There and Back Again

I have return-ed, though my internal clock is all wonky. Was showered with gifts upon leaving; now have a new mp3 player (huzzah!!!) from Uncle Fred for college, a bracelet from Lydia which looks like an exact miniature of her very stylish necklace, and a toy turtle from her as well. Left Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Fish and his family, though he's only on Prisoner of Azkaban. He knows that Sirius dies anyhow, so I don't see any real point in him getting attached to the character in the first place. Since he asked, I told him that Harry does indeed snog with Cho; he found this amusing since he has a classmate named Cho Chang (Cho as in Autumn, Chang as in.. Chang, the common family name. In Cantonese: Zhou Zheung) who takes a lot of crap for being a Harry Potter character.

Other things about my family; Joanne, Fish's older sister, is job hunting yet again in this economy. She had a job teaching Chinese History and Civics this year among, um, very academically unmotivated high schoolers who she has amusing but also very disturbing stories about. There's one boy whose father was either in the Triad or axed by the Triad or both; when she asked him conversationally what he was doing this summer, he uttered grimly, "I seek vengeance." And there's another kid who, when he was taking an English exam where he was required to "fill in the blanks with suitable word or words" simply wrote "word" or "words" in every blank. There's a kid who survived for months, because he was so poor, by begging for bread from classmates and shopkeepers. There are kids who hand in exams completely empty. There was a boy who when asked in an essay test "What would you buy with $3000?" which was meant to be very easy because of course you could BS anything, got zero points because he misread $3000 as $30 and wrote that he couldn't afford anything. An alumni came back on career day or whatever to rant to the student body on how bad their school was. And now, my cousin is being fired from her job, because they need a teacher that can teach Chinese History, Chinese, Mandarin, and English, which is pretty much impossible for anyone.... it's like asking one of our teachers to teach History, English, Spanish and French. Yeah, my cousin's life is weirder than Boston Public, which I never thought possible.

Kai-lap, Lydia's younger brother, this year is really into Dynasty Warriors. He's got posters all over his room and the wallpaper on his computer. This cracks me up because I keep thinking of Dynasty Memories, the Dynasty Warriors parody on 8-Bit Theater. Lydia doesn't like Dynasty Warriors, thinking they're ugly, and is constantly trying to replace the computer wallpaper with one of Baby Cinnamon, a spastically cute and rabbit-like cartoon dog from Sanrio. Kai-lap in turn finds Cinnamon disturbing.

He has a ticket for a Liverpool soccer match at Hong Kong Football Stadium. He camped out all night in line to get it. Beckham is reportedly coming to Hong Kong in August. I should've liked to see him, if only because other people find him a big deal and worth bending like. Lydia does not like him though, mostly because she is annoyed that other people could possibly find him handsome.

I am back later than scheduled because the flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo was delayed by five hours due to a broken generator; I'm not sure what a generator is, but it wasn't generatin'. Obviously missed the connecting flight from Tokyo to Detroit; stayed overnight in Tokyo free of charge and took the flight from Tokyo to Los Angelos at 1 in the afternoon the next day, Tokyo time.

I went to Japan! I went to Japan!

My happy dreams of hopping in a taxi to downtown Tokyo and staying up all night sightseeing were shattered by the fact that our hotel was an airport hotel. By 'stay in Tokyo' I mean 'stay outside of Tokyo in the fucking middle of nowhere, where streetlamps apparently hadn't been invented yet.' A nighttime bus ride to the hotel revealed pitch darkness outside the windows, broken every once in a while by a lit vending machine by the side of the road. You couldn't even see the trees. A taxi ride into Tokyo from the hotel would've been over an hour long and we had no yen. I was in a hotel where you could not tell you were in Japan- it was Radisson, an American chain hotel (pronounced Rah-Di-Son! by the Japanese) and everyone spoke English and the food and accomodations were all western. My mom said we would wake up early the next morning to sightsee. I took a shower and washed my hair and brushed my teeth like any sensible person that's been waiting at airports/sitting around in a plane all day, and watched some Japanese tv (The Cube was on) and went to sleep. I woke up at seven something, watched more tv including the Simpsons. I recorded a bit in a wav file on my mp3 player, which I will upload so you can hear Marge and Homer arguing in Japanese. Japanese tv is funny; news anchors and show hosts will actually bow at the camera (hence you the viewer), and say "Hai!" a lot. There are a lot of cooking shows on (I also recorded a wav file of some kids singing a sushi making song in a show that's some bizarre combination of Emeril Live and Barney), but not Iron Chefs. I ate breakfast and my mom and I took a stroll around the place, where there were farmers in straw hats, smoke from open fires, and cocks crowing, because we really were in the Clarksburg of Japan. Unlike rural China, it was clean and neat and not at all poor, so it was pleasant, (a very respectable 70 something degrees in the daytime and a cool fifty something at night) though not what I was expecting. We didn't go to Tokyo after all, which really pissed me off, because I still felt that we should've gone during the night. While I was in the bathroom, my mom turned down an offer to take a taxi to the nearest shopping mall, which missed me off more, and when we went out to take another stroll in the countryside, it started raining, which pissed me off extremely.

Which was about time we took the early bus to the airport, and since there was daylight we could actually see outside the windows now. We got bowed at by immaculately uniformed baggage handlers, security guards and porters, which left me feeling extremely weird because they're all middle-aged men; it feels that I as the 18 year old girl should be bowing to them, and even so the whole bowing thing is just weird. And did some airport shopping and whatnot. I was vastly amused that there was a Mitsukoshi store in the airport, because there's one in Hong Kong also; I picked up some Mitsukoshi business cards relating the locations of stores around the world. There are three in Germany; Frankfurt, Munchen, and Dusseldorf, two in Rome, one in Paris, one in London, one in Hong Kong, one in Shanghai, and several others. It's quite sad that I've memorized this. Bought some souvenirs (I was reminded of what Joanne said to me at Hong Kong International as I was leaving; airport souvenirs solely exist for when tourists desperately need to buy gifts but hadn't bought them yet upon leaving). I was amused that for sale there was a sushi cup exactly like the one T bought for my birthday a while back. Then we left.

I'd been getting used to listening to Japanese too. Korean airlines; it's a bit annoying to have flight attendants address you in Korean constantly, but I don't suppose they can be expected to remember what languages all of their passengers speak.

Los Angelos was the shits compared to Japan. Flight to Memphis, then to DC.

I was wondering perhaps if it wouldn't have been better to have stayed in Hong Kong for an additional day rather than put up with having to wait for five hours in Hong Kong's airport, and going through bureaucracy in re-arranging connecting flights from Tokyo, and going through customs and security in Japan, and getting our luggage from Tokyo Narita airport to the hotel, and getting the luggage from the hotel to the airport the next morning, and then having to change flights at LA and then Memphis, whereas originally it would've just been Detroit. But apparently Hong Kong was hit with a level 8 typhoon the day after we left so we can consider ourselves lucky that we got out at all. My cousins had been complaining of only getting a level 1 typhoon; apparently all good schoolchildren the world round hope for inclement weather.

But I'm back. I've received a letter from Andrew D at boy scout camp and Doug thanking me for helping him on his Eagle Project. It makes me so happy. I've got mail! Real honest to god mail, written on real honest to god paper with real honest to god pen! Not e-mail! Not IM! Not ICQ, not phone, but real fuckin' mail!

I'll write back right away.

And you thought that our wired generation was less appreciative of these things.