HK & Singapore update

So HK was cool as expected and I had a good visit there with mi familia. We did quite a bit of sightseeing even though the weather was mostly shit. I love that city.

The main reason for this post though is Singapore and the revelation I had that it is way cooler than I expected.

First of all, they allow gum. Just not the selling of it. So after I entered passport control hiding my gum stealthily on the roof of my mouth (and well into the rest of Friday evening), I was told by some expat dude that they do allow you to put chewing gum in your mouth and in fact chew it in the light of day...right in front of the authorities.

Aside from that little tidbit, I learned that Singapore is basically like a working and efficient version of SE Asia which was kind of a nice break from KL. People there seem pretty friendly and there seems to be a big number of younger expats.

It's also relatively easy and cheap to get around by metro which was definitely a nice break from KL with 99% of its cab drivers being rip off artist fucks. A hearty fuck you to all my Malaysian cabbies reading this.

Singapore also has a number of cool historic hoods where you can get bomb Indian, Chinese, or Malay food for pretty cheap (if you know where to go..which I didn't). Hawker stands though seem to be all around and offer really good food and drinks 24 hours a day.

To sum Singapore up: I could see myself living there and I may be looking into a getting a job there sometime in the not so distant future.

Now I'm going to Singapore

Also known as "Disneyland with the death penalty" or the "world's only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations" as I've read on wikitravel...and I believe everything I read there.

Not having been there, I would venture to say that Singapore is actually more strict than Disney Land since they allow chewing gum at the latter. Not to worry as I will expertly hide my gum on the roof of my mouth as I've done since Ms. Denicola's 1st grade class on up to my most recent meeting with the CEO of the External Trade Development Arm of Malaysia today.

Anyway, I'm pretty pumped to finally go there since I had a friend living there when I was in BKK and never got around to visiting. I expect to hear a lot of annoying "Singlish" that sounds very much like English spoken in KL with random grunts and "lahs" added to words that need no additions. I also expect to pay $40 Sing dollars for every meal...on second thought maybe I'm not that pumped...

So...Singapore. Here I come.

I'm Going to Hong Kong

My parents are coming to Asia and I'm headed to HK to meet them this weekend. I've been before so I know what I'm in for and it's going to be sweet.

On a related note, I was just told that I "can't miss" the restaurant Chili Fagara. ha ha. Yeah right. Nice try guy who "lived in Hong Kong for 5 years."

That reminds me of the last time I was in HK. My buddy asked if his friend, who lived in Hong Kong for a while, knew any cool people we could meet up with. He gave him a number and said "call my buddy Mickey. He's really awesome."

Fast forward to the first night we were there and my friend says to me and our other travel companion: "hey guys, I'm gonna call this Mickey guy cuz he's supposed to be cool and will know where to go out here." He whips out his phone, dials the number, and gets the general line to Disney Land Hong Kong. Well played guy who orchestrated this prank. I'm still waiting to use it on some unsuspecting friend.

I did just check the web for Chili Fagara and to my surprise, it does exist. No joke, this is on their website: "Many people describe our food as orgasmic - the intensity mounts and grows until you reach the top. Then you have to calm yourself..."

I think that's called blue balls.

Crazy Monkey Defense

Since I have so much free time on my hands working by myself, I've started a new class. It's called CMD, or "Crazy Monkey Defense." It's basically some sort of offshoot of MMA.

http://www.crazymonkeydefense.com/cmdp/

Next time you see me come at me like a crazy monkey and see if I can't defend the shit out of whatever you throw at me.

I roll with socialites...

in third world countries.

I went to some actress's birthday party the other weekend. It was in a really really nice house in a rich compound in Manila (pronounced "My Knee Lah" if you are Filipino). They have these compounds in various areas throughout Manila to keep the poor people out.

I'm told the guy who threw the party only uses the place as an "event house" (read nose candy house) Apparently he is the son of the owner of Philippine Airlines. Who even knew they existed? Let alone make a lot of money.

Anyway I also invited my buddy from college who is Filipino-American and also did not know who any of these socialites were at the party. We both brought bottles of wine that were promptly hidden from view at the top-shelf open bar.

Bali Bribin'

I went to Bali last weekend for a second time in as many months. As luck would have it I got to give my first SE Asian bribe out! Actually two in one trip!

The first one came when I tried to enter Indonesian passport control only to find out that they would not put their visa over top of faded passport stamps I had acquired over 7 years ago. They shuffled me to a shady backroom where a beaming Indonesian guard not so subtly asked me for 50USD for "extra pages that look like American passport pages."

This offer sounded more attractive than flying back to KL for the weekend, so I agreed to give him 50 Malaysian Ringgit which is about 40 USD. He said ok and disappeared for 10 minutes. What he came back with in no way resembles American passport pages. He handed me my passport with a piece of grade z wax paper stuck into the middle with an Indonesian visa on it. I should have a lot of explaining to do to the American consulate here when I actually go to get more pages put in...

The next bribe I had to give came also from a very pleasant Indonesian cop when he pulled me over for not wearing a helmet on my scooter. I tried to explain to him that I'm a pale face and did not know the law but he didn't speak English very well.

It turns out though, that his English language negotiating skillz kicked in perfectly when I told him I was from the USA. He was able to get 10 USD out of me. My Filipino buddy was pulled over 10 minutes later and only had to give 5 USD after saying that he was just a poor Feeleepeenoh. Reverse racism.

Bali is still awesome though. The rest of the weekend I spent surfing and drinking and chilling on the beach. I plan to go back for a third time next month.

I'm in KL

That's Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for you Asia NOOBS...Idiots.

Anyway, lots of things have transpired since I last posted a month and a half ago.

One of those "things" is that all of my friends were laid off from the job and I'm working alone in KL. Anyway, I'm not long for this job...at least with this company.

So far KL is pretty boring as far as SE Asia goes. Like I said in a post from a prior visit, there's not much to see. It is clean, green, and much richer than every other SE Asian country. If you think these things are cool then you must not be. SE Asia is supposed to be cheap, smelly, polluted and dodgy. The food is ok so far but still doesn't compare to Thailand. Neither do the girls...half of whom are wearing head scarves...if they can't show me their "hair up there" how am I supposed to get a peak down below? nawhadaimeen? Actually I think that's the last name of a girl I met the other day...heyooo. But enough with the unnecessary racism.

I did manage to get to Bali last weekend which is one of the "awesomer" places I've been in my life. Everything is cheap, people are friendly, and you can surf. I plan to go there and surf and drink as much as possible to maintain sanity.

Easter Trip

I'm going to Barcelona for the weekend with a coworker or two. I've been already but Spain is sweet and I want to go back and eat olives, enjoy the weather, get drunk, and exercise my Spanish hablando skillz.

I went to Paris a few weeks ago and I've been slacking on writing posts so I'll write about that when I get back, along with a recap of Barcelona. Remain on the edge of your seat until I get around to posting.

I'm Moving to the Philippines

I never thought I would actually be sent there given that there are so many filipinos working for my company...but I guess they want the token vanilla face there to show that we are "international."

Starting May 9 I'll be living in Manila which is a typical SE Asian city. Hot, smelly, and filled with lots of poor people and a few uber rich. I'll be hanging out with the uber rich and laughing at poor people as I step over them, trying not to smudge my puma in the process.

I'm working with a filipino guy who is a former model/actor there and knows all of the filipino aristocracy. Hopefully I'll be hooked up with a fat luxury apartment with rich mahogany and many leather bound books.

Either way I'm going back to Asia for 4 months and all of my coworkers will be there as well (Jakarta, KL, Australia). It should be a crazy time.

Token poverty pic to gawk at:

Manila Slum

Ze Austrian Alps

I am told these are the "baby mountains" by our Austrian hosts

I went to the Alps this past weekend. I still have no clue what the name of the resort was because it was really tiny and we had Austrian friends taking care of us the whole time. I know it was near the town of Ebensee which is between Linz and Salzburg.

Anyway, it was a really sick weekend. We stayed in a resort which was started and owned by this Austrian guys' Grandpa and now run by his cousin so it was more like staying in someone's home. It was on top of the mountain so you had to take a gondola to get to it and it stops running at 5pm so you're stuck up top all night. This originally sounded terrible to me but ended up being a blast.

To get to the place on Friday we knocked off work early and got a rental car. I had to drive since I'm the only American who knows how to drive stick...ever. We arrived at the gondola at 5:30pm and found our Austrian friend waiting for us. Apparently he held the last gondola for us and this was not a problem because we were 4 out of the 12 guests staying on the mountain that night.

We got to the top of the gondola and found that it was windy, snowy, and all around miserably cold. We had to hike up the mountain for about 5 minutes to get to the lodge and my filipina coworker, obviously experienced in snowy situations, wore her boots with heels. Anyway, she got to ride on the snowmobile that transported our luggage while the rest of us trudged up the mountain.

That night we ate bomb ass food called knödel (kanoodle) and schnitzel. Then we played drinking games for a few hours. Then we hit the bar in the basement of this old ass ski haus (with a nice wine cellar) where it was just us chilling and playing more drinking games including one called "noggin" where you try to hit a nail into a stump faster than everyone else using the wrong end of the hammer.

The next day we hit the slopes. Even though it was really windy and snowy it was tight because none of the locals wanted to ski. We basically had the whole mountain to ourselves and there was fresh powder (not the kind you find in Manila and Eastern Europe).

Late run on Sunday

That day a cool ass Austrian couple who works for Redbull showed up and skied with us. We then all had another big Austrian dinner that night complete with some baked pork that was really fucking tastey. Afterwards we had a private wine tasting in the hotel's wine cellar. Later we basically repeated the night before but drank even more and ended up having a huge dance party in the basement. Lots of Jaeger bombs (called a "flying hirsch" in Austria) were consumed and fun was had by all.

The next morning I woke up early and hit the expert slope that goes all the way down the mountain with our Austrian friend. We were the only ones good enough to do it (I'm awesome) and it was a nice start to the day which turned out to be sunny and gorgeous.

Picture riding up the slow lift in the morning

The rest of the day was awesome and after skiing we decided to go to Salzburg with the cool Austrian couple. They took us to see this hangar that is owned by Redbull that has all of their airplanes and F1 cars and a couple of really exclusive restaurants and cafes. That part is in the blog pipeline. For now check out the pics and be jealous.

View from close to our lodge

Morning run as the sun was coming up

Prague blague

Why hello there. I went to Prague a few weeks ago and I wanted to share some of my candid stories and adventures with you over the interweb. Sit back, relax and enjoy this visual and prosaic blague-venture through Prague.

Old Town Square

My Vienna coworkers and I arrived in Prague after a 4 hour train ride and took a private taxi to Old Town where we had a baller ass apartment setup for us. From there we met up with the artist formerly known as Gunmetal Gary (now known as black trenchcoat Barry) and hit the town.

First we went to get food. In my limited time in the country I found that Czech food consists of 3 options - pork shoulder, pork knee, and pork whatever other parts you can eat off of a pig. I had the pork shoulder and it was delicious.

That night we went out and got drunk in some area of the city that I don't remember...I think it might have been in old town or close by. At any rate, it was fun but we ended up at some divebar that looked like it could have been in Adams Morgan. It seemed like an expat bar and I was disappointed to find myself talking to British girls with bad breath and not hot Czech girls who I assume have pork breath. I slayed with the British birds that night. It was a very late night and I think we went to bed when the sun was coming up so it couldn't have been all that bad.

Krazy Klock in Old Town Square

On Saturday we got up and got food at a pub nearby. This time I ordered the pork knee. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life as I was treated to the largest hunk of roasted pork knee on a spit that I have ever seen. I guess that doesn't sound impressive since I've never seen anything like it...but it came with all sorts of sauces and was delicious.

After eating we decided to hit the local army surplus store and buy ridiculous soviet outfits. We walked around town all day in full soviet garb and it only dawned on me at the end of the day that maybe it was offensive to Czechs since they were sort of conquered by the soviets on and off for decades.

Soviet Stylin

Black trenchcoat barry aka soviet steve got extra special dirty looks from eurobags in orange sweatshirts.

Orange Poolius hating

On Saturday night we went out to a club not in the center of town and the name escapes me at this point. There were ridiculously hot girls dancing on podiums but it wasn't very crowded. Overall another disappointing night in a town I thought would be a crazy party type place. I guess we went to the wrong places. We still managed to stay up until 9am and end the night/morning at a really depressing betting/games place where some old Czech dude was asleep at the slot machine.

Overall I would give Prague a decent rating but some parts of it were disappointing. It was absolutely beautiful but cold with even colder people. I would like to go back in warmer weather and know someone who knows good places to meet hot Czech girls.

Insert joke about Czeching her out here

Random Funny Japanese Video

Japanese people are like cartoon characters.

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.

Seoul

Popular Korean Car - the "Korando"

This will be a relatively quick post since I don't remember the bulk of this stop. This is not for lack of time spent there...I was in Seoul for the most days (5) out of any of the destinations. It has more to do with hanging out with one Paul Withrow who drinks alcohol every night like a camel stocking up on water for the next 2 months in the desert.

My Seoul adventure began before I even got there when I partied all New Year's Eve night and into New Year's Day in DC. I got about 30 minutes of sleep (a sign of things to come for the next 3 weeks) and headed for the airport at 9am to catch what I thought would be my cakewalk 15 hour direct flight to Seoul. Little did I know that Korean Air would sit me in the crying Korean baby section.

15 hours later with about 30 minutes sleep again, I arrived in Seoul. Upon landing I was given a Korean landing card along with a pamphlet on how to find God from the uber religious Korean lady sitting next to me with her admittedly cute and much-better-behaved-than-the-rest Korean baby. Her baby daddy probably left her cuz she is batshit insane religious. I thanked her and avoided her questions about being saved and went to gather my bags and sanity.

Once I made it into the city I met up with Paul and we proceeded to the nearest Korean BBQ place (there are about 15 to choose from on every corner) and started drinking beer (mekju) and soju (worst hard alcohol drink ever) in massive amounts. We then went on to a few Korean bars (Hofs) and got wrecked. I think the night ended after I got in a belligerent drunk verbal sparring match with some Canadian douch scrotes.

The next 3 nights went on in a similar fashion (sans the fights with citizens of America's hat). I don't really remember much of what happened but I'm told one night I helped to breakup a fight amongst some tiny Koreans. I can only imagine it was really easy since Koreans are half my size and usually never come to blows.

Anyway, I was deathly ill for most of this leg of the trip and it definitely put a damper on the visit. I would like to go back to Seoul when it is warmer and see more of the city and maybe some cultural things. I'm sure it is more than just Soju and Mekju and fighting.

about 20 soju shots deep - barely remember this