Working Out In Vienna

This being my 3rd stint in Western Europe I know that European gyms are a big waste of time. Most are absurdly outdated and are only frequented by homosexual European men looking to meet other homosexuals. Since I am so hetero it hurts, I have decided to forgo the gyms. In Vienna I am going the way of Patrick Bateman and doing my own rigorous exercise routine.

I bought a jump rope and I am doing a few online programs which, upon completing them, I will be able to do over 100 pushups and approximately 2 million situps. I guess you could say I believe in taking care of myself.

I'm trying to eat well here too but it's nearly impossible with all the sausages and schnitzel these people eat.

The other day I was even convinced by my coworker to go to a Bikram Yoga class with her. It was my first (and probably last) Yoga class ever.

In Bikram Yoga you basically hang out in a room that is 40 degrees celcius (105 degrees fahrenheit) and do a bunch of awkward poses. It was surprisingly hard and within the first 5 minutes I was pouring down sweat like I never have. It was 90 minutes in total. The only thing that kept me going was the instructor who sounded like a Nazi, barking orders in German, but had an ass like I have never seen in my life.

German/Austrian Music

This is what's happening in the streets of Austria.

The first band is a German band of eunuchs who sing nonsensical lyrics...I'm pretty ashamed to admit that the song is actually very catchy. By the way allein means alone. So sad.

Polarkreis 18 - Allein Allein
by Polarkreis-18

This is DJ Ötzi. Apparently he is big at Austrian ski parties where people drink Schnapps till the break of dawn. I had Schnapps the other week. It is terrible. Austrians drink it like it is water when they go skiing. I guess it's their way of coping with the terrible music.



This is Scooter. He's a huge douche nozzel. Enjoy his soothing sounds:



Now obviously this post is biased and represents (mostly) the shit music in this section of Europe. I am hard pressed to find anything really good though so I'll leave you to search for the treasure in the trash.

I used to tell this Dutch girl I knew in Amsterdam that not only did Americans save them from the Germans, but we also saved them from their own terrible music. Now I know the full extent of what we saved them from. Their music could have blended with German music forming an enormous nuclear poo cloud of shit music. You're welcome world. AMERICA.

People I work With

I've mentioned before that my company is not quite normal. Here are some examples why.

This video is my coworker here in Austria. She's the first one to speak. It is obviously in Tagalog, the language of the Philippines.



This is my old coworker in Thailand. He was on Big Brother Australia a few years back. This is obviously in the Queen's English.



This next one is more risque. To the point where it wouldn't allow me to embed it...sorry Delic. Had to do it. Your sexual prowess has been exposed to the four people who read this blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qqa5Lsea8U&feature=related

Manila and Boracay - a hazy recollection

Embassy - a club in Manila

As stated in the title, I don't remember everything from this section of the trip. I'll try to recount the really important stuff.

We got into Manila capping off a few weeks of traveling. Since 60% of my company is made up of uber rich filipinos, we were treated like royalty. We were greeted at the airport with my coworker's private driver who was in a pimp ass SUV with fully tinted windows. He is also a driver for a congressman there (they're targets for kidnapping and assassination there at every minute) so he was trained in all sorts of evasive driving tactics and martial arts. I'm glad I didn't have to see him whip out his krav maga skills. His driving was insane.

Nightlife seems pretty sweet in Manila if you know the right people. I've been once before but didn't get to see it due to a flight I had to catch. We went out to a club called Embassy in the trendy, nice part of the city called Makati. We got into the VIP section since my friends know the owner. As you can see in the above picture there was a guy with his shirt off in the club proving that they have huge douche nozzels in the Philippines too...and they can even get into the VIP section.

We left for Boracay a few days in and had another company conference like last year. This time it was cool because I'm higher up in the company, I knew what to expect (a lot of drinking) and I wasn't jet lagged. We spent four days and nights in paradise partying and doing lots of "team building excercises." It was a blast and there are too many stories to recount so I'll try to list a few.

- at one point my friend and coworker decided to rent a cock from a local filipino. He proceeded to throw his cock on everyone as they were trying to sleep at 7am. He videotaped it all so we'll have the memories forever. Here's a picture:

Copy Rolex the Cock

- I partook in the 15 shot challenge like last year...this time I do not remember it as well. I'm not in as good of drinking shape I guess. I know that you get to write something down on a plaque at the end and I was too drunk to write. Luckily my manager and editor managed to write "tackling 15 shots the Koranda way" for me.

We got tshirts for doing the 15 Shots

- I did what I swore I would never do and I tried balut, which is basically a duck fetus crossed with a hard boiled egg. It was not as bad as I thought it would be but not good in any way, shape, or form.

Balut - hard boiled duck fetus - really hard to eat when you are massively hungover

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of other good stuff but that's all I can remember at this point. Now I'm in Vienna and wishing I was back in warm weather. I would eat 30 duck fetuses to get back there...The end.

Kuala Lumpur - The Baby Pool

View looking at KL from the radio tower

Before we left for KL from HK I read that KL is a "baby pool" for Southeast Asia. It's clean, easy to get to from the airport to the center, people speak English, and people don't rip you off...too badly. This is a very accurate assessment of KL. My friend who lived in Singapore for 4 months last year said that it reminded him of it.

KL is famous for the Petronas Towers which are basically at the center of the city. We stayed in a really nice hotel which was about a 5 or 10 minute walk from the Towers in the "Golden Triangle" area of KL. I think it was a 4 or 5 star hotel and it was probably the cheapest place we stayed in the entire trip.

There isn't a lot to say about KL since there isn't really much to see other than the towers and some place called the Batu Caves. The towers are cool to look at but going up in them is not really great. It's free but you have to watch some 8 minute propaganda video from the Petronas company (Malaysia's largest oil and gas company). If you ever go there I would suggest going up the radio tower a few kilometers from the towers. You get a good view of the whole city including the towers.

Fuckload of steps leading to the Batu Caves

The Batu Caves are basically some caves a few kilometers from the city center. There are a lot of steps leading up to them and some big statue that has something to do with Buddhism. It took us about 20 minutes to walk through and see everything. The highlight was obviously the dirty monkeys running around trying to get their dirty monkey hands on bags of peanuts from tourists.

Dirty ass monkey eating peanuts

Nightlife in KL is kind of weak but we were only there during weekdays so maybe it's sweet on the weekends. We spent three nights there and two out of the three nights we went to this club called Zouk. The first night we went there was ghetto hip hop night. We didn't discover this until after the fact so for about 24 hours I thought all Malaysians like to go out to clubs, not drink anything but redbull, dance like Michael Jackson, and get into lots of dance offs. Anyway, we met some girls at Zouk the first night that we (affectionately) dubbed ZG and ZS, standing for Zouk Gook and Zouk Spook. You can guess what they looked like. They were both really into dancing and were doing crazy ghetto dance moves all night. ZS took a liking to Colonel and they have a facebook relationship to this day.

The last night we were there we went back to Zouk and hung out with some different girls. We affectionately labeled one of them DSM (The first letter stands for "Downs") and the other Moonpie face. A lot of whiskey was consumed (I think two bottles or so) and fun was had until the break of dawn. I'm not going into details. We left for the airport at 7 am for our flight to Manila with no sleep.

Hong Kong and Macau

Hong Kong from above

I should not have waited this long to recap all of this stuff. I'm struggling to remember everything that happened on the trip and at this point, after a long weekend of partying in Prague, I'm sure I'm leaving a lot out. But anyway...

Hong Kong
We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday afternoon ready for anything other than Shanghai and cold weather. The train ride into the city from the airport looked like Southern California with sunshine and hills rolling down into ocean. It was immediately 1000% better than Shanghai based solely on the warm weather.

Hong Kong itself is divided into roughly two areas, Kowloon, and Hong Kong Island. Kowloon is the grittier, more Chinese part of the city, and Hong Kong is the more glamorous, high-end, British section. We decided to stay in Kowloon because it was cheaper and its bay is where Cassandra from Wayne's World is from.

We got to our place, the only hostel of the trip, and immediately got ready to go out on the town. That night we went to Lan Kwai Fong which is a big street of bars and clubs that is really popular with expats in Hong Kong. It was Friday night so it was really packed with lots of douche scrotes in suits pretending to be important. At any rate it was really fun. At some point some crazy girl told Gunmetal to close his eyes and open his hand and she dumped a load of pills in it. I don't remember the rest of the night.


The next day we moved to a better hostel (the AMERICAN hostel) and covered a lot of sightseeing activities. We did the old double decker bus tour of Hong Kong which I have no pictures of because I forgot my camera that day. Toward the end of the day we rode up the side of a mountain in a cable car to check out the view from the hills. It was sick.

On one of the nights we were in Hong Kong we decided to check out their "world famous light show" that happens every night at 8pm or so. We were all very excited for a sweet lazer light show to blow our minds Pink Floyd style...We were sorely disappointed when we realized it was just a series of slow blinking lazers coming off of each building on the Hong Kong side while terribly cheesy chinese music played and announcers chattered in Cantonese over some loud speaker. Even the 3 year old asian babies were underwhelmed.

As a final assessment of Hong Kong I have to say that it is an amazing city. Despite the shitty light show (it had to have at least one flaw) it is the perfect mix of Asia and London or San Francisco. It is beautiful. It is surrounded by rolling hills and has a skyline that is really cool. The people are pretty nice and it's very vanilla face friendly. The weather is awesome - in January it was 60 - 70 degrees the whole time. Even the language, Cantonese, sounds way better to me than Mandarin. Hong Kong has everything anyone could ever want in a city and I could see myself living there for an extended period of time.

Macau

Some Macau Church Ruins

We hit Macau for a day after we covered Hong Kong and Kowloon pretty thoroughly. Macau was also a pretty interesting place. I had heard bad things so my expectations were low, but it was well worth seeing in my opinion.

Macau was a Portugese colony for about 400 years. It looks like a European city and actually has a few sites to see. There is one area in the center that has ruins of an old church. Here you can walk a street and sample 50 types of jerky meats ranging from pig to cow to chicken...or so it is advertised. I'm pretty sure it's all either dogmeat or human meat from casino workers who weren't pulling their weight anymore. Aside from the jerky there is also good Portugese, African, and Chinese food.

Looking down on Mystery Meat Street

We hit the casinos for a while and I made 700 HKD (100USD) at the blackjack tables. The casinos there are weird because there are literally 5x more workers than there are patrons. If you've ever been anywhere in Asia outside of Korea or Japan, you probably realize that this does not automatically translate into a more efficient operating system. Getting a drink was nearly impossible.

Overall Macau was cool because I made money and got to feast on jerky. Go here if you like to do these two things.

Shanghai

Oriental Pearl Tower - a shaft with some balls

For the second leg of my Asian adventure I met up with my two good friends from work. I will call them Gunmetal Gary and Colonel Canadia. Both had been in Shanghai for a day by the time I met them and Gunmetal had the same death disease I picked up in Seoul. I got in at around 10pm on Tuesday to a surprisingly nice hotel. After a confusing and frightening late night meal where we pointed at a menu while a chef hacked turkey necks 5 feet away from us with a giant knife, we all decided to take it easy for the night.

The next day we toured around the city and covered pretty much every major site there is to see in Shanghai. I was disappointed to find that nothing was very impressive. One of the most impressively shitty things I saw was the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel pictured below.

"METEOR SHOWER!"

If you like to move slowly through a tunnel of blinking lights while a cheesy 1970s computer sound effect plays, you have to check out the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. Suffice it to say there are absolutely no real sights to see in this stupid tunnel. If you're having trouble falling asleep check out the youtube clip.

Monks at the Jade Buddha Temple

This is a famous tourist site which was actually alright. Those are monks doing monk stuff. I should know more about what these monks are doing but I was too busy throwing coins at these statue things that Gunmetal and Canadia thought you were supposed to throw coins at...I'm still pretty sure you were supposed to place the coins gently on them.

That night we met up with a friend of a friend to go out in Shanghai. We went to the safe, vanilla face portion of town where we sat a table with this Chinese girl and her boyfriend and had a serious cultural exchange. We taught each other how to play drinking dice games with whiskey.

After this place we went to an after hours bar where the Chinese girls made it no secret that you were to buy them drinks before talking to them. I made some sarcastic comments to them which they didn't like. I think sarcasm is a few years off there...Anyway, my normal superb A game was turned into Z game by my death disease. So after an hour I left Gunmetal and Canadia to make very regrettable decisions while I went home to get an awesome night's sleep. But my sleep was ruined by Gunmetal and Canadia returning to the room and raiding the not-so-cheap minibar for the rest of the night.

The next day (Thursday) we woke up at 11am, went and got food, and proceeded to sleep until the next day at 9am. There was nothing left to do in Shanghai. Also we were all either sick with the flu or sick over decisions made the night before.

We were all very happy when it was time to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong on Friday morning. We wanted to take the Maglev train to the airport but our taxi driver convinced us to take him all the way to the airport because of traffic going to the maglev station. We were all too tired and sick to care. He didn't disappoint though and after the scariest taxi ride of all time we agreed that he was just slightly faster than the maglev.