pretty good at finding them. We had to file a lost bag claim, and didn't know the address of the hotel offhand. Later, when we were at the hotel, we had the hotel call BA, and between them they had us our bag a mere 5 hours later. Anyway, we made a pit stop by the British Airways arrivals lounge, after the easiest stroll through customs and immigration I think I've ever had.

That was a good way to refresh a bit and snack. And free wifi, to boot. On our way out of the terminal we noticed our first bit of authentic English food: Just kidding! Yay for american chains being all over the bloody world. Anyway, we took the tube to our hotel, which is about two blocks down from Harrods. This was mighty convenient since it's on the same subway line as the airport. The ride took about an hour, but we got to see some of the suburbia around London. Very quaint. The row houses with the little chimneys reminded me of the chimney sweep scene with Dick van Dyke from Mary Poppins.

After navigating the subway a bit, we found our hotel pretty easily.

It's a nice place. They didn't have a room ready yet, so we dropped our bags off and went shopping. We wandered Harrods for a bit. They really do have everything in there. You can buy chocolates, sushi, a suit, jewelry, real estate in Dubai... yeah, everything. And the escalators have an egyptian theme. No idea why.

While we were out and about we came across an adorable open-air market.

Crossing the street did scare us a bit, what with all the people and the aggressive drivers. Though, you're free to cross at ground level or on horseback.

Anyway, we were very impressed with how historic everything is. In fact, little markers explained some of the incredible importance of the location you happen to find yourself in. Such as next to a house where Jane Austen spent a year visiting her brother. Wow, so important.

Eventually, after dropping stuff off at the hotel and napping quite a bit, we went back out and found dinner. Being forewarned to avoid English food, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the restaurants aren't actually British. Lots of Italian, French, and middle-eastern cuisine around here. A little Asian as well. In the end, we found a tapas place in a street off the main drag. It was a lucky find, with great staff and tasty food. Our favorite was the super-delicious jamon, it was from acorn-fed pigs and cost a lot extra. Mm, I want more, now that I think about it.

Anyway, it's late and we are exhausted. Travelling is hard. Let's go shopping! PS Yes we found the Prada, but no we didn't buy anything. Namely, I wouldn't let Jerry buy an umbrella.

more random thoughts/observations from our trip...

2007-06-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

Hi! So we've finally posted our pics of our trip onto Picasa:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ponophobic

Making captions for all the photos is hard and time consuming, especially since I can't remember what some of the buildings are, which explains why some of the captions only say "another building on the temple grounds." Anyway, take a look at them and leave comments if you feel compelled to.

So back to what this post is supposed to be about--more stuff about our trip:

1) Melons are expensive. Ok, so I guess melons might not be that easy to grow in Japan because the prices for them are insane. There was this small watermelon at a grocery store that was selling for around $9. And if you thought that was expensive, there is this one variety of melon that is insanely pricey, the Yubari Melon. So we're not sure what's so special about this melon, but everywhere we go, we always see them selling for at least 10,000 Yen (roughly $85-90). And then there was this one store that was selling a pair of them for 41,000 Yen. What's even crazier is this article. Seriously, 2 million yen?!?!? We were tempted to buy one just to see what the fuss was about, but we resisted.

2) Vending machines are awesome! So yeah, Japan has tons of vending machines, and there are some bizarre ones out there. Unfortunately, we just saw a lot of drink vending machines, sometimes a cigarette machine as well, but that was about it. But the most interesting one that we encountered was on the Ramen floor of the Kyoto Station (yes, they have a ramen floor). We wandered around the floor from one ramen place to another, and when we were ready to go in and order, we wondered why each store had a vending maching near their entrance. We realized that to order food, you actually used the vending machine! So each button on the vending maching corresponds to a menu item, and the menu was a display of plastic versions of the dish. The place that we went to went a step further and actually numbered each item in the display so that each button corresponded to the display number, so that people who couldn't really read Japanese could still order based on what the food looked like. After you pressed the buttons for your order, the machine would print out a ticket for each item, and then you'd take all of them and hand them over to someone who was standing by the entrance...and that was it. We sooooo appreciated the ease of ordering there.

3) Kyoto taxi drivers. So we decided to take a taxi from our hotel in Kyoto to Kyoto station. This would be our first taxi ride, and we didn't know what to expect. First of all, many of the cars in Japan are small, including the taxis, and the reason for this became obvious very quickly...the roads in Kyoto are narrow!!! Our driver decided to avoid main streets in order to get to the station, so this basically meant that we would be travelling on streets that would be considered a one lane road, but was actually a two lane road. The driver wasn't worried that at one point, there were two poles on either side of the street, and in order to avoid them, he needed to slalom...no, he just kept his 30 km/h speed down the road. If a car was coming at him...just keep going and swerve to the side if absolutely necessary. We probably shouldn't complain too much about it since he did get us to the station in a short amount of time, but really, it was crazy and impressive at the same time.

4) The MTV Japan Music Awards. We happened to be in Japan during this, and we happened to catch a piece of it on Japanese TV. The one moment that we remember very vividly is this one male celebrity, most likely a singer, come out on stage and greet the crowd in English with, "Are you exciting?!?!" He was very ecstatic about this...and he continued with "I'm so exciting!!!!" And that was your piece of Engrish for the day :)

I think there's more to talk about, but I'll stop here for now.

Jerry Liu

Field Trip!

2007-06-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

So, while we were visiting some castles and temples in Kyoto and Osaka, we kept running into huge groups of school children. Our first stop was Nijo-jo, one of the oldest and biggest Shogun temples in Japan. We were walking to the entrance of the temple when three middle school girls came running up from behind us to ask "Excuse me, do you speak English?" And when we said yes, they were incredibly excited. They proceeded to tell us that for their English assignment, they needed to find people from other countries and ask them some questions. Their first question was "what do you like about Japan?" to which we answered "the food." There were many other things as well, but we decided to keep things simple. They stumbled a bit when trying to ask "what kind of Japanese food do you like?" but eventually we figured it out. Their last couple of quesitons were about where we were from and which city...and that was it--quick and very amusing.

Later that day, we made our way to sanjyusangendo, which is famous for housing 1001 nearly identical buddha statues. When walking to the area where we needed to take off our shoes, another group of middle school girls approached us and asked a very similar first question to the previous group of girls (something along the lines of "Excuse me, do you speak English?"). After we said "yes," they immediately started asking their questions, which were slightly different from the first interview we did. However, we were very puzzled with one of the questions: "How many seasons do you have?" We answered "four" very tentatively since we weren't sure if that was really what they were trying to ask, and judging by how confused they were when we gave them our answer, we were pretty sure that they weren't trying to ask about seasons, but probably something else. They also asked "do you like Japan?" and of course we had to say "yes," which was genuine, but really...was anyone really going to say "no" to them? When the interview was over, they took a picture with us, and in order for Nick to actually be in the picture, he needed to squat really, really low...it was amusing.

The next day, we made our way over to Osaka Castle, which is pretty much the only thing to see in Osaka. As we were exiting the castle, we decided to sit down on a nearby bench to read the travel guide and figure out if there really was nothing else noteworthy to see there. While looking through the Osaka section of the guide, a large group of elementary school children surrounded us while we were on the bench and in unison said "Excuse me, do you speak English?" (We were starting to wonder if this was the canonical introductory sentence to say to foreigners). They introduced themselves to us as students in the 3rd grade class of Osaka Elementary School. We knew that they taught English as part of the Japanese educational curriculum, but we were amazed that they started that early.

Anyway, they asked us many general questions about where we're from and our trip to Japan. At the end of the interview, they sang us a Japanese children's song...it was cute, and a bit long. We sort of smiled throughout the entire song 'cuz we couldn't understand the song, but that wasn't really the point of why they were singing. Then they asked us if we could sing a children's song from our country, so we sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" (and by "we" I mean "I" since Nick apparently doesn't know his children's songs). Before they left, they gave us a sheet of paper with their names on it as well as an origami piece as a thank you gift. It was all incredibly sweet and they were so full of joy and happiness that it made the interview really fun.

...and after that group of children left, we were approached by a second group of children from the same 3rd grade class. We tried to explain to them that we already were interviewed by another group, but to no avail since they started to ask us the same questions. They sang a different children's song, so we sang "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (and once again, I was doing most of the singing...).

After we finished talking to them, we decided that we needed to leave the castle area because we knew we would be approached by another group of children, and sure enough, as we were leaving, another group came up to us and asked us the same questions. It was then that we realized that having to come up with children's songs on the spot is hard, especially if you haven't had any reason to sing them recently. We were struggling to think of a different song that I was quite tempted to sing "Happy Birthday to You," but we were able to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

...and then we left as quickly as possible.

But all throughout our trips to Kyoto and Osaka, we kept running into groups of school children. An amazing number of buses came and went when we were visiting the various landmarks. Even as we were boarding the train to Tokyo at Kyoto station, we saw large numbers of school children who just arrived and downstairs at the loading area, we saw an equal number of school children in rows getting ready to board their train to return home.

Personally, I never had any field trips like that when I was in middle school...

Jerry Liu

The Tawaraya Ryokan

2007-05-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

Hi, it's Jerry! We've returned to Tokyo for our last night before we leave for LA...here's the first of (probably) a few posts about our trip to Kyoto and Osaka. I will discuss the ryokan that we stayed at named the Tawaraya. A ryokan is a Japanese style hotel where the rooms are that of a traditional Japanese room, with tatami mats and futons to sleep on. It took a while for us to actually get to our ryokan since it involved a subway transfer and some walking around, but after we got some help from another tourist, we finally found it off the main road.

The front of the Tawaraya, with it's lanterns and artfully places bamboo railings, gave us a hint of what we would expect when we entered. There is no reception desk when you walk in. Instead, we were immediately greeted by two women, one who asked for our names, and the other who asked to take our luggage to our room. We were then escorted to the steps to leading to the lobby of the ryokan, where we took our shoes off and changed into red slippers...and of course, Nick's pair was waaaay too small. The floors were made of wood and polished, and the interior was intimate, but not so cramped that one would feel claustrophobic. We rounded a corner and were given our first look at one of the sitting areas--a seat placed next to a small garden with a well.

Our room was rather close to the lobby, so we didn't get a chance to see very much of the rest of the ryokan, but that was fine because our room was quite extraordinary. And it was a bit surreal that next to the ryokan is a very busy street, yet you'd never know it was there since it as so peaceful and quite.

After the man who led us to our room left, we were immediately greeted by a woman dressed in a kimono. She entered into the living room area, shut the door to the small entrance area of our room. Once she stepped up onto the tatami, she bowed and welcomed us to the Tawaraya and then brought us green tea and some rice crackers. She asked if we were having dinner with them, and we were, so we ordered the Kaiseki, or traditional Japanese meal. After she took our order, she left and we decided to rest a bit and explore our room. Here are some pictures of it:

From the main room, looking at the dining area (where Jerry is) and the entranceway on the right.
Jerry sneezing, now sitting at the table in the main room. Note the sliding glass doors reflecting light on the far right, they go out to the garden.
Looking across the entranceway into the bathroom.
Peering into the bathroom, with the wooden tub (Suzu always left it full of hot water when we came back in the evening). The glass next to it faced the garden also.
Looking out at the garden from the main room. The sliding wood and paper doors between this room and the garden had a section on each of the doors that could slide up, as seen here, to allow you to see through them. Kinda like a shade.

We noticed that our luggage was delivered during the time that the woman was welcoming us...we never heard the door open or anything that would indicate that someone else had entered. It was quite impressive.

We decided to walk around the area until dinner time (that will probably be detailed in a later post).

When we returned to our room, we were greeted by another woman named Suzu. She would end up being our attendant for the rest of our stay. And this was the start of our journey into the world of extraordinary Japanese service. Suzu greeted us and then started to serve us dinner. She started wiping off the table in the living room area, but then I think she noticed that Nick was a bit uncomfortable sitting on the ground, so she asked if we wanted to move over to the other table which had an opening for our legs to hang underneath. So we moved over there and she proceeded to wipe that table. Then we were served the first of our 8 (I think) course meal, each brought to us by Suzu who would explain as best as she could what we were eating. The presentation of the food was so beautiful that I was compelled to take some pictures:

During the last course of the dinner, Suzu closed the screens to the living room area and started to make our futons. It was quite strange sitting at our table knowing that she was moving furniture around while we were eating. After 10 minutes, the screens were opened and the room transformed into this:

Suzu would serve us breakfast every morning we were there with the same attention that she did for our one dinner there.

But what amazed us even more was that whenever we left the ryokan, either to go sightseeing or to find dinner, we were greeted at the door by one of the bellmen, Suzu, and another woman. They would each bow to us wishing us well on our excursion, and after we actually left the ryokan, they would walk outside the entrance and watch us as we rounded the corner of the street, bowing as we made the turn. And every time we returned from our trips to wherever, Suzu would come to our room with cups of green tea and some type of sweet treat.

It rained on our last day there. After we checked out and headed to the taxi, we were, once again, met at the door by Suzu, the bellman, and another woman (I never knew who this was). They immediately opened up umbrellas as we walked under the uncovered areas of the entrance, and as we walked to the taxi, the owner of the Tawaraya bowed and said "Arigato" as we entered the taxi. When the driver drove the taxi to the nearby stop light, we turned around and there they were, bowing.

It's incredibly difficult to describe the experience we had there, but at the end, we were very happy that we stayed there and I'm a little sad that we won't be there again until our next visit to Japan. Waking up to a view of our garden, taking a bath next to the garden, and just simply relaxing in an environment that was so serene was a once in a lifetime experience, and one that we'll never forget.

[Nick's commentary: It was a great experience; we lived as feudal lords might once have, but the doorways varied in height from small enough for Jerry to hit his head (aka my chest) to perhaps my nose. I managed to only hit my head once, though, and the futon was surprisingly fine, even for my height.]

Last day in Tokyo before leaving for Kyoto

2007-05-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Hi! Unfortunately, I didn't charge my phone last night, so I wasn't able to take any photos of our trip today, which is why today's post is pictureless. It'll also be a short post since it's past midnight right now and we need to go to sleep so that we can wake up early in time to get ready to leave for Kyoto.

Today, we went off to Kamakura to see a big Buddha statue, but along the way, we saw a few shrines and temples. And then we went to Yokohama for the evening. There was a big amusement park area which had a 9 story tall ferris wheel, which we decided to ride on. There were also a bunch of those crane games where you can win small toys, and I found a few that stocked some Mario themed ones, so I played a few. The result was two small toy power-up mushrooms and a small stuffed cheep-cheep (the flying fish that would pop up from the bottom of the screen during any stage involving a bridge). We also had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the entire waterfront.

And that's all that I can write for now before I fall over. We're not sure if we can update our blog during the next few days since our hotel might not have internet access. If that's the case, we'll try updating as much as we can when we return to Tokyo the day before we leave for LA.

Rainy day

2007-05-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

Today was rainy, so we didn't do much. We attempted to visit the imperial palace gardens, but it seems they're closed Friday. Not a big deal, since it was raining pretty hard in the morning.

They have a whole bunch of moats around the palace, though the modern bridge system would make it totally raid-able.. though I guess warfare doesn't work like that anymore. The moats had swans.
Pretty swans. :-)

Then we wandered over to Ginza instead, to enjoy shopping in the rain (see last blog post for the stores' rain prevention measures). Within Ginza, we visited Gucci and some more interesting small shops.
You can't see it well in this picture, but there's a five-story Apple store in there. Admittedly not as pretty as Rodeo, but as Victoria Beckham says, lots of good shopping in here. [Jerry's editorial note: Nick got that last sentence all wrong. I did not say that Victoria Beckham said that there was a lot of good shopping in Ginza. What I did say was that Kylie Minogue commented on how Milan has lots of good shopping. There is a rather amusing clip of Victoria Beckham coming out of a Tokyo Starbucks being very amused by the automatic doors and analogizing them to the panels of a Bang and Olufson stereo system.]

This is the floor plan for a stationary store. Yes, they sell paper, writing implements, greeting cards, and, um, more paper.

This is the famous Kabuki theater near Ginza. What really struck me (that I failed to capture a photo of) is how this very traditional building is surrounded by totally modern businesses. A show was letting out as we walked by.

We also went into another toy store that was pretty cool, called Hakuhinkan Toy Park; a kid would have had a ball in there, though yet again not as cool as the FAO Schwarz that used to be in NYC. :-P

Oh, and we went into the Shiseido gallery. You see, it seems Shiseido is from Ginza, and beyond their flagship store ("The Ginza") and the other store that's across the street from the flagship one, there's also an "art gallery" which this time was focused on lipstick. Rouge, to be precise. They had some beautiful photography exhibited... of women putting on lipstick. Oh, and they had a bunch of lipsticks dating back to 1922. And advertising for the lipstick. To be honest, it was actually pretty interesting. Though I'll never again put my face into an interactive makeup computer thingie. It showed me how I'd look with rouge lipstick, and it was freaky.

Smallness and Japan go well together

2007-05-25T02:55:00.000-07:00

Rather than describe a day in Japan, for once I'll just leave some commentary about size. Jerry will get to the daily summary later, perhaps.

While walking around, we've found some areas have nice tunnels that connect into both the subway and nearby buildings (such as department stores) as well as having their own restaurants and magazine shops. It's like a whole new world underground. A world where the signs hang down to my eyes, so I duck... a lot. It was pretty cool, though, being able to get from place to place on a rainy day like today underground. And the restaurants and storefronts down there are pretty nice.

The next place where Japan is short is in the subway. We rode the subway during a Friday rush hour today. Probably a bad idea, because at every stop, people crammed in until the car was really full. Nevertheless, we were there, shoulder-to-shoulder with lots of folks going home or going out. Well, not really shoulder-to-shoulder; in the case of the four-foot-six man behind me, his shoulder kept bumping into my bum, and sometimes I felt an elbow hit my hamstring. And there was a woman near me that I nearly bashed in the head with my elbow. When the train jerked around you could get just a touch too friendly with your neighbors. Sigh. The other fun part of the subway was looking down the length of the train and seeing the tops of so many heads with very little variation in hair (straight black hair being the norm). It would make for a fun photo, but Jerry thought that would be rude. Oh, and in the theory that Tokyo subway trains can hold an infinite number of people, one woman was trying very hard to make the proof by induction: she pushed herself into the door of the train rear-first. :-)

My final complaint about the, um, size issues I've been having here has to do with clothing. Yeah, I know, I shouldn't have expected to be able to buy clothes here at all, but I saw this great shirt by a Japanese designer that I've never seen in the US. I thought, what a great opportunity to get a unique shirt that doesn't exist back home. So, looking at the small one that was on the rack, I asked a nearby friendly clerk (the clerks are so friendly and helpful here!):

Nick (in broken Japanese): [gesture to shirt] Me big.
Her: [gesturing to shirt] "L" (pronounced "ehlu")
Jerry: I think she's saying this is a large
Nick: Oh.
Her (in Japanese): I'm so sorry...

She was nice about it. And now I know, the Japanese are short. Some say I'm just tall, but I don't buy it. It's not me, it's that everyone else is short. :-)

Seriously, though, Jerry's the largest size here.

And now for something completely different.

Plastic

Today was rainy, and it taught us a lesson about wrapping things. It seems the Japanese already have a propensity to wrap things. For example, individually wrapped Q-tips (left), toothpicks, and sugar cubes (actually, the cubes come in pairs, see left).

But, a new abuse of plastic, back on the rainy subject: wrapping anything that might get wet or is already wet. Namely, there were umbrella wrapping stations at every store, so as to avoid dripping all over the store. Most of them came with this cool yet simple machine. It has a hole that you stick the umbrella into, and when you pull it out, it's shrink-wrapped. Fast and easy. Some places even had spring loaded umbrella check racks, where you push in the umbrella and a key pops up. When you put the key back in, the umbrella pops away from the rack.

This umbrella is coated in plastic. There's a trashbag in the background (also plastic) where you can discard the umbrella bag on the way out of the store.

When going shopping, they cover the shopping bag they give you with its own little poncho (with holes for the handles). Note that the contents of the bag are also wrapped up.

No trash

2007-05-24T06:30:00.001-07:00

This is Nick again. I always start these because I upload all the pictures while Jerry takes a bath. You know, for such a clean city, there's almost nowhere to throw out the random garbage. We walk around with an empty starbucks cup for an hour before finding another starbucks to throw the cup out at. Not that we've been going to American chains like Starbucks. Much.

Anyway, we've got some fun tidbits from today to share before we pass out.

Meiji Shrine (and nearby gardens):

(Jerry) We decided to start off the day with something very touristy, the Meiji Shrine and the surrounding park. It's easy to get to, just a short train ride. Here's what the entrance to the Meiji park looks like:

The post and lintel gateway is called a Torii, and there were a few more of them on the way to the shrine itself. The park itself reminded me of Central Park since they share the common characteristic of being a huge park in the middle of a very urban setting. Although we could hear the train pass by while walking down the path, it wasn't so obtrusive that we couldn't enjoy the scenic walk. Along the way, we came across this display:

I'm not sure what it is, and the only description of it was in Japanese. My guess is that it's a set of drums used for some ceremonial event, but I'm sure that I'm completely wrong.

The entrance to the shrine itself included another Torii:

Past the Torii above was the gate to the Meiji shrine court:

And here's the actual shrine itself:
You couldn't actually walk up to the shrine, and I'm not sure if it is ever open to the public. They do have three wooden donation boxes where people drop some yen into and pray for good fortune. We saw a few people do this while we were there. While we were walking out of the shrine, we came across some sort of procession:

We aren't sure what this procession was for--a wedding perhaps? It's hard to tell from the photos, but the women were all dressed in beautiful kimonos. We couldn't get a close look a the woman in white. After bowing to the man in front, they continued their procession across the courtyard...we decided to walk to the Meiji Treasure Museum. Here's a picture of it from afar, providing a contrast of the traditional architecture in front of the cityscape of modern high-rises:

Ok, so it doesn't look that ancient and traditional from this picture, but being there and seeing it in person really made the contrast more apparent. When we reached the entrance to the museum, we were met with a notice that it was only open on weekends. We then decided to walk to the Meiji Gardens. According to the brief historical information that I read, this area was frequented by Emperor Meiji and Empress Shokan, and it has been preserved ever since. Below is a picture of one of the teahouses:

And here is the South Pond, where many koi and turtles reside. We got a sense that they were being fed a lot by visitors because anytime one of us was standing by the side of the pond, a huge crowd of koi would gather in front of us.

We walked further into the garden and came across this:

It was supposed to be an iris garden, but I guess we were there too early since they seemed to have just planted them...you'll have to imagine what this would look like if it were filled with blooming irises.

At the very end of this path is a well:

Legend has it that this well is special because of how it rises and falls, I think. Also, it's the source of water for the South Pond and the quality of the water coming out of the well is wonderful. There was a sign to the right of the well that said "no drinking," so we cannot vouch for the water's purity, but it looks very clear and pristine.

Afterwards, we went to an exhibit showcasing the attire of the Emperor and Empress. Many intricately embroidered kimonos were displayed as well as decorative fans and headwear. There was one kimono that was a traditonal cermonial woman's dress that was quite impressive. It seemed to be composed of five layers of fabric and looked incredibly heavy. I'm amazed that anyone would be able to walk in something that looked incredibly cumbersome to maneuver in. [Nick's editorial note: Judging by the clothes, they were short. Smaller-than-Jerry short.]

Harajuku (and Aoyama):

Nick here, I'll be finishing the commentary, I guess. We left the Meiji area and crossed into Harajuku. You might find this word familiar from a certain Gwen Stefani song that references Harajuku girls. They basically are young girls who do cosplay and hang out in certain public areas. We actually saw some in Shibuya yesterday, but none in Harajuku itself. :-)

We started by finding lunch. It was a simple cafeteria-style place with pasta, roast chicken, and curry. For cheap, simple food, it was quite tasty. I felt like we should try harder to seek out Japanese food, but to be honest, there's quite a lot of non-Japanese food in Japan. Notably, Italian and French, but also Indian, British/Irish, hotdogs and other random things. We were hoping for ramen-ya or some form of real, simple Japanese food, but those places are mostly the cheap standing restaurants (yes, where you eat your food standing up) that salarymen go for lunch or for a light dinner before heading to a bar to drown their day's stress.

So, we wandered down the street, found Kiddyland (sorry for not getting a picture of this), which was a glorified children's toy store, though I'd prefer the old FAO Schwarz on 5th Ave that no longer exists. We found a couple other nifty stores; Harajuku is a good area for the quirky boutiques.

We saw this clothing store and thought of California. :-) We wandered further down the street and the shopping went way upscale. We passed a mall called Omote-Sando Hills (I've noticed a few places that use the words "Park" or "Hills" to add an upscale note). It had some nice stores, but the really nice stuff was in Aoyama, particularly the Prada store.

This is psychotic, ne? ('ne' is like the canadian 'eh'.) The inside was all white. And I mean all. The white tiled floor led seamlessly into white carpet. The walls were white plaster that would curve into shelves in some places. The white staircase that followed the angle of the windows up the side of the building went up five floors. Men's was the top floor, of course. There was actually a great view up there. Oh, and the dressing room was interesting. I only saw from the outside; it looked like a pod set into the floor with couple steps down into it (it had a round top like a submarine). The anteroom of the dressing room had a tv and seating. Jerry went inside. Here's his description: Well, Nick pretty much described the lounge area of the dressing room rather well. It had a nice view of Harajuku since it's located on the 5th floor. The dressing room, which there was only one of, was covered by a semi-transparent plastic curtain with some pattern to it. It did make me a bit self conscious whenever the salesman came down into the lounge area to bring me a smaller pair of pants or shirt 'cuz he could basically see in while I was changing. The room was also white, which wasn't surprising at all, and it was sort of egg shaped...basically, the room was very round. About the only non-round part of the room was the floor. And that was it for the only dressing room on the men's floor. I wonder what would happen if they had more than one person needing a dressing room?

Akhihabara:
So, I've heard a lot of things about this place, mostly from Anime. "The home of the latest electronics" is actually kind of mundane. The things that really make this area interesting are:

Just about every store for a few connected blocks is an electronics or anime / video games store.
You could build your own computer, and with very good specs, while saving a lot of yen, if you buy all the parts here.
Narrow shops would go up 6 or 7 floors, all with electronics or anime.
As mentioned, lots of anime, lots of manga, CDs of anime soundtracks, and dojinshi.
Dojinshi is manga porn, basically.
There's a lot of dojinshi.
And non-dojin anime.
Oh, and a couple girls doing cosplay.
But still, lots of porn. Good thing they make it clear where the 18 plus areas are, so it's hard to find yourself lost there.

We also liked the pretty lights and the games to play. Oh, and there was this train overpass where they'd built small buildings underneath it (such as a KFC). I love the efficient use of space in this city. When real estate is this much of a premium, you can invent new real estate, if you're creative enough.
This was a sega arcade-type place. Lots of those machines where you move a crane around and then try to pick things up. I always assumed you could never pick anything up with those, but Jerry succeeded a couple times, mostly looking for Mario stuff. Oh, there wasn't much chococat among the Hello Kitty stuff, so Jerry was sad.

(Jerry) So yeah, the whole not being able to find anything relating to Chococat was disappointing, but not all that surprising. But it was a shock that none of these stores sold any Super Mario toys, and having to play those crane games in order to get them was rather frustrating. In fact, the only Mario thing I got from those games was a "fire flower" mini, which seems to serve no other purpose than being a mini. It's not a magnet, or a keychain...and it can't stand up when placed on a table, so I can't even display it on the window. Maybe I'll have Chococat hold it in his hand...

There were lots of otaku here. Otaku have a certain look about themselves, which is much like what some Americans think of as dorky: unkempt hair, poorly dressed, and possibly overweight and wearing glasses. That and they walk into the dojinshi section unabashed. I suppose I should stop harping on that. There were some cool electronics, actually, new phones that we don't have in the US yet. Ipods are big there, but they're the exact same as ours. Video game systems are cheaper by about 15% than the US, but that may have more to do with the exchange rate than anything else.

By the way, for dinner we came back to Shinjuku, and found a building that was five floors of restaurants. In Tokyo, one could say that the "when it rains, it pours" concept applies to commercial concepts quite frequently. What I mean is that there are whole neighborhoods of electronics, bookstores, clothing, and food.

Tokyo: Day 2

2007-05-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

(Nick) I'll start today with some commentary on Japanese culture. Well, maybe not an interesting observation, but it made my morning. You see, it seems I'm tall. And white. As it turns out, that combination isn't too common in Tokyo. Not unheard of, of course; we've seen plenty of European and American faces around. But still, I guess I stand out in a crowd. Most Japanese are incredibly polite, so they glance up at me and then move on; a few stare briefly. This morning, we were walking toward a subway station when I noticed a gaggle of (well, 3) school girls, in the classic Japanese schoolgirl uniforms. When I glanced around, one waved at me to get my attention. Then the three of them said "Hello!" in unison. I replied with a startled Ohayo, and they giggled. Yeah, giggled. It was strange, but very entertaining.

Meguro:
With the goal of working our way up the region west and southwest of central Tokyo, we started at the bottom, Meguro. It turns out there isn't much down there, though it was a really cool area. If I were to live in Tokyo, that's the kind of neighborhood that would be friendly, quiet, but with plenty of small eateries and the normal small shops.

Tokyo has pretty rivers! This is Meguro-gawa ("gawa" means river, as Jerry pointed out). We went to this nifty modern art museum housed in a complex also containing a pool, community center, and daycare. There were kids, and trees, and a couple interesting freestanding bits of architecture, such as this bell thingie:

I like it. And then I got us lost on a long walk in many directions, trying to get to Ebisu from Meguro. They're maybe 3/4 of a mile apart, but with the winding, disconnected streets, lack of signage (most small streets in Tokyo don't have names), and my terrible sense of direction, Jerry nearly killed me. On the upside, there are vending machines all over, including in the residential area we were wandering in (later identified as Ebisu-Minami). We ended up at the Yebisu Garden Place where we had a very delicious and beautiful lunch.

Here's the thing about lunch; the prices seemed (well, are!) very reasonable. Most entrees were in the 1500-2000 yen range (about $13-$17), and it was Japanese food, which is what we wanted. Going in, it seemed perfectly normal, but then they took us into the back room. It extended down this long gentle terracing, with tables on these terraces. In the middle of the room was a rock garden with a fountain and flowers. Beautiful, I declare! Downside: we ordered using the point-and-pray method. We were able to understand the coffee-or-tea question, at least, but my answer of "iced coffee" led to some confusion. I needed the ice; we were sweaty from hiking in the warm weather.

The food arrived. Here's how it looked:

Isn't it amazing? Just a work of art. And delicious. Considering that tax and gratuity are included in the cost, this was such a cheap meal. I never thought I'd say this about Japan, but the food is cheaper than LA for even better quality and service. One weirdness: they leave a check and you're expected to take it to a cashier up front, Denny's style, even in a very nice place.

After lunch, since we were in the grounds of the former Yebisu brewery (owned by Sapporo for 40 years now), we visited the free beer museum.

It was nice, but brief. The highlight for me (being me) was the cheap beer tasting room. 200 yen ($1.70) for a Yebisu black? That's a good price. It was 400 yen for a sampler of four half glasses, but I avoided that, given that we just ate and had some walking to do.

Shibuya:

It's Jerry, and I'm going to finish the rest of our day. After we left Yebisu Beer Museum, we headed off to Shibuya. The first thing we wanted to see when we got there was the famous statue of Hachiko, the dog...and here's a blurry picture of him:

The story goes that Hachiko's master was a professor and one day, his master left to go to work but never returned. But for the 10 years following his master's death, Hachiko would return to the Shibuya station to wait for him. I guess the residents were so moved by this that they built a statue of him. Apparently, it's a very popular meeting place.

We then started our Shibuya journey by crossing the street:

It's a very big street with tons of people walking through it. I couldn't get a picture of the swarm of oncoming walkers becuase I was too busy trying not to run into any. We visited a few stores including an arcade place that housed Pachinko, a popular game involving balls falling down a machine. I was tempted to play, but really didn't know where to start.

After walking around a bit, we wandered through the Love Hotel Hill, which is known for their hotels offering "rests" to those interested in a hotel room for a few hours. The interesting part about this area is that it's completely filled with these hotels and they are all very different from the outside...some of them were quite odd in design, but they were all unique.

Oh, and along our walk, we came across this store:

When I first saw the sign, I read "Three Minutes Happiness" and I can't remember the accompanying tagline, but the combination really suggested a different type of store than what it really was--a clothing store.

We decided to go back to the hotel after our trip to Shibuya. For dinner, we went to a Tempura House that was mentioned in both of our travel guides and was also recommended by the hotel conceirge. It was a fair walk, but sooooo worth it. The tempura came out fresh and hot and the prices were really good considering what we were being served. On the way back to the hotel, we saw more Pachinko arcades, which is starting to become tempting...

Oh, and neither of us have mentioned that while waiting in the immigration line at the Tokyo-Narita airport, we noticed a Japanese girl who was crying while talking to some man. Neither of us recognized who he was, but I overheard someone ahead of me saying that it was Orlando Bloom...and it was! And at one point, he was two feet away from us since he was on the other side of the Tensabarrier of the winding line. Once we left immigration and went to the main area trying to find a Citibank ATM, we noticed a huge crowd of people surrounding some doors. And then we heard women screaming and that was when we realized that all these people were waiting to see Orlando Bloom. We actually started walking to the other side of the terminal, not because we were trying to avoid the crowd, but because we were still trying to find the Citibank ATM. And while we were walking, a bunch of Papparazzi came running past us to go to what appeared to be another exit out of baggage claim. And there were also a huge crowd surrounding those doors.

So that was our celebrity story...tomorrow, we're going to try to see the Fish Market, although I'm not sure we want to wake up that early.

Tokyo: Day 1

2007-05-22T07:06:00.001-07:00

Hi! We made it to Tokyo, and after a bit of wandering around, we found our hotel, the Park Hyatt. Here are some pictures of our room:

Since it's night time, we're not quite sure what our view is. Hopefully we're on the side that faces Mt. Fuji. Supposedly the pool in this hotel has incredible views of the entire city because it's completely surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows...we'll be making a visit there one of these days.

But right now, we feel like crashing since we didn't sleep on the plane ride here and we've been up for almost 24 hours, and we need to rest in order to have the energy to see the sights of this huge city. We're not sure what we're doing tomorrow, either Shibuya or Ginza. I'll post pics of wherever we end up going to.

Jerry Liu

Nick's favorite flight

2007-05-22T06:54:00.001-07:00

(We're half asleep, since we've been up for 24 hours straight, so forgive my rambling!)

Flying to Tokyo was possibly one of the most pleasant experiences I've had in a long time on an airplane. We flew Singapore, business class (best use of airline miles ever!). The food they served was fantastic, better than the office food in SMO (though not Pinxto quality). The service was great, staying out of the way when not wanted and refilling my wine glass with riesling when I merely nodded.

This is me in the Singapore Airlines lounge. It's nice. They had cookies and little sandwiches and an open bar (not that I needed a drink for lunch).

This is the airline seat. If you held down one of the thousands of tiny buttons for a while, it laid down to an eight degree angle. What I really liked was the LED reading light. Bright, but directed, so it didn't disturb other passengers. One of the amazing things about this flight is that we left at 2:35 and flew for 11 hours without ever running out of sunlight.

There was even a power outlet to keep my laptop fresh. Now if only they had internet...

going to Japan

2007-05-19T00:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this New Year's resolution to update my blog more frequently isn't going very well...

Anyway, Nick and I are leaving for Japan in three days!!! We're excited and a bit nervous at the same time. I was joking with people that I would take pictures from my phone and e-mail one to them on everyday of the trip. Considering that it's fairly easy to upload pics from my phone to my blog, I might just do that.

So keep checking back here as I try to post pics of Japan on this blog!

Jerry Liu

White Christmas

2006-12-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Hi! So I know that it's been a while since I've updated this blog, which is why I'm adding this entry in now (one of my new year's resolutions is to update this more regularly).

I'm not sure what to say 'cuz so much has happened since the last entry. We bought a new loft in the Marina Del Rey in early November and we moved all our stuff there a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. It's a huge place with 17 foot tall ceilings and a mezzanine level that we chose to cover in hardwood flooring. We just got the drapes installed on the big wall, which is a wonderful thing 'cuz we've been having to live in the loft with a few uncovered windows. Kitty also seems to like the new place as well since there's so much space for her to run around and act cat-like.

For Thanksgiving, Nick and I went to New York to visit his family and to celebrate the holidays with them. We worked out of the New York office during that time and that was fun. The office moved to Chelsea and is huge...so huge that it's common for the employees to ride on razor scooters from one end to the other. Thanksgiving dinner was great--a lot of food was made and a lot of leftovers, including a lot of squash, which I tried to eat more than my fair share of, but had to stop after my 3rd serving of it.

Oh, so there's a wonderful story of our trip to drop off Kitty at the cat kennel before we left for New York. We decided to go with a much closer kennel since driving to Burbank took too much time, but the traffic was so bad that night, that we might as well have driven to Burbank instead. Anyway, Kitty was unhappy the entire time she was in the crate and partway through our trip, she sprayed. And then about 10 minutes later, she pooped in the crate!!! So Nick and I are driving through traffic trying to find our way to a kennel that we've never been to and sitting with a very dirty and smelly cat. We finally make it to the kennel, so I told Nick to go in and ask them if they would take our cat in her current condition, and while he was doing that, I took Kitty out of the carrier and put her in my lap. Nick comes back to the car to tell me that we're at the wrong kennel, so now we have a filthy cat walking around loose in our car. During the time it took to go from that kennel to the kennel that we were supposed to go to, I held Kitty down, thus covering myself in kitty sewage...it was wonderful :(. But, the kennel was very nice and said that they've experienced such disasters and told us that it was fine to leave our cat with them, which was a very big relief. We've now decided that for any car travel with our cat, we'll just let her roam the car (she hasn't sprayed yet...).

Last weekend, we had the holiday office party at the El Rey Theatre. The theme of the night was "old vegas," so there were various table games and a Sinatra impersonator. According to many people at the party, the highlight was going to be the "office guitar hero tournament finals." During the entire work week preceding this party, the office held a guitar hero tournament (if you have no idea what Guitar Hero is, read this). For the finals, it was me and one of our friends in the office, and we were going to play our final match on stage at this theatre with the sound piped into the theatre audio system. I've never been to this theatre before, but I've been told that many famous musicians have graced the stage, so being able to "play" on the same stage was a really awesome feeling. So the finals started and finished...I beat Rob and am now being called the "guitar hero champion" around the office (I had to go to my boss to assure her that I do spend time in my office doing real work). What was amusing was that earlier this week, my boss bought the game for her brother and asked me to teach her how to play the game...so we went up to the game room where I tried to mentor her. Anyway, no one wants to play me at the game, so now I've been forced into retirement and can only coach :(.

Currently, Nick and I are in Tahoe with Nick's family--later we'll fly to Seattle to be with my family and friends for my birthday and New Years. Nick's happy 'cuz he was able to ski for one day here, and that might be the only day he's skiing 'cuz the weather reports supposedly aren't very favorable for skiing conditions.

**********

and now it's been waaaaaaay past when all the events above happened, so Ii'll continue summarizing:

Seattle was great...Nick and I played a lot of maj jongg. We celebrated my birthday at a nice Japanese restaurant. For New Year's we went to Emily and Joshua's new apartment and played some games, which was a lot of fun. It was nice to see everyone again, especially 'cuz we're not sure when the next time we'd be in Seattle.

After we came home, we finally had some people over to our new place. And then a couple of weeks later, we held our long overdue housewarming party. Unfortunately, we gave our invitees less than a week's notice, so only 1/3 of them showed up, but it was still great to have them all over and socialize.

Last weekend, Nick and I went to Vegas. We had originally reserved a suite in the Luxor, but we didn't know that there were two towers next to the Luxor--we thought all the rooms were in the Pyramid. So, not only were we disappointed that we were in the tower, we were also stuck on the first floor. Nick complained to the front desk and was able to get an upgrade to a much bigger suite in the Pyramid on the 29th floor, which was soooooooooo much better.

The next day, we saw "O." It was a spectacular show with amazing acrobatics and choreography. We weren't sure about all of the plot and what each character was supposed to represent, but it was still an amazing show. The next morning, we went to the Aladdin to get our facials at the spa. It was our first facials, and we both had peels and random other crap put on our faces...Nick didn't believe it was worth it at all, but I enjoyed it. Anyway, the entire trip was tons of fun...costly, but fun.

And now the next big thing is the Google ski trip up in Squaw Valley on Tuesday. I'll tell you how that goes in the next blog post...

wedding, a new home, and Hawaii

2006-10-12T01:38:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! So, Nick and I made it safely to LA after the wedding. The car ride back home was a rather unpleasant one considering that Kitty wouldn't go to sleep and decided to walk around the entire car in order to see everything that she could see...i have a few cat scratches from her as momentos of our trip. The wedding was really fun; there was a lot of dancing, drinking, and enjoyment by all the guests. We did have to go ringless for a few weeks because we went back to Tiffany's in order to get the rings engraved. It took a while to think of stuff to engrave into our rings, so we went with lyrics from Kylie's "love at first sight," specifically, Nick's ring says "love a first sight" and mine says "we were meant to be as one." I originally wanted "and everything went from wrong to right," but that would have been a bit too long to engrave into the ring. But, we got the rings last friday, so now we have our rings.

Last monday, we placed an offer on a new place down here in the Santa Monica area, and we got the word that the offer was accepted by the builder. It's a loft in the Marina del rey area...hopefully about a 15-20 minute drive to work, which is reasonable. It's a very big, open loft space with a lot of creative potential. We're not quite sure when the move-in date will be, but we hope to move in sometime early next month. However, this means that we need to deal with the kirkland house. No one's made an offer on it yet, and it looks like we might have to lower our asking price, but we'll talk to our realtor about that this weekend.

Right now, Nick and i are in Hawaii with Erin and Kelly, Emily and Joshua, and Erin and Kelly's friend, Bill and Andrea. We've done quite a lot on the big island: walking around Volcanoes National Park, lying in the swimming pool and tanning, shopping, kayaking and seeing dolphins, and taking part in a luau. Tomorrow's our last full day and I think we're just going to lounge around and do some last minute shopping. I also want to get in a good tanning session 'cuz I want to get a little darker before I return to LA. But it's been a lot of fun just sitting and relaxing and not doing work.

And that's the short version of what's happened since the wedding. Hope all of you are doing well!

Jerry and Nick

Leaving for Seattle

2006-08-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

Hi! So tomorrow morning, Nick, Kitty, and I start our drive up to Seattle to prepare for our wedding (which is in two weeks!). I'm freaking out, but Nick thinks everything is fine. We'll be there for two weeks, working from the kirkland office. And then we head back down to Santa Monica the day after our wedding.

And we also hope to start preparations to sell our house while we're there. We need to do a lot of cleaning and moving of things, but we have some time to do that. We really hope we can sell the house because that would be one less thing to have to worry about.

Work has been going well...and Nick got promoted! However, he's been having to deal with some issues relating to work that he's not very pleased about, including flying to Mountain View repeatedly. Unfortunately, we won't be taking much of a break until October, so he'll have to deal with it for now.

I guess that's all I have to say for now. We've been busy with work, the wedding, and hanging out with our co-workers, which has been fun. I've been playing a lot of tennis and at one point, I thought I figured out how to hit my forehand, but I've lost it now and desperately need to find it again.

Ok, hope you're all doing well, and I'll see some of you really soon!

Jerry Liu

less than one month away!

2006-08-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

So Nick and I just realized that our wedding is happening in less than a month and that in less than two weeks, we'll be starting our drive up to Seattle. It's crazy that all this is happening so fast, but it's also quite exciting. We've finalized the cake order, found a DJ, booked the florist and the photographer. I think all that's left now is to find a pianist for the ceremony and also to discuss details of the ceremony with Emily a bit more.

We haven't received all the RSVP cards, so if you're one of the few who haven't sent one to us, please do so soon.

In other news, Nick and I have been quite busy lately with work and other stuff. My kickball team won our first playoff game, and we play our next playoff game this wednesday. Nick and I have also been playing tennis on the weekends, and I realized that my forehand sucks, but my backhand has gotten much better. Nick's improved too, but his backhand still needs help.

And that's all for now. BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

bowling and stuff

2006-07-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

Hi! So it's been a couple of weeks since I last updated, but life hasn't been that interesting. Nick had a presentation that went very, very well. I moved from my cubicle to an office today (I feel so important).

Actually, we do have exciting news to announce. Nick and I bought our wedding rings from Tiffany's and we both really like them, which is a good thing 'cuz we'll have to wear them...forever. We also got me a suit for the wedding that I'll have to pick up this weekend from Barney's.

Over this past weekend, Nick and I and a bunch of our friends went bowling. I won the first game, but James crushed us all in the second game, getting 4 strikes in a row at one point. The second game was very frustrating for me 'cuz i kept ketting 9 pins and missing the spare (this happened like 4-5 times). But I felt very consistent, and there are pictures somewhere, but I'll have to send y'all the URL later.

We then went to the Santa Monica pier, which was incredibly packed, most likely 'cuz school's out and all the children stayed up late to play games and ride the various rides. We played way too many midway games and lost a lot of money in the process, however, i did win a stupid keychain in skeeball, and I won a curious george doll in the "shoot the water in the hole" race. However, i didn't want the doll, so I gave it one of the women at work to give to her son.

Um...what else...?

I've decided to learn more html stuff, so hopefully I'll have a website up soon (i know i've promised this before, so i don't know how realistic this goal is).

Anyway, that's all for now. Hope y'all are doing well!

Jerry Liu

summer stuff

2006-07-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Hi! So I realized that I haven't updated this blog in a long, long time...so here I am with an update. The summer's been going by really quickly, and the wedding is fast approaching. The good thing for Nick and me is that we're almost done with the planning...we have the florist, photographer, baker, and we sent out the invitations, and ordered the wedding favors. We still need a DJ, but Nick will find one soon, hopefully. We also need to buy suits and rings, and also talk with Emily about the ceremony, but there's still time for that. We really can't believe that we're getting married in less than two months.

Oh, so our realtor contacted us and told us that housing prices in our area are going up, and that we might get a pretty good offer on our house right now. Nick and I are contemplating selling our house, assuming the offer is high enough to pay for the realtor fees and relocation fees. But we'll see about that and probably discuss this more with our realtor when we visit Kirkland the end of August.

For the 4th of July, Nick and I went to Catalina Island, which is located in the ocean south of Santa Monica. We took a ferry over there, and stayed there for two nights. We visited the memorial/garden, did the underwater semi-sub tour, a bus tour that took us through the mountains, and a half day trip to the other side of the island, which also included snorkeling and sightseeing. All in all, it was a very nice trip...but Nick and I are over watersports for a while.

Work has been very busy for the two of us, but more for Nick than me. I'm starting to understand more about my project and am able to provide constructive feedback, instead of being a sponge. Nick is currently up in Mountain View to meet with some people on his project and won't be back until Thursday night. And then he gets to go back up there next week, but this time for a shorter visit.

Kickball's been interesting. Our team isn't doing too poorly in our division, but have lost two games already. Hopefully we will win some more games so that we can make it into the playoffs, although, I'm not sure how I would feel if our team made it that far. I joined 'cuz I wanted to have fun outside of the office, but the competition environment really does make the game a little more intense than I would have liked. But that's cool...as long as people don't start pointing fingers at others for losses and everyone's having fun.

Ok, I'm gonna find some dessert now. Hope everyone's doing well!

Jerry Liu

San Diego

2006-05-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

Hi! So Nick and I went to San Diego yesterday, and returned today. Nick wanted to see a show in the area, and the show that we originally wanted to see was sold out, so we went to see a different musical located in a city north of San Diego, and discovered that we were the youngest attendees who are not part of a family, and the only gay couple, and I swear I was the only non-white person there. We felt kind of out of place demographically, but the musical was quite good considering that it was a very small production. What was cool was that the set was on a turntable, so when they changed scenes, they would rotate the furniture in and out.

This afternoon, we went to Escondido to see the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park. It's huge, with a whole bunch of different areas. We actually got to see a Siberian Tiger play with a huge rubber ball in a pool of water. There were flamingos, gorillas, many birds, and lions as well, but the tiger was the highlight. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my allergy medicine, so on the drive home, I was sniffly and teary-eyed, and am still so right now.

So I'm going to make this a short blog entry 'cuz I'm about to sneeze. BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

Going to the gym...

2006-04-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

Hi! So today, I went with Nick to the nearby 24 hour fitness and signed myself up for a membership...I'm being added onto his membership, so now we have a family membership, yay! Now that means that I have to go to the gym and start losing all this weight that I've gained in the past 8 months. I'll let you know how that goes...

On thursday, our office went to Go Kart World for a day of go karting! It was a lot more fun than I had expected. We reserved the three big tracks, so once we were done with one track, we didn't have to wait to go on another track. I did get hit from behind and forced into the wall once, but that was the only major accident I had. There was a slick track which was a small oval track with very slippery turns. Because of this, we all hit each other many, many times, in fact, we hit each other so much that at the end of the race, we were lectured by the operators about using the brakes and that they would start kicking people out. The next day, many of us found bruises on our back and were sore.

Nick and I saw "stick it" yesterday, and it wasn't that bad. We especially liked some of the lines from Joanne, the ditzy gymnast. And my new goal is to get one of the Hale girls to perform the worm on the beam...that would be cool.

Ok, that's all for now. Hope you're doing well...BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

Kylie and cheerleading

2006-04-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Hi! So, Nick and I were watching the national cheer and dance competition on TV (actually, I was the one watching it, Nick was in the living room and watched part of it, against his will), and the reigning dance champions, BYU, were up and I immediately recognized their first song as the intro. to Kylie's "Limbo." I thought it was an interesting choice of songs considering that it isn't well known at all, but it worked since it is a very upbeat song. Anyway, they won the competition again, and they deserved it because they really did look better than all the other teams.

Nick left for Seattle today and will be working from the Kirkland office this next week. It'll be lonely again, but at least he'll be returning Friday night, rather than some later date. This Thursday, Google's going to have a company outing. We're going to go go-kart racing at a park about 30-45 minutes away. Nick isn't going, which made me not really want to go 'cuz I wasn't sure who I would know. My manager's going, so at least I'll know one person. But, i did find out that three of the raters are going, as well as some of the recruiters, so I'll be able to hang out with non-engineers. YAY!!!

Last Thursday night, the company had an in-office happy hour where we invited a pool pro to show us some trick shots and teach us a few things about pool. It was really cool to see him perform the trick shots, but it was really great to learn how to hit the ball, how to bank balls, kick at balls, and just generally improve our pool game. And at the end, he seemed genuinely thrilled that there were 15 or so people left who had stayed and watched him until the end, and we were all very honored to have him in our office. It definitely motivated more of the Googlers to play pool.

Nick and I bought some ping pong balls for the office ping pong table. For some reason, we seem to lost ping pong balls very quickly. Some get damaged, but other just disappear. It's very odd, and very frustrating when anyone wants to play ping pong only to find out that there are no balls. Anyway, we got a 24 count package of ping pong balls...but I held onto 6 of them, so there are 18 balls available for general use. I hope they last for at least 2 weeks, but I don't have such high hopes for these poor balls.

Oh, and I'm excited that Alias has come back, but I have no idea what's happening in the show...it's all very crazy, but i'll still watch the last 5 episodes.

Ok, hope all of you are doing well...does anyone still read this blog? BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

benign positional vertigo

2006-04-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

Hi! So for the past few days, I've been feeling a bit dizzy...not soo dizzy that I was nauseous and not so lightheaded where I felt like I was going to faint, but it was very annoying to work through such a sensation. Today i went to the doctor and told her what was going on with me, and she said that since my symptoms were rather subtle, that I could have one of two things. She decided that for now, she's going with the diagnosis that I have "benign positional vertigo." She said that there isn't any treatment for it, and that it should go away after a while, but that I shouldn't be surprised if one day I wake up and my vertigo is very severe where for 24 hours or so, I feel like the whole world is spinning. I really hope that this doesn't happen. But for now, she told me to take some medication to treat the symptoms of dizziness...the only problem is that it could make me drowsy. I think I'll take it tomorrow morning and see just how drowsy I get and to see if I feel better.

Oh, and I had some blood tests and the doctor said that my results were fine, but that she didn't ask me whether I drank alcohol. According to her, my liver test showed signs of some effect of alcohol. Considering that I don't drink, this was very surprising news...so I guess this is a good reason for me not to drink if my liver isn't all that healthy.

In other news, Nick arrived Monday night. He was supposed to arrive late Monday night, but he took a much earlier flight and was in the apartment when I arrived. It was a wonderful surprise since I was getting incredibly lonely at night. He's staying for this week as well, but will be going back to Kirkland next week.

Yesterday, we went to a party hosted my Marija, another Googler. It was nice to sit around and talk about things other than Google projects. One of the other Googlers was surprised to hear that Nick and I met each other before working at Google...I guess it's easy to assume that we met at work and not anytime prior to that.

Ooh, and hopefully tomorrow, we'll have our landline so that we can actually activate our Direct TV receiver. It'll be great to actually watch cable...especially considering that we've been paying for it since we've moved in.

And that's all for now. BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

faulty washer/dryer

2006-04-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

Hi! So last weekend, I placed a service request for my washer/dryer because it wasn't drying well at all. Like, once it was finished "drying," I would take out the clothes and still have to hang dry it for hours until they clothes completely dried. Well, the repairmen showed up this morning to fix the motor, which was the problem, I guess (I actually don't know why it wasn't drying). I actually had to leave while they were fixing it because I was going to play tennis with another Googler, Mark. When I got back home, the washer/dryer was claimed to have been fixed, so I ran a load of clothes. Well...it appears that something is wrong with the draining mechanism 'cuz the machine won't drain at all. So right now, my clothes are sitting in soapy water, and I can't take them out to dry them 'cuz this is a front load washer, so in order to take my clothes out, I would need to put something under the door to collect all the water. Since I don't have any receptacle that big, I'm just going to leave my clothes there until the repairmen show up tomorrow morning. And thus concludes the story of my faulty washer/dryer.

In other news, I went to the mall today to buy a bath rug and also to get a copy of Kingdom hearts 2. I watched most of the opening sequence (I needed to cook dinner, which is why I stopped it partway through), and listened to Utada Hikaru's english version of the theme song for the game, "Sanctuary." It's the first time I've ever heard the entire version of the song, and I think I prefer the Japanese version.

Nick was planning on returning to Santa Monica this weekend, but it appears that the movers aren't arriving until tomorrow morning, so he's planning on returning tomorrow night. I can't wait until he arrives...the nights have been incredibly lonely :(.

I visited the main office on Thursday to attend a presentation by my mentor, Teresa. I was also there to be introduced to the other key people on our team, Jason and Mike. Initially when we arrived, Teresa got an e-mail saying the two of them weren't going to be at the presentation, meaning that I wouldn't be meeting them at all. But then, they were able to schedule a meeting while I was still there, so I finally was introduced to them, and all was well.

And I think that's all I have for now. Hope all of you are doing well. BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

New apartment

2006-04-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

Hi! So last weekend, Nick and I moved out of the condo and into our new apartment in Santa Monica. The movers were supposed to arrive Saturday night, but I guess they were running late, so they postponed it to Sunday morning. The good thing about that was that we could sleep in our bed for one more night, as opposed to on the floor in our new, but unfurnished apartment.

Nick drove his car to our house in Kirkland this weekend, and hopefully he's there right now. We're not sure when the movers will arrive with our stuff, but Nick will be there this week waiting for them leaving me by myself in our apartment for the entire week. i mean, I do have Kitty, but right now she seems more interested in sleeping in her cat bed which, by they way, she has never slept in during the year and three months we've had it. i have no idea what prompted her to want to sleep in it now, but it's sooooo cute!

Anyway, since we did move everything of the condo to Kirkland, we had to do something about the new apartment, so we decided to rent furniture. They delivered it on Monday and when we arrived after work, we found the furniture neatly arranged and in very good condition. I didn't tell them that Nick and I own a cat, and we didn't think it would be too much of an issue, but Kitty seems to really like scratching the corner of this couch. I wonder how much of the deposit we'll lose?

I've completed my second week as a linguist, and it's been a lot of work (not like I expected it to be easy...). I did become sick during the middle of the week, and had to stay home on Thursday, but I think I've recovered from whatever it was that i had.

I lost to my manager's manager at work in the ping pong tournament. I thought I played rather well, but he was returning almost every shot that I hit, including some slams. For some of the shots, I basically thought I won the point, but he returned it and left me in shock and totally unprepared to continue the point. Seriously, he should not have been in the loser's bracket...

There might also be a pool tournament once the ping pong tournament ends, and I think i fare a better chance of doing well in that tournament. I played against a few other Googlers during the past week, and I was doing well--winning something like half of my games. Nick realized that even though i lost on Friday, he did say that even me on an "off" day is better than most of the office. Now if only I could learn how to do a jump shot.

And since Direct TV isn't working, most likely because we don't have a landline which is probably necessary to activate the receiver, I'm watching very basic cable. Right now, i'm being entertained by the cinematic masterpiece, Mortal Kombat. Sadly enough, i think this is my third of fourth time watching this movie. Oooh, and the actress playing Sonya Blade is Pete Sampras's wife.

And on that note, I will end this entry. Since Nick isn't around to distract me, I'll try to update again this week. BYE!!!!

Jerry Liu

sold our condo!

2006-03-12T22:02:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! Nick and I are happy to tell y'all that we finally sold our condo. We received the offer last week, and then countered it because it was rather low. The buyer accepted the counteroffer, and after the inspection and finance contingencies were met earlier this week, it's basically a done deal. And now, we need to find movers to move our stuff out of the condo up to Kirkland.

Nick is in Kirkland right now helping out some people in the Kirkland office, and he decided that he wanted to stay in our new house. This meant that we needed to get all the utilities set up, purchase a mattress for Nick to sleep on while he's there, and just generally make it bare-bones livable. Well...Nick got to the house and discovered that the water isn't turned on yet, so he won't be staying there tonight. Fortunately, my parents are taking a two week vacation to Thailand and Taiwan, so he's going to spend the night at their place. Tomorrow, the cable should be installed, the mattress should arrive, and the water should be running. Nick did say that he talked to one of our neighbors who suggested that we replace the toilets because the builders used the cheapest low flow toilets that they could find. Nick also mentioned that he briefly met Josh Brown, the kicker for the Seattle Seahawks. Supposedly, his friend parked her motorcycle in our driveway because she believed that no one lived there, which is essentially true, but she kindly moved it once she realized that Nick was there.

There's a ping pong tournament going on at the office right now. I lost in the first round in a close match, so I was immediately thrown into the loser's bracket. I won my first round match in the loser's bracket last Monday, and now my next match is against the person who beat me a couple of weeks ago. I'm a little annoyed that I had to draw him again so early in the loser's bracket, but that's the way it goes. Hopefully I can win this time around...I need to learn not to go for every shot since that was my downfall when we played the first time. I hit waaaaaay too many shots into the net, including three straight shots which were guaranteed slams, except for me 'cuz they hit the net all three times. Maybe I should play with the slice?

I don't know if anyone actually reads this blog anymore, but I'll keep updating! I'll also try to update a little more frequently! Hope all of you are doing well, and for those at USC, have a great spring break!

Jerry Liu

another update

2006-02-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

Hi again! It's been over the last few weeks, but now we're watching the Olympics and I thought that I would give an update.

So, the purchase of the house closed earlier this month! Unfortunately, we haven't been able to sell our condo, and it appears that no one is interested in it. In fact, our realtor wants to talk to us this weekend and discuss lowering the asking price, which Nick is not a big fan of at all. We might end up renting our condo and waiting for a better time to sell the place.

We went to the UW/UCLA gymnastics meet yesterday and I ran into my old soccer coach, who is the father of Kelly McDonald. He brought me down to their section where I talked to Kelly's mom and we talked about why I was in LA and how I was doing, and what Kelly is going to do after this year...and interspersed throughout our conversation were various "Go __(insert UW gymnast's name)__!" But it was a fun meet. I'm not sure if Nick truly appreciated it, but I enjoyed it, and that's all that really matter :).

Ooh, pairs skating is on right now. Hope all of you are doing well.

Jerry Liu

Quick Update

2006-01-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

Hi! Sorry it's been a while since I last updated, but Nick and I are a bit busy with many things. First of all, we placed an offer on a house in Kirkland, and are now in escrow. We're waiting for the inspection details to be accepted, but I don't see much of a problem there...so if all else goes smoothly, we should have the house by the 8th of February.

In the mean time, we are selling our condo right now and had our first open house on Sunday. According to our agent, there were a fair number of people who walked in, with one man in particular who seemed really interested. So it was good news and hopefully an offer will be made sometime soon.

So, that's the update on the biggest news that the two of us have to share. Once I have more time to sit down and write (as opposed to constantly cleaning, and making the place look immaculate), I'll try to update more frequently.

Hope all of you are doing well!

Jerry Liu

Christmas in Maryland

2005-12-24T07:44:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! I've been meaning to give an update a while ago, but I kept forgetting. Anyway, I'm back with some things to share. First of all, Nick and I are in Maryland right now staying at his parents place for Christmas. We arrived on Wednesday, and have been enjoying a nice, restful stay...so far. The rest of the family arrives today, so the house is going to feel a bit crowded, and everyone will probably be helping out with the cooking duties and such. I haven't been asked to make anything, and that's probably a good thing 'cuz I don't think I'd handle the time crunch and the stress all that well. And besides, Nick's mom has already ordered a ton of desserts, so why add another?

Yesterday, we went and saw "memiors of a geisha," which was better than any of us thought it would be considering the various negative reviews. None of us have read the book, so we were surprised as the story unfolded, which probably added to the positive experience we had. I was impressed with Zhang Ziyi's English considering that she started learning it about two years ago, and Gong Li plays a very scary character. According to a Time magazine article, during the filming of the movie, one of the children wouldn't stop crying after she looked at her because she had the look of ice (or something like that). Anyway, we liked the movie and that was all that really mattered.

Two weekends ago was the Google holiday party, which was held in the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood. It was fun...crowded...but fun. We got to watch two silent movies with a live piano player. Then there was a montage of movie parodies featuring Google employees, and that was highly amusing. And finally, we had the high school photos of various Googlers, but mine didn't make it on there for some reason. And then there were the door prizes: an iHome, iPod video, PSP, and finally, an XBox 360. Neither Nick nor I won any of the four prizes, but that's OK, everyone got a bottle of champagne to take home with them. All in all, it was a great evening.

And that's all that I can think of to say right now. To those of you in Seattle, we'll be seeing you shortly (we arrive on Tuesday).

Jerry Liu

Grammys

2005-12-12T21:33:00.000-08:00

Hi! Just a quick post to say congratulations to Kylie for being nominated for a grammy. The song "I believe in you" was chosen to compete for the best dance recording grammy. Her competition:

Galvanize
The Chemical Brothers Featuring Q-Tip

Say Hello
Deep Dish

Wonderful Night
Fatboy Slim & Lateef

Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
LCD Soundsystem

Guilt Is A Useless Emotion
New Order

I don't know any of the other songs in this category, but I've been reading that The Chemical Brothers' "Galvanize" will be stiff competition for Kylie. I hope she wins, of course. This is her fourth straight grammy nomination, so that's an accomplishment, I suppose.

And that was all...hope all of you are doing well!

Jerry Liu

But can they sing?

2005-12-07T20:36:00.000-08:00

No! For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, "but can they sing" is a Vh1 show where nine "celebrities" compete in a singing contest...the catch? None of them can sing. I mean really, Kim Alexis's version of "the way you love me" was awful. Bai Ling sang "like a virgin" in a completely different octave, and wore a pink tutu-like skirt which she later took off in order to expose her light pink hot pants. Nick and I believed that Carmine Gotti Agnello would eventually win the show 'cuz the demographic for this show are teenage girls--the same type of people who would vote for him no matter how poorly he sang...and trust me...it was baaaaaaad. Morgan Fairchild was probably the best singer out of them all, and I really wanted her to win, but she had no audience to vote for her. Nick wanted Michael Copon, the original blue Power Ranger, to win, partly 'cuz he could sing, and partly 'cuz he was cute. (If you, for some reason, watch the show and haven't seen the results show yet, skip to the next paragraph). Anyway, Carmine and Michael made it to the final three, along with Morgan Fairchild, which was a complete surprise to both of us, but a good surprise 'cuz she could sing. Unfortunately, she didn't make it to the final two...and Nick and I assumed that Carmine would win, but we were wrong 'cuz MIchael actually got more votes. We were both happy, and it did give the show some credibility that people are actually voting for the competitor's singing ability...but not really 'cuz the final two were two young men flashing their bodies in order to get the girl vote. Anyway, that show has been our (ok, my) guilty little pleasure of the past few weeks.

And now we're watching the top 100 one-hit wonders of all time, and I really don't know very many of them. Right now we're at 49 with "turn the beat around."

Oh, I wanted to tell all of you that if you e-mail me, to please use my gmail account at: ponophobic@gmail.com. It's the only account that I can access both at home and at work, so I can immediately respond to anyone using that account.

And Nick's USC e-mail account doesn't work anymore, and supposedly the system doesn't ping the sender with an e-mail saying that. So in case any of you have been e-mailing him on that account and wondering why he hasn't replied to you, well, that's why. He also has a gmail account: nickwah@gmail.com.

Ok, that's all for now. Hope all of you are doing well!

Jerry Liu

Thanksgiving in NYC

2005-11-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

Hi! I know it's been a while since I've updated, but that's because Nick and I are in New York right now celebrating Thanksgiving with his brother and his wife, Jason and Anna. We arrived Saturday afternoon, after a 5 hour flight on JetBlue. I had never flown with that airline, but I enjoyed the personal TV's and the huge number of channels that they had available. Unfortunately, I was so tired, that I basically slept for the first two hours while listening to HGTV. I think I randomly woke up hearing things about concrete and bricks...it was strange.

That night was probably the most eventful for Nick and Jason. You see, Jason and Anna's friend was celebrating his birthday in the city. So we went to meet up with him and his posse after having dinner. We crowded around this one table at a bar, and after a few beers, some of his friends decided to go home. The group shrank to just the five of us, so we went around trying to find another bar. We settled at a wine bar and sat and talked and their friend realized that the last train to Jersey would be leaving at 1:30. Since he wasn't going to make that, he said that he would need to wait for the first train which departs at 5:30 (or something like that). All of us were tired, but Jason didn't want to abandon his friend, so he said that he would stay up with him, and Nick joined in as well. Anna and I went back to her place so that we could get some sleep.

I tried to stay up until Nick and Jason got home, but I was just too tired. Since Nick and I are sleeping in the living room on the sleeper-sofa, I woke up when they returned home at 6:00 in the morning. They were very tired and slept in the next day, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure what they did during that time, but if Nick is up for it, I'll have him describe the events in a later blog post.

The next day, Nick, Jason, and I went to the Brooklyn area to go to the Jacque Torres chocolate store where I bought a box of chocolates and a cup of hot chocolate. Since we were there, and since the Brooklyn bridge was nearby, we decided to walk across most of the bridge. It took a while to find our way up there, but we made it. It was cold, but the sight of the city was amazing from the bridge. We decided to take a picture on the bridge, but the only one that came out relatively well was the one below:

After our bridge walk, we walked around the beautiful Brooklyn Heights area. I was joking with Nick that if we ever make enough money to afford a second house, we should buy one there, but there's no way that that'll happen anytime in the near future. Later, we met up with Anna and watched "Pride & Prejudice." And then we went home to get ready to start our work week in New York.

We woke up early to the sound of the doorbell...I guess Jason and Anna were expecting a repairman to fix the floor around the vanity of the bathroom. However, neither of them were expecting him to show up at 8:00 in the morning, so that took us all by surprise. Anyway, we got ready as quickly as we could and walked to the subway station...rode it for 25 minutes...and then found ourselves at the corner of the block that Google's office was on. So it was a great commute for us.

The office was bigger than we expected. Nick and I thought that they occupied three floors of the building, but I guess they had just recently acquired two more floors, and had moved people around. So our office was on one of the original floors, and is actually much better than our office. We shared our own office with a window view of the next building. It is a big improvement over our cubicles at Santa Monica.

We had dinner with Eileen at a nearby Japanese restaurant, and that was a lot of fun. The restaurant, Hakata Grill, offered a really great prix fixe menu for $25, which consisted of 5 courses. I wasn't that hungry, so I ordered an entree instead, and then realized that for $6 more, I could have had 4 more courses...but that would have been too much food, so I'm happy with what I ordered.

Thanksgiving day was hectic. Jason and Anna spent the morning and afternoon cooking everything. All I had to do was make a pumpkin pie, which I did. But after I was done, I quickly got out of their way. Their friend, Flora, arrived at 4:00 and then dinner started. First was the cheese and spread platter, followed by potato and leek soup. And then a break, and then the main course: roasted turkey, cornbread stuffing and sourdough stuffing (yes, there were two stuffings), brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce. And then another break. Around 9:00, Anna's mom and Flora's mom showed up with some guests, and we had dessert while they were there. And then we had a break, and then we slept.

On Friday, Nick and I thought it would be good to go shopping...so we headed to the 30's and found ourselves right outside of Macy's. It was incredibly busy on the streets around the store. We then headed to Times Square to go to the Virgin megastore where I bought a PSP game, and two X-mas CD's: The Barenaked Ladies holiday CD and the Hampsterdance x-mas single. Nick joked that we should have a holiday party solely so we can play that single over and over again.

Later that night, we met up with Eileen, Jason, and Anna for dinner. Afterwards we went to a nearby irish bar where Susan met us. It was a lot of fun just sitting around talking about random things ranging from Susan's auditions and how she seems to get roles in horror films to the number of bars that Eileen, Jason, and Anna have been to. We went home late, woke up early the next day to get on the plane to LA.

It's been a few days since our return, but it's nice to be home. Kitty is still fiesty as ever, but her cuteness makes up for it.

And that's the end of this entry. I promise, I'll stop with the really long entries since no one ever finishes them. Hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

Jerry and Nick

A new car!

2005-11-13T21:25:00.000-08:00

Hi! So, this is probably the shortest interval between blog entries, but I couldn't wait to share the news.

Anyway, Nick's lease on his current car ends this month, and since we'll be in New York next weekend, and are returning the following weekend, we realized that the only free days we would have to test drive some cars would be this weekend, or the last sunday of the month. We didn't want to push our decision to the last moment, so we looked for cars this weekend. The short list of cars were: the BMW 325, Infinity G35 and the Honda Accord Hybrid. Nick actually test drove the Accord Hybrid a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't tested the other two.

So we went to the local BMW dealer only to find ourselves waiting for a salesperson. After about 15 minutes, a salesperson was forced upon us by the manager (or some other important looking person)...the salesperson didn't seem interested in helping us at all. In fact, we were thinking of leaving the dealership 'cuz of the wait, and in retrospect, we probably should have since the salesperson told us that the dealership had no 325's available. So we left and walked next door to the Infinity dealership only to find out that they didn't have any G35's in stock. This left us with the Accord Hybrid (which we initially preferred among the short listed cars), so we went back to the dealership where we test drove the car. We asked for the salesperson who helped us during the test drive, but was told that he no longer worked there...it was sad, but another salesperson showed us the car.

Unfortunately, the 2006 Accord Hybrid isn't available until the end of December, which would be a little too long to wait considering that Nick has to return his current car at the end of this month. The dealership only had a couple of 2005 Hybrid availables, so we sat in the only one with the Navigation system and tinkered with it for a while. We were also informed that the car has a voice recognition program which can be used to change stations, adjust the temperature, and control some of the Nav system functions. Unfortunately, it didn't do too well with some of Nick's commands, but that wasn't too detrimental to the overall appeal of the car.

We decided to get it, although I didn't like the color of the only car that met our specifications (it was some metallic silver color). I wanted blue, of course, and Nick simply wanted a darker color. We were told that there were only four colors available for the hybrid: white, silver, some light gold color (I think), and graphite, which is a dark gray...and so we chose the graphite. This meant that they would have to get the car form another dealership, but that was fine, we could wait a couple of hours. We went home and when it was time, I drove Nick back to the dealership so he could drive home with the new car. But before he was able to leave, the salesperson showed him how to use the Nav system and also took the following picture of Nick and the new car:

And I guess he put this picture onto a calendar, so now we have a 2005 calendar with this photo on it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the car is equipped with XM satellite radio, which we've been playing around with for a while. Actually, that reminds me that Nick and I wanted to go to the XM website and see what the current channel listing is. So that's what I'm going to do now. Hope everything is well with y'all!

Jerry Liu

a choir flashback

2005-11-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

So this entry is for those who were in the Eckstein choir. I just finished watching the last episode of Alias, and guess what song they played at the end? No, it wasn't "Like an Eagle" or "Song for a Russian Child." They played "The Water is Wide!" I'm not sure how popular this song is, but this is the first time I've heard it outside of choir, so it was a pleasant surprise. Although, I seriously don't know the words except for the first line.

"the water is wide, I cannot get o'er.
And nor have I, the wings to fly"

I think those are the words, but I could be wrong. Aaah...flashbacks to middle school...how joyous!

And that was all I wanted to say.

Jerry Liu

Guess who is about to celebrate a birthday?

2005-11-06T21:21:00.000-08:00

Our turkey! Yes, the turkey in our freezer is about to turn one year old. We got the turkey last year because we spent enough money at the grocery store to qualify for the free turkey. We didn't roast it then because we went to Joyce's to celebrate the holiday with her and her family...and then we came home to a still frozen turkey. We kept contemplating cooking it, but were too lazy to prepare it (i.e., defrosting the turkey for several days, brining the turkey, and then roasting it). So it just kept sitting in our freezer taking up a lot of space...we would place everything else on top of it, around it, behind it...but we never actually got rid of it. And we still haven't done anything with it, and by now, I'm sure that it isn't safe to eat it so we have no reason to keep it, yet Nick doesn't like throwing it away. After we get back from New York, we'll sing happy birthday to it, and then dump it down the trash chute.

Seeing all of the USC-ers was great, and we really wish we could get together more often. Maybe once the semester ends, we can find a time to get together for a holiday party.

And that's all I had to say. Have a great week everyone!

Jerry Liu

Happy Halloween!

2005-10-31T19:39:00.000-08:00

Hi! Hopefully y'all have been able to read entries below about the Las Vegas trip. If not, then here's a quick synopsis:

Jerry forgets PSP at home, Nick and Jerry land in Vegas and take a long taxi trip to hotel, visit Hoover dam and walk to Arizona for 2 minutes, leave to go eat dinner and stand up a reservation for a $165/person restaurant, see Cirque du Soleil, wake up the next morning and go to strip again, purchase jeans for Nick, purchase chocolate for Jerry, walk around a long time, and then leave for LA.

Ok, now that you're caught up, we can talk about Halloween. I carved a pumpkin last weekend, but it didn't survive until today. Over the weekend, it got moldy and squishy, so I threw it away. Anyway, the picture below is of the pumpkin:

I thought it was cute, but only Nick and I are the only ones who got to see it in person. I was going to put it out on the balcony, but Nick didn't like that idea for some reason, so left it inside for a week. Next time, it's going on the balcony so that I can feel that my efforts aren't for naught.

Today was the Google Halloween party, and people dressed up 'cuz there was a costume contest. I wanted to be original, so I asked Merak what I should dress as, and she said that it would be cool if I went as a fridge. I mulled it over for a few days, and on Sunday, I decided to go for it. So Nick and I went to the arts and crafts store to buy white wrapping paper, a pair of really big scissors, and some sharpies. It took a while, but we taped and wrapped up a a cardboard box with the wrapping paper. Then I had to go to my many Martha Stewart magazines and clip out pictures of anything that could be put in a fridge. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of vegetables and salad dressing for the fridge section, and ice cream for the freezer, but whatever. We glued it onto the "fridge" and taped on some doors...Nick screwed in some handles that were leftover from when we were remodeling our kitchen, and then I added some take out menus, a shopping and a to-do list, and Nick wrote up a fake programming assignment.

First, is the picture of me from the back and side:

This is the front of the fridge, with the doors closed:

And finally, here's the picture of the front of the fridge with the doors open:

If you look at the top left hand portion of the fridge, you will notice a cat...yes, it is a cat...I had a bunch of white space and needed to fill it up with something, so I thought a cat would suffice.

Anyway, we had a parade of costumes at work. There were a lot of people dressed up, so it took a while to get through all of us. Now, walking with this fridge was difficult because it goes past my knees. While getting ready for the parade, I needed to walk upstairs to the front office, and then present myself as I walk back down the stairs with some grace.

After the votes were cast, the results were announced and well...I didn't win, or even win runner-up for any category. It was disappointing, but I guess it doesn't help when only like 8 people in the office know my name, and it also doesn't help that the others had great costumes. There was "girl in a shower," "chaotic Christmas tree (complete with lights)," "rubik's cube," "iPod commercial silhouette," and "plastic foosball man." It was very entertaining, and I guess there was a bigger turnout this year than last, so everyone was happy. A lot of photos were taken of the event, but I don't know if they'll be posted. If they are, I'll let you all know.

And that's all for us. To all those who are working on your screening papers...Nick and I wish you the best!

Jerry Liu

Las Vegas (Part 2)

2005-10-23T21:03:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the first part of our trip below, please do so before reading this entry...unless you don't mind reading in non-chronological order.

So after our trip to Hoover Dam, we still had a few hours before we needed to head to the strip to see Ka, one of the newer Cirque du Soleil shows. We decided that we wanted to dinner on the strip, and because Las Vegas has tons of restaurants to satisfy any appetite. So we looked around and after some debating, we settled upon a nice sounding French restaurant located in the MGM Grand, which, coincidentally, is where our show was. So we drive there...Nick thought he knew what he knew what the directions were to get to the strip, and I believed him. Turned out that he actually got on the wrong freeway, but we managed to get back on track and reach the MGM Grand with plenty of time.

It was about 7:40 when we arrived into the main casino area of the hotel, and since our reservation wasn't until 8:00, we decided to find someplace to purchase some advil for Nick's mild headache. It took a while, but we were able to find a store that didn't sell high end clothing or frozen margaritas from a chic-looking slurpee machine. We then decided to go back to the restaurant, and on the way, I somehow found myself in front of a slot machine (really, it wasn't on purpose at all...I just needed to rest my legs...in front of a slot machine :)). So I did some light gambling (aka: money squandering) and gave up and proceeded to the restaurant. Before we went in, I decided that I wanted to take a look at the menu to see how much things cost. The website we looked at only had the pre-set menu, but no price. Anyway, it was a good thing that we didn't go straight into the restaurant and get seated 'cuz the price of the meal (excluding tax, tip, and alcohol) was $165 per person!!! Nick and I sooooooooooo weren't paying that much for dinner, so we basically stood up the restaurant and went somewhere else for dinner. We remembered that we had passed by a nice looking Chinese restaurant during our search for Advil, so we went there instead. The food was excellent, if not excessive...we were very, very full afterwards. It took a while for our food to arrive, which worried me because we did have a show to get to. But it all worked out in the end, and the cost of our bill was lower than the price of one person at that French restaurant.

We then proceed hastily to the Ka auditorium where we experience the joy of finding our seats. Actually, it wasn't that difficult...the ushers told us the general direction that we needed to go in and we were able to figure it out from there. What was really funny was that the two women who sat next to us were the same two women who sat next to us at the restaurant. I don't know what the probability is of being seated next to the same two people in a restaurant and then in a show is, but I can't imagine it being very high.

(If any of you are planning on seeing Ka, or would rather not read about the show, please skip the next few paragraphs. I'll let you know when you can resume your regular reading with a line of asterisks)

The auditorium was decorated in this sort of grim futuristic mechanical mining world (I have absolutely no idea how to describe it). But one thing that Nick and I were a bit confused about was that there was no stage. Instead, there was a big pit that shot out random blasts of fire. So we were wondering how there was going to be a show if there's nothing to stand on. Was it going to be an all-wire act with people suspended above the audience?

Shortly after this pondering, the show began, and our question was answered. We see the actors being raised up from below on top of this incredibly complex stage. Nick, being a nerd, was admiring the mechanical engineering of the stage since it was being lifted by two hydraulic lifts. Not only does it go up and down, the stage can actually go from being the floor of the stage to becoming perpendicular to the ground where it acts as a wall. The creators of the show used this stage magnificently throughout the show by incorporating it into every scene and projecting various images to make it look like a boat to an icy cliff.

The performers were amazing and the music was dramatic. All in all, it was a great show and was worth the cost of the ticket price. After seeing this show, we are eager to see the other Cirque du Soleil shows.

****************************************************
(If you skipped the Ka part of this blog, you can come back now...please? :))

So the show ended and it was after midnight, so we headed back to the parking lot to go home. Little did we know that midnight is the time when everyone leaves. The lot is crowded with cars trying to find the exit, and we were on the floor above the majority of the chaos, so we knew that we would be at the back of the line to get out. We got in our car and joined the long line of cars. At some point during the crawl, I see this woman screaming at this white truck and wondered what was happening. We both figured that the truck cut the corner a little too closely and hit the back corner of the screaming woman's car...and we were right. What was really surprising was that the woman driving the white truck wasn't stopping, which pissed of the other woman even more...so much so that she actually walked in front of the white truck and was forcefully pointing at hood while screaming at the driver. And then I notice another woman next to the hit car screaming as well. The driver finally gets out with a frustrated look (I have no idea why she had that look since it was her fault that she hit the car...did she think that it was OK?), and there was more yelling and screaming. By this point in time, we drove past them so I have no idea what happened in the end, but it was an interesting way to end our night.

The next morning, we wake up and have a really nice breakfast at the hotel. I had french toast with walnuts and banana, and Nick had an omelette with salmon in it...all for prices waaaaaaaay more than anyone should have to pay for such a breakfast, but whatever. Since our flight to LA wasn't until 9:00pm, we had many, many hours to kill, so we head back to the strip so that I can satisfy my gambling addiction. But, my first destination was the Vosges-haut Chocolate shop in Caesar's Palace.

Actually, our first destination was the Lucky Brand jean store in the Aladdin. You see, the night before, Nick realized that his jeans had a hole near the crotch area and that he's been walking around with this holey pair of jeans, so we needed to get him a new pair before the hole started to get too big. Anyway, Lucky Brand is the only store that we know of where Nick can find jeans his size, so that's why we went there as opposed to any jeans store.

And then after we got his jeans, we went to Caesar's Palace. Some more slot machine playing happened along the way, and my wallet seemed lighter and lighter as a result, so Nick and I hurried along to the chocolate store before I lost too much money at the slots. The grandiose curved escalator going down to the floor level was broken, so we had to walk down the escalator instead. I don't know...there's something less extravagant about having to walk down this escalator as opposed to simply riding on it. I don't know why it is, but that's what it felt like to me.

We make it to the store where I purchase a few boxes of chocolate to take home with me. The salesperson knew that my flight wasn't for a while, so she bagged the chocolate with two ice packs to keep the chocolate cool. I guess this is something that is a concern for them...it would suck to go home to find that all your chocolate melted. And ice packs are cheap, so it's a great investment for them. Before we left, I asked the salesperson if anyone has ever purchased their cakes for a wedding, and in fact, someone had a wedding the day before and served their cakes for their occassion, so it wasn't an odd thing after all. They also had the mini-cakes on display, so Nick and I got to see them up close, and we liked them. We haven't tasted them yet, but so far, we are enthusiastic about having our wedding cake consist of many of these mini-cakes. So don't be surprised if on your wedding invitation, you see a choice of two cakes: white or chocolate :).

After my chocolate trip, we make our way to the Wynn--the newest hotel on the strip. The price of the smallest room at this hotel for the weekend that we went: $500+/night. Seriously, we were not going to shell out that kind of money for a dinky room...so we walked there to see what the fuss was all about. It was a long walk, but we made it. There's a mini-waterfall near the entrance to the hotel, and inside, the decor is very elegant. Nick says that it is the next generation of the Bellagio. The floor was covered in ornately designed carpet, while on the ceiling, swaths of fabric drooped outward from the center. There was some garden type walkway with hanging balls of flowers in the center of the casino. That inspired me to have hanging balls of flowers at the wedding, but I don't think Nick is too keen on that idea. We walk around even more and take in the over-the-top feel of the hotel, and then leave 'cuz I lost some more money at the slots.

We head to Treasure Island for some reason; I can't remember why we went there, but we did. Actually, they no longer want to be called "Treasure Island." Their new name is "TI." I guess they're trying to create a new image. I decide that I want to play blackjack, and I find an empty table, so I sit down and entertain the dealer. I start off doing poorly, but then I have a string of wins which brings me back to even. The dealer talks to Nick and me and we discuss life in California...and then it's time to rotate dealers. I lose the first three hands with the new dealer and joked that the old one should come back 'cuz I was doing well with him. But then my luck changes again, and I pull back to even with my money. This new dealer, her name is Sandy, told us that at the table behind her, the player kept calling her Sally and didn't know that that wasn't the dealer's name at all. Then we get into the discussion about Sally and how many Sally's we know and whether or not is an antiquated name...and all this time, I'm playing blackjack and winning and losing. In the end (about 30 minutes later), I leave with the same amount of money that I started out with. It was worth it since it kept the two of us entertained and we didn't lose any money during the process. Then we decide to play Casino war where the two of us lost to the dealer. What was really funny was that I ran out of money first, and Nick only had one chip. So if he won, I took that chip that he won and played a hand. And then I lost and Nick won, so I would play the next hand with that chip. This cycle repeated about 4 times before I got a 2, Nick got a 3, and the dealer got a 6.

We were starting to get hungry, so we headed back to Caesar's Palace to eat at the Mesa Grill only to find that they were booked until 8:00, which would be too late for us considering our flight would depart an hour after then. We manage to eat dinner at the Monte Carlo, but found ourselves in a long line for the taxi. For some reason, there were no taxis arriving at this casino, and people were getting really frustrated. But shortly afterwards, a line of taxis arrived, so everything was all right.

We got to the airport and I realize that my earphones were broken. I don't know what I did to them, but one of the ears keeps falling out, so I wanted new ones to replace them. We head to the Bose kiosk where I buy their newest model of Noise-cancelling headphones. They really do block out a lot of sound, and they were really effective on the airplane. It's a good thing too, 'cuz then I don't have to pump up the volume on my iPod...the higher the volume, the shorter the battery life...at least, that's what I've been experiencing.

The flight back home was very, very bumpy. I don't know what it was, but the turbulence was horrible. The descent was incredibly shaky, and at times, the turbulence actually dropped us down a bit...I was incredibly uneasy during this entire landing. We touched down rather aggressively. Nick felt that the plane was coming in a bit faster than normal, which would explain the odd feel of the landing. It takes a while to get to the gate, but we arrive, get off, and then head back home where we immediately fall asleep in order to be ready for work the next day.

And that was our Vegas trip. It probably doesn't sound as exciting as it really was. Now we need to plan our next trip.

Oh, and I guess Planet Hollywood bought the Aladdin hotel, so sometime in the future, it will be called the Planet Hollywood Hotel (or something like that). This means that the current owners will be charging less than normal for their hotel rates since they no longer have an investment in it. So check the Aladdin prices in case any of you are planning on visiting Vegas sometime in the near future.

And now I need to go to sleep. Have a great week everyone!

Jerry Liu

Las Vegas (part 1)

2005-10-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I meant to write about our recent Vegas trip earlier this week, but kept forgetting...until now. So here we go:

So we wake up early and get to the airport with time to spare, and this calls for the good ol' Starbuck's breakfast of coffee drink and a pastry. As we sit down, I am thinking about taking out my PSP, but then recall my frantic morning packing, and remember bringing my games, and bringing the power cord, but I can't remember packing the actual PSP. I start hoping that my memory is flawed, but when I look in my backpack, the reality sinks in...my PSP is still at home...and I'm sad.

And then we get on the plane, PSP-less. Nick is all like "it's a one hour flight!" And that made me miss my PSP even more.

And then we touch down in the Las Vegas airport and start walking out. The first thing I see are the slot machines in the middle of the terminal and all the bells and whistles that go with it. Nick quickly forces me away from the machines and guides me to the exit where we find a huge, huge line for the taxis. But we quickly realize that the line is constantly moving, and that we'll be at the front of the line in a short time. We get in and start our trip to Ritz-Calrton, which is located on Lake Las Vegas about 30 minutes away. The taxi driver, who's lived in the area for a while, gave us a brief history of the development of the city. It's amazing how much sprawl there is in the suburbs, and I guess that the property has tripled in value during the past year. Houses which were sold for $100,000 last year are going for $300,000+ now.

After we arrive at the hotel, we check in and are told that the car that we were renting for the day is being cleaned, so we have a couple of hours to kill. First, we head to our room, but get lost trying to find the elevators. We were joking that we were going to spend all that time waiting for the car just trying to find our room. After 15 minutes of wandering, we figure out where the elevator is and proceed to our room...and of course, the first thing we do is investigate the room. First we walk into the main area and look out the window to see what our view is, and we were amazed. The room is located in the wing of the hotel which was created to be placed upon the lake, so our view is of the middle of Lake Las Vegas with the strip in the far distance. The bed is a king, which is good 'cuz Nick'll fit in it. The bathroom is spacious with a separate bathtub and shower. And I just realized that we don't have any pictures of anything.

After more exploration of the hotel and it's surroundings, our car is finally ready, so we head to the front desk and sign the papers for the car and drive to our first location: Hoover Dam. It's only a 20 minute drive full of views of Lake Mead and the twisting road to the historic landmark...Nick actually drove on it on his trip to LA, so he's seen it all before, but I don't think he's actually taken the tour. So we park and pay for the tour. First, there's a powerpoint presentation describing the construction of the dam. The narrator is a local government worker...and his monotony rivals that of my most boring professors. Next, we take a 500+ foot ride down to the generator room and see how Hoover Dam generates power from the waterflow. Continuing on our trip, we go all the way up to the observation deck where we get to see the entire dam and the Colorado River. I think I have some pictures of that, but it's from my cell phone, so the resolution is pretty bad. I'll post them later when I have the time. The rest of the tour was rather boring, so I won't go into that. Before we leave, Nick asks if I want to go to Arizona, so we walk across the dam, reach the Arizona side, stop and look down the dam, and then walk back to Nevada. Now I can cross off Arizona as one of the states that I haven't been in.

And I'll stop there for now...I'll try to continue this weekend when I have some time.

Hope you all are doing well.

Jerry Liu

no more leilani

2005-10-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

This morning, I read on the Seattle Times website that Leilani Lanes has been sold to a developer who plans on building an apartment complex on that site. Although I bowled there a couple of times, I am going to miss the place once it closes its doors sometime next March. I guess Nick and I and the rest of the gang should bowl there while we're in Seattle for the holidays.

The only problem now is that the Leilani bowlers are going to move to Sunset, making it even more crowded than it already is. I suppose that we could go to Kenmore, but that feels....well...ghetto. I mean, it is Kenmore after all. What else is there besides Kenmore lanes?

Nick says that he likes work...he must like work 'cuz he didn't get home until 7:30 (he arrived at 9:00). We're trying to see if we can transfer to the New York office during the week of Thanksgiving. We're probably going to celebrate Thanksgiving with Nick's brother and his wife, and he thought it would be better if we could fly in the weekend before and then work the next three days, eat a lot for the holidays, and then leave the following weekend. This is a much better alternative than having to fly cross-country within a span of four days. The only problem is that I might not be able to work there because I'm not a full-time employee, and according to Nick's boss, no contractor has ever asked to be temporarily transferred to another office. Anyway, we'll see what my boss has to say about this proposal.

And that's all I can think of saying right now. BYE!!!

Jerry Liu

Eggs are special

2005-10-09T22:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, Nick and I made some hash browns and eggs for breakfast. We had some leftover potatoes which was what prompted the breakfast menu. I was frying the eggs for Nick, and I broke the first egg on the side of the skillet and dropped it on the hot surface. I broke the second one and dropped it as well and noticed that the egg had two yolks! I had heard of such eggs before, but had never seen one in person before...anyway, we took it as a sign of good luck.

And then I went to make myself some eggs, and after I opened that egg, I noticed that it also had two yolks inside. I'm not sure what the chances of getting one egg with two yolks is, but the probability of getting two such eggs must be very low. And then Nick made eggs this morning and noticed that his egg had two yolks. So of the 6 eggs that came in our carton of eggs, half of them were double-yolked. We hope that means that a lot of good fortune will come our way.

Nick is pissy because we went and bought a new wireless router to replace the one we have now. We went to Best Buy and looked at the numerous routers for sale. Nick decided to buy the cheapest one following the belief of my mom, "if it's cheap and it breaks, throw it away and buy a new one." I now wish that my mom had never said that to Nick because now he is adopting this philosophy...and it backfired. Nick installed the new router after we got home, and both of us are having problems getting any type of wireless connection on our laptops. In fact, our wireless connection is flakier than the router that we replaced. I think we're going to return the router in the upcoming days and then purchase a new one.

I've been feeling a bit sick lately, and I'm not sure what I have. For the past couple of days, I've had some lightheadedness which made it hard to concentrate on much, I haven't had much of an appetite lately, and when I do eat, I become nauseated soon afterwards, and I have mild coughing fits. Nick thinks that it might be a mild cold. Whatever it is, it's incredibly annoying and I wish it would go away. The good news is that I'm feeling better now, so hopefully that means that I'll be at full health when I go to work tomorrow.

...and the Seahawks beat the Rams...YAY!

(the next comment is for the Seattle-ites). Is Gaard Swanson on any of the seattle news stations? Nick and I were watching "designer renovation" and I noticed that Gaard Swanson was hosting the show. I guess this is a step up because now he is part of a national audience, albeit a small national audience, but it's got to be bigger than the number of people watching him doing sports in Seattle.

And now my coughs are back...so, so annoying.

Hi everybody, it's Nick.

Jerry insists that I write more in the blog. I'm not much with the words and stuff. Work is fun. I played foosball twice this week. Both times I teamed with Chandler, aka "twitchy". You might be wondering why he is called that. Just imagine someone with way too much caffeine in his system playing foosball. It's so random. Anyway, first we played Rob and Marija. They're generally pretty good, but for some reason Chandler and I totally kicked ass. It was like 5-0, 5-1, 5-2, and then Rob just walked out without giving us the honor of a fourth game. I felt bad. The next day we ended up playing Steve and Kenny. They totally whooped us. I mean, it hurt. Though we didn't walk out early or anything. :-)

Oh, I saw Affleck outside our building, talking on the phone, pacing back and forth, and smoking a cigarette. I wonder if wifie knows he smokes, especially since she's pregnant and all.

Anyway, it's my bedtime (yes, it's sad, but we wake up early here), so I'll just shut up.

Have fun, y'all.

The death of our e-mail accounts

2005-10-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

Hi! I'm not sure about Nick, but I know that my USC e-mail account has been disabled. Fortunately, I have my e-mails forwarded to our home account. I don't think Nick has done any e-mail forwarding, so I'm not sure how any of you are going to contact him via e-mail.

Nick and I just beat the new X-men game for the PS2 (it's available on the other platforms as well). Nick played with Rogue because he likes to "smash things," while I played with Storm and electrocuted and blew away my opponents. It was fun beating up various enemies and abusing the powers in our game. It was a bit short though...I think we finished it in about 15 hours. But it was a very amusing 15 hours. Next up: We love Katamari. If you don't know about this game, you should. It's the sequel to one of the most innovative games released in the past two years. Basically, the King of all Cosmos did something so that the sky now has no stars or planets. So he enlists the help of the "prince" and asks him to recreate the various stars and planets by rolling things up on earth. The more things you roll up, the bigger the star/better the planet/bigger the constellation/etc. (basically, the bigger the better...). The developers of the game had to put in a lot of time with the mundane aspects of the game. Every item that can be picked up is named, and there are something like 10,000 items (I'm making this number up, but it seriously is a huge number of different items). The music is cute and whimsical, much like the game. Our favorite lyric: "I want to wad you up into my life." At least, we think that's what the singer is saying, we could be wrong.

And Nick would like to add that traffic was incredibly good for him going to and from work. My experience...well...it took me almost an hour to get to work, but getting home was really quick.

Nick needs to open his new pack of socks that he bought...they're just sitting on the living room floor. If I see him wearing any more holey socks, I am throwing this pack of socks at him.

And that concludes this blog entry.

Jerry Liu

Where there's smoke...

2005-09-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

Today on my way to work I saw an ominous brown cloud rising over the Santa Monica mountain range. It was being blown into a layer of super-smog out over the ocean. "How strange," I thought. "This smog seems much worse than yesterday's."

Then I got to work and saw the news item on my Google sidebar: Wildfires Rage Across Southern California. "So, that's what it is."

On my way home as the sky darkened I could see that the smoke was now blowing east over Beverly Hills and Hollywood. As I got close to home at around 7:15, the car smelled funky. The smell got worse as I got closer to home. When I got out of the car, I felt like I was ten feet from a campfire. The heat was pretty nasty too.

Anyway, I hope everyone's okay out there. Good thing Jerry bought me an Ionic Breeze for my birthday.

And now for something completely different.

The cat is finally acting sane again. I guess she was just hyperactive to make up for the days she was sick and slow-moving. She's awful cute.

Everyone have fun out there.
-Nick

Tuna fish salad

2005-09-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

Today's dinner: Tuna fish salad. What a wonderful dinner to have...especially when you consider that we forgot to defrost any of the meat we have in the freezer. I'm just happy that Nick didn't decide to mix the tuna with the can of chili that we have in the pantry. He tends to do such things without warning, and then surprise, it's tuna chili pasta surprise!

So this past weekend, Nick and I went to a local Japanese restaurant that received great reviews from the Citysearch people. We walk in and get seated, and then minutes later, Nick says "and Zach Braff just walked in the door." My back was facing the door, so I didn't turn around to see if he was right...and I didn't have to because he, his mother, and step-father were seated next to us. It was very interesting since the close quarters of the restaurant allowed us to hear some of their conversation. I know, it's a bad thing to eavesdrop, but it was hard to stop ourselves.

So that was celebrity sighting number 1. Yesterday, I was about to leave the office to go home, and I was in a rush because Nick and I needed to get back to the car service department before they closed, otherwise, Nick would be without a car. While I was running out of the front lobby, I looked up and noticed that Ben Affleck was walking by. This isn't too much of a surprise because the Google office is located across the hallway from the Project Greenlight office, and according to the Googlers, Ben Affleck tends to show up sometimes, while Matt Damon doesn't show up as much. Anyway, it was still exciting to me to see another famous person.

Oh, for those of you who visited our blog last night, you might have noticed that the name of our blog and our screen names have changed. I guess Nick didn't like the name "gayglers." I chose that name initially because it's the name of the GBLT Google group. Our new name "super guys" is a reference to one of our favorite anime series "super gals," in case you were wondering why we chose that name.

As for the name of our blog, "kitty-doken," I'm not sure that I can explain that one. It has something to do with "8-bit theater," which I've never read, but Nick has. Maybe he should explain it:

Ahem. You see, black mage (BM) has a special level-9 spell, the all-powerful Hadoken. It destroys everything, more or less. But he can only cast it once per day, much to his dismay. One day, though, he discovers that throwing his best friend/worst enemy Fighter (I like swords) in a wonderful move he calls "Fighter-doken", he can still harm the bad guys. A little. Anyway, Jerry throws kitty onto the bed sometimes, and Kitty-doken seems like a good title for that. Nerdy enough for you? Okay, back to being antisocial.. Jerry can type the rest.

And how appropriate, we're watching Tivo'd Ellen, and she's talking about her cat. And I do not throw, I gently toss.

I think that's all we have to say for today. BYE!!!

Jerry and Nick

Hi!

2005-09-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

So, here is our attempt at creating a blog. We'll try to update it regularly, but we aren't guaranteeing much. Right now, Kitty is attacking Nick's face while laying on his lap...isn't that cute? And now Nick is asking me why Kitty is acting so fiesty, to which I can only respond "I don't know."

Um...so once we actually figure out what we want to say in our blog, we'll continue adding entries. Anyway, we hope you'll find our musing interesting, and feel free to comment when you want!

Jerry Liu