My first time!

A tropical storm rolled through Hong Kong last night, the first time that I've been in town when they've raised a T8 warning, which requires you to go home and not be at work.
I wish it was more exciting than it seems. It was the same typhoon that rolled through the Philippines and sank a ferry, killing hundreds earlier this week. But it weakened before it got here, and I barely noticed it.
The T8 flag was raised around 10:45 last night, so I got to leave work 45 minutes early, and it was just gusty outside with a few sprinkles, but nothing major. The harbor looked pretty choppy, but that was it. The storm rolled through Hong Kong in the middle of the night, and I slept right through it. By the time I woke up, it still was T8, with about 40mph gusts and rain, but it was plenty warm outside.
No major damage or drama. The biggest difference is the streets were noticeably absent of traffic, especially cabs. It's weird not to see cabbies trolling the streets.
In true Hong Kong capitalist fashion, however, I had a delivery of a case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (pricy at about $45 US a case, but worth it) scheduled before 1pm, and they made it, though the T8 flag had only been lowered about an hour at that point. Hooray for beer!

Fringe benefits

The one thing I will miss about my current job once I switch careers: The ability to swear whenever you want out loud without ramifications.

The trip, lowercase

I just realized posting pictures without an itinerary might be kind of confusing. To recap: last week, I spent one day in Kyoto with friends, two in Osaka. Moments from the trip:
1) Sometimes people just may be too friendly. On our first day in Osaka, as we were returning from the ball game for a nap, we took the wrong exit at our subway stop. We were trying to figure out which way to go back to our hotel when a 60-ish local man offered to help us. Twenty-five minutes later, he still was trying to help us find our way, constantly stopping at 7-11s or other convenience store, trying to figure out how the best way. We found it eventually, and marked another reason why I love Japan: The people are super-friendly, and good manners get you far more than money ever will. You would never think of offering someone money for their help, as you would in some other countries, just a couple of bows and thank-yous.
2) There is less smoking than you'd expect in Osaka. There seems less than in Tokyo, and you don't see many walking down the street while holding a lit cigarette. They've even banned smoking in some outdoor areas in Osaka, apparently to cut down the scourge of kids getting hit in the face with burning cigarettes.


3) Japanese television is even wackier than you could imagine. On one of the channels in Osaka, they mostly show lessons on foreign languages, including English and Spanish. The English show I saw was centered on a journalist walking into a bar, trying to pitch his friends on a Ponzi scheme he just sunk some money into. Weird.

4) While Hong Kong may suck when it comes to bread, Japan rules when it comes to pastries.

5) In Osaka, we walked through an underground mall between the exit near our hotel and the entrance to the subways. Appropriately, the mall was Whity Mall.

6) One thing HK and Japan have in common: their teens are not threatening in the least.

Urban landscaping

On our final day in Osaka, we headed over to one of their high-rises, which also happens to be a tourist attraction. There's a lot of park area around it that is landscaped, with two separate areas, both with different feels. It's a weird mix of ultra-modern building adjacent to a tiny forest that's designed to calm you down and give you a place to relax.


The view of the tower from below. The two tubes runing through the open circle are seen below.

There is a little mini-forest park in the courtyard next to the tower, with cool chutes that shoot out water to form a waterfall.


Inside the mini forest. You will never, ever see someone in Hong Kong setting aside space to set up something like this in the courtyard of an office building. The landscape-architecture studying friend said that during some projects in Japan, they get zen masters to help choose which rocks to pick. The zen masters tell you to talk to the rocks for a few days to make sure you can connect with them and get their permission to use them.


The escalator tube cited above, going down. Kinda like a 70s sci-fi thing.


Landscape-architecture friend resting near a porthole overlooking Osaka. It was a little hazy that day, but part of it was from the oncoming rain, too. Still, it was nice to be in a city again where you could see more than a mile away.


An ingenious solution to how to connect a road to another one if a building is in the way, or an ingenious solution of how to construct a building if the road is in the way.


The walking gardens next to the tower, filled with little channels cutting through it. Cats, too.

Ferris wheel panda sex

Sadly, the title is a combination of things I saw, not a single event that I saw. hotel I stayed at in Osaka was surrounded by a number of adult establishments, though that wasn't all there was in the neighborhood; there were restaurants and bars too, but also love hotels. Here's a general rule I came up with this weekend: If a business has a curtain covering up the top half of its front entrance, there's a good chance it's not meant for kids, like the two businesses directly across the street for our quite nice hotel, which was filled with a number of elderly Japanese.


Just on the corner down the street from our hotel is high-quality VD space for rent.


How you fumble through a foreign land: You guess Sexy Angel is a porn shop, as is the shop next to it with no English in its name, but pictures of porn actresses.


These are but two pictures, but I saw lots of panda pictures and references in Kyoto and Osaka. I'm not the only one sharing an obsession with them. This is from a subway ad in Osaka.


And from a truck on a Sunday afternoon in Osaka.


Besides pandas, there were lots of ferris wheels in Osaka. I saw at least 4 separate ones in the Osaka area. Why? I have no idea. This one, near the pier, claimed to be the world's largest, though I think that was years ago. It ws pretty tall, though.

Kyoto's main tourist attraction is an ancient castle at the confluence of a few rivers. It's surrounded by a huge park now that was filled with lots of musicians when we visited Sunday. The strangest part, though, was coming upon the outdoor elevator grafted onto the 500-year-old castle so the elderly can visit the higher floors. There also is an elevator inside, too.

No hot dogs, no seventh-inning stretch, but still, it's baseball

Dont'cha love it when a plan comes together? After taking the express train down from Kyoto to Osaka (standing with your luggage for 40 minutes on a train, though, is not so fun) I checked in with the front desk at our hotel to check when the game was. I thought it was 6 at night, but nope, it was at 1pm. Since it was 12:15 at the time, we scampered to the subway and made it in at the bottom of the first. Nothing like last-minute decisions that come together!
Before the game, I was talking about how the Japanese like to bunt and play small ball. Of course, the final was 4-3, decided on a walk-off, two-run home run, the sixth of the game, which means every run was scored by a home run. Doh.
But it was just as fun as my games last year. It was interleague play, so the left field stands were filled with fans of the visiting Chunichi Dragons, the right field stands with home team fans. Lots of music, lots of chanting, lots of fun. The beer girls weren't anywhere near as cute as the Tokyo Dome's, but the beer was still refreshing. I was disappointed their hot dog stand was sold out of hot dogs (when I asked, the woman working the stand crossed her arms in the X shape, the Japanese way of saying, "no"), but I thought I could make up for it by getting the Tuffy Rhodes rice box, which is rice with japanese pickles and a pork tenderloin. Nope, got the X symbol, too.
(Tuffy Rhodes is known for hitting 3 home runs on opening day for the Cubs in 1994, then being sent down to the minors a month later. A few years later, he went to Japan, where he became one of their greatest power hitters later, becoming a cultural phenomenon. Which means you get ballpark dishes named after you.)
But the fans were polite, the seats sparkingly clean and the workers polite. (They line up to bow to you and thank you for coming after the game.) Baseballs were being sold for about $2 in the souvenir stands; the week before, I stopped at a sporting goods store in Central in HK, and they wanted $200 HK (about $26 US) for a single hardball, and were shocked when I said that was more than I wanted to pay.
And inside and outside the stadium, they had souvenir stands set up specializing in souvenir items for the visiting team. Imagine what would happen back in Chicago if someone did that outside of Wrigley or Comiskey Park. Sometimes, I weep for the thuggery that is America when you compare it to how other countries are.



The Kyocera Dome, where the Buffaloes play their home games. It really doesn't get better looking when you get closer up.


Inside the dome. The color isn't off; the turf really is colored a reddish-fluorescent orange color between the bases. (The only dirt is the darker circles near the bags.)

kyoto

Kyoto, via pics.


There are literally dozens of old castles in Kyoto, and we got to see two on our one day there. They're all peaceful and tranquil, though a lot of them are with areas that are set off. You can look at the landscaped areas, like above, but don't walk on them.
Especially with shoes.


Inside the castle, in one of the old rooms that are divided with sliding doors.


The Japanese version of a gargoyle.


Use it for meditating on your tranquility, but not for drinking.


The front gate at the one castle.

The inner gate. Evil eye wards and gargoyles!

Japan, beer, friends + baseball = .....

A few quick tidbits to a weekend in Osaka that seemed to last forever, yet still ended too quickly. I'll post more in a day or so.


I suppose if there if one ad could describe one of the reasons I love Japan so much, it will be this ad for Suntory on a store window near the Umeda station in Osaka.
That said, Suntory also gave me the LOL winner of the weekend. On Sunday, we were visiting a cool exhibit at the Suntory exhibit on Osaka's harborfront. Japan usually is spot-on on its English translations, but not this one: there was a sign pointing to the nearby contraption that dispensed beverages in exchange for money, with the sign: VENDING VENGING MACHINE.
God, what I wouldn't give for a machine that would let me unleash some vengeance whenever I wanted for 120 yen.
Then again, I might make this into a t-shirt.



From another sign near the Osaka station. I forgot what it was, either a clothing store or a restaurant.



And another reason why I love Japan: It combines expected joys (baseball games!) with unexpected mirth (in the middle of the seventh inning, instead of singing the stretch, the Tigers fans at Kyocera Dome in Osaka let go of their spermatoza-shaped balloons all at once, which squirt upward [yes, squirt; they are not tied shut, so they don't float] as they cheer on the home team.)

Sharing and caring

A few times recently, on my bus ride into work, there's been a group of students who get on about five minutes into the ride. Usually it's a group of 6 to 8, all of them around 8- to 10-years old, I would guess. They pile in the back, near where I sit, then pull out snack treats and share them among each other. They're quiet, but still outgoing. They talk, but don't scream, and offer the last snack to someone else, usually, before they eat it.
Which surprised me at first. You never see kids in the US just open up a bag of snacks and share it with 5 of their friends. I asked a Canadian-born Chinese friend who has lived here for over a decade if she thought that HK kids were more sharing and well behaved than US kids.
She said: "I think HK chinese parents -- both here and overseas -- are alot stricter with their kids. so HK kids probably do seem quieter and better behaved, and are taught to think communally first. that's a pretty big generalization.
"But i can totally see myself sharing snacks with my brother or cousins. that would be normal. eating them all by myself with others had nothing to eat would seem rude and wrong.
"It's strange. hk-ers are taught to be VERY polite to people they know or have connections to -- colleagues, friends, family. but they are also taught that, to survive, they must be rude to strangers, i.e. in elevators."
At least that explains why everyone here tries to shut the elevator door here the moment they get in, even if someone else is trying to enter. But it does also give me hope that there is a generation of kids growing up who are kind and friendly and sharing.

Take them bowling!

Recent moments:

1) Went bowling on Sunday night. There are some universal constants, I continue to find out. For example, bowling alleys in both the US and HK:
a) Have shoes in US sizes that are so garishly awesome that you want to steal them.
b) Have electronic dart boards (the first time I have seen them in HK)
c) Are buried in the basements of buildings
d) Only serve cheap beer. I wish I could have enjoyed said beer, but it's 5 days to the end of my month of alcohol fasting.

2) I have gone out a few times during the month of fasting, but it's not the same. Beer is the great social lubricant, and lime sodas just aren't the same. Maybe if I smoked (more), it would be different, something to do while talking. Last night, I met a friend out, and he was with a few friends who I have met before. The first was one guy who is an animal rights advocate, who knows a member of my family kills small vicious furry animals for a living. He proceeded to question me about what I thought about it. It was more inquisitive than confrontational, but still, not something you want to do on an extended basis in a social setting if you're not lubricated. And then afterwards, an outspoken Brit started to grill me on why I thought Obama could win in November. And then lecture me on why Obama could not win. And then interrogate me on America's role in the world.
Maybe I could handle this if I was on my third Hoegaarden. After a grueling day at work, the last thing I want to do is argue politics. I've said in the past that moving overseas brings out nationalist tendencies that I never felt before. People love to criticize the #1, and if you're American, it's quite easy to do right now. (Which now that I think about it, it doesn't surprise me about the nationalist fervor by overseas Chinese recently regarding Tibet and the Olympic torch relay. If you are an overseas student and people are constantly ripping what your country is doing, it's only natural you want to stand up after constant pounding on the place you call home.)
But I can't handle it drinking lime sodas. After an hour I bailed. Said Brit was a former navy guy who is always outspoken. But damn, what happened to conversation while drinking, instead of argument? Sometimes, because people find out what I do for my job, all they want to do is talk politics and foreign policy and heavier, newsier events. And because I'm American, it's like I have this bullseye on my back for similar things.
But I really do not want to sit there, sober, arguing - and I mean arguing - politics for an hour with a semi-drunk Brit. It's like being at work, but only taking all the negative parts of work and concentrating it. It's been nearly a year since my friend Geoff died, and I remembered what I loved doing with him: going to a bar and having friendly conversations about music and baseball. Congenial talks about things we loved, but conversations that would let me not think about politics or the news or foreign policy. Conversations that were fun, not taxing. Chalk this up to things I miss about the states: Going to the Nisei tap after or before a Cubs game with Jason or Greg Or Alyse or any of my season ticket comrades or neighbors, getting a beer on tap, and talking baseball for an hour. Because a bar is where you relax, not where you get wound up.

3) While it is hot and steamy b/c the rainy season has started, there is something relaxing about waking up most mornings at 9am to the sound or rain pouring against your window.