What I know about t-shirt production
Sunday night was super fun! It was the perfect way to say goodbye to Japan. I did my internet thing, and then went to meet up with Shinya. While I was waiting for him a Japanese kid started to talk to me. He said he would talk to me to keep the womanizers away. Then he asked if I was a student, I said I just graduated and he said, high school and I said no, university and he said, "But you look like you're 15!" Then Shinya showed up. I was glad.
The show was an all day event. Bands started playing around 2 and KS 48 went on at 6. Shinya put me on some discount list so I only paid 500 yen for a drink ticket that I forgot to use. The bands were fun. The place was pretty empty and I kind of felt bad for the first couple of bands but then when KS 48 went on the place filled up! It was so cool. They put on a really good show. The crowd loved it. I had fun. When the show was over I went to Vodofone to charge my cell phone (you get a little cell phone locker with a charger and set up a password, all for free!). When I got back they were in a meeting with someone important so I walked around and watched some more bands. Apparently the meeting didn't go well and they seemed to be in a bad mood when they got out. I decided I should probably leave. Shinya was going to have to go to work soon and the other guys were cranky. And Errol was staying at Lindsay's and they were going to do karaoke! So I said my goodbyes and walked to the train station with a really nice girl who knew English pretty well but didn't have an email address which I thought was strange. She took my email address for when she finally sets one up. Who doesn't have an emai addressl?
Then when I was waiting for the train Shinya ran up to me. He had been calling my name but since coming to Asia I tried to stop thinking that I was ever hearing my name called, so it took me a while to notice. But what a pleasant surprise! He works for Yahoo Auctions doing customer service stuff. He works from 10:30pm - 7:30am. He told me he was really tired cause he hadn't gone to sleep last night and now he wasn't going to get to sleep until at least 8am. I told him about Red Bull in the States.
The first train that came was going to where he needed to go to but not as far as I needed to go and he said he would wait with me. That was so nice! I was really happy. He's like an actual friend I think. He said it was too bad I wasn't in Tokyo longer cause he could have shown me around a lot more. That would have been cool. I realized that after being in and out of Tokyo for almost a month I really only know the Shibuya area.
Danny wants it to be known that he wants to be a unicorn. He told me to incorporate that into this blog somehow. There, I did it.
Moving on, by the time I got to Yokohama to meet up with Lindsay, Errol and friends they were already finished with karaoke!!!! And completely wasted. I hadn't had any alcohol but I was in such a good mood from the show and my talk with Shinya on the train I was able to act just as drunk as any of them. I sang Hanson in the street without any alcohol, microphone or music. I started too high and didn't last long. But the effort was fun.
We decided to try to get me drunk. We stopped at a 7-11 and I got a can of some beer and a juicebox of sake. I never made it to the juicebox sake. The beer was plenty. We went to an izakaya (place where you orders tons of appetizers) and I ordered a "cheeze-ugh, pete-zah." I spoke Japanese. They understood me. The waiters always run at izakayas. It's fun to watch. Then everyone got lame and wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go do more karaoke. I missed the last train back to where my hostel was so I went back to Lindsay's place and watched 50 First Dates with Sarah. I'll admit, I liked it. Then I went to sleep, woke up at 5:30am and left to go back to my hostel. First things first, I stopped at the 99 yen store and got ice cream. I had been planning on ice cream at karaoke but since we never made it there I had been thinking about it all night. What I thought was vanilla with a layer of chocolate turned out to be vanilla with a layer of red bean paste. Totally not what I was in the mood for at 6 in the morning. Luckily I was able to peel the red bean paste off and save the vanilla.
So around 7 I got back to the hostel thinking I had totally out-cooled the other kids in the room. They stayed out till 6am the previous night but I stayed out until 7! Ha! I again prepared before going into the room so I could be as least annoying as possible. Then I walked in and saw no other backpacks. I guess they had checked out. I was back to being the only one in the hostel room. I went to sleep for a while, woke up, then left for the airport.
I got to the airport pretty early. My plan was to get there early, check my bag, then walk around. I like airports. But after waiting in line for an hour I got to the desk and the lady told me that there was something wrong with the plane. The flight was probably going to be delayed, but possibly canceled and becuase of that she couldn't give me my boarding pass. I would have to come back in an hour and see what they decide about the flight. I asked if I could leave my backpack somewhere, she said no. Lame.
Turns out the flight was fine and wasn't even delayed.
The flight was fine. The guy next to me was kind of weird though. It wasn't a full flight and a lot of the middle seats were empty so I was surprised when he came and sat down in the middle seat next to me. I had the window. I thought maybe there were going to be three people. But there weren't. And he never moved. Instead, we both worked to share the arm rest and the floor space. When we were getting off the plane I saw his boarding pass and he had the aisle seat! I don't know if he just likes middle seats, didn't know how to read his boarding pass or just wanted to be creepy.
Danny met me at the airport with a sign that said THE CAT EMPIRE!!!. Funny Danny, funny. I was tired and Danny had a presentation today so we decided to skip the hoppin' Monday night Hong Kong nightlife. Don't worry, we saw some drunk middle aged white people (either Irish or Swedish, couldn't tell) on the train. The Hong Kong people on the train didn't like them. From the train stop we took a scary minibus ride to Danny's university. I was scared. Danny was used to it.
Danny's dorm is like a dorm. His roommate is in Japan right now so I can use his bed. Cool. Oh, the girl's bathroom has a code. Danny didn't tell me this. So I went to the girl's floor bathroom and pushed the door for about 5 minutes. Then i walked away and then saw a girl going to the door, pushing in a code into a keypad next to the door and going inside.
Danny didn't know the code. Or any girls on the floor to ask. So I went back and waited until someone used the code, opened the door and then I ran in behind her. I'm sure she didn't think that was weird.
This morning I slept and he worked on a group presentation he had this afternoon. Then I went to classes with him! The first one was amazingly boring. Danny called it his "reading class or something." I think it was supposed to be Chinese Literature in Translation. The guy spoke English I guess but was really hard to understand. Danny told his professor I was getting my PhD at Madison in Chinese Literature. I tried to say that wasn't true but I don't know if he got that part. Then I fell asleep. Oops. But people in that class do it all the time, and I was a guest so I was even more allowed to. People also walk in late, leave early, answer their cell phones, talk during class, so sleeping was actually one of the more considerate options.
Oh Danny also drank the sake juicebox during this class. You know, to get ready for the presentation in the next class.
The second class was a lot more fun. It was an entrepreneurship class and there were 3 groups presenting their business plans, including Danny's group. The first group was going to start up a skydiving site. Their presentation was ok. The second group was going to start up a "customizable t-shirt" business. Oh my god. I never realized how much I knew about t-shirt production. And they didn't know any of it. They had so much wrong information and lacked so many really important details!! I could have asked so many questions that would have made them look really bad. Some people asked questions they couldn't answer which made me happy. I really didn't want them to get away with being so dumb. Wait, I'm not mean. If they were just dumb I would have just felt bad, but they based their whole presentation on them being funny rather than on actual information and everyone gave them As and A+s on the peer evalutations! That's why I would have liked to be able to make them feel dumb.
To be fair it was only a minor assignment and most of the class is made up of international students and I realize that 1) business plans are annoying and it's obviously hard incorporate everything into a 15 minute presentation and 2) sometimes quality work for class isn't a top priority when you're studying abroad.
So it was just a strange experience. I felt really smart. Thank you Party in the Park and The Cat Empire I guess.
Danny's group presentation went well. He was energetic (drunk) and explained the plan well. But then someone asked some financial info which made the professor notice that the CEO of the company was only making $30,000 Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) a year. It's about $7.75 HKD to the $1USD. Yeah, you do the math. Oops.
I think I'm going to go see if I can buy a cell phone now (Quad band, worldwide)! Stuff is cheap in Hong Kong!!! I got a huge salad with egg and tuna and it was less than $3, and bananas were so cheap ($0.25) I got two! Exciting! The entire train/bus ride from the airport to Danny's stop was no more than $4.
But first I'm going to stand outside the bathroom again.
The show was an all day event. Bands started playing around 2 and KS 48 went on at 6. Shinya put me on some discount list so I only paid 500 yen for a drink ticket that I forgot to use. The bands were fun. The place was pretty empty and I kind of felt bad for the first couple of bands but then when KS 48 went on the place filled up! It was so cool. They put on a really good show. The crowd loved it. I had fun. When the show was over I went to Vodofone to charge my cell phone (you get a little cell phone locker with a charger and set up a password, all for free!). When I got back they were in a meeting with someone important so I walked around and watched some more bands. Apparently the meeting didn't go well and they seemed to be in a bad mood when they got out. I decided I should probably leave. Shinya was going to have to go to work soon and the other guys were cranky. And Errol was staying at Lindsay's and they were going to do karaoke! So I said my goodbyes and walked to the train station with a really nice girl who knew English pretty well but didn't have an email address which I thought was strange. She took my email address for when she finally sets one up. Who doesn't have an emai addressl?
Then when I was waiting for the train Shinya ran up to me. He had been calling my name but since coming to Asia I tried to stop thinking that I was ever hearing my name called, so it took me a while to notice. But what a pleasant surprise! He works for Yahoo Auctions doing customer service stuff. He works from 10:30pm - 7:30am. He told me he was really tired cause he hadn't gone to sleep last night and now he wasn't going to get to sleep until at least 8am. I told him about Red Bull in the States.
The first train that came was going to where he needed to go to but not as far as I needed to go and he said he would wait with me. That was so nice! I was really happy. He's like an actual friend I think. He said it was too bad I wasn't in Tokyo longer cause he could have shown me around a lot more. That would have been cool. I realized that after being in and out of Tokyo for almost a month I really only know the Shibuya area.
Danny wants it to be known that he wants to be a unicorn. He told me to incorporate that into this blog somehow. There, I did it.
Moving on, by the time I got to Yokohama to meet up with Lindsay, Errol and friends they were already finished with karaoke!!!! And completely wasted. I hadn't had any alcohol but I was in such a good mood from the show and my talk with Shinya on the train I was able to act just as drunk as any of them. I sang Hanson in the street without any alcohol, microphone or music. I started too high and didn't last long. But the effort was fun.
We decided to try to get me drunk. We stopped at a 7-11 and I got a can of some beer and a juicebox of sake. I never made it to the juicebox sake. The beer was plenty. We went to an izakaya (place where you orders tons of appetizers) and I ordered a "cheeze-ugh, pete-zah." I spoke Japanese. They understood me. The waiters always run at izakayas. It's fun to watch. Then everyone got lame and wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go do more karaoke. I missed the last train back to where my hostel was so I went back to Lindsay's place and watched 50 First Dates with Sarah. I'll admit, I liked it. Then I went to sleep, woke up at 5:30am and left to go back to my hostel. First things first, I stopped at the 99 yen store and got ice cream. I had been planning on ice cream at karaoke but since we never made it there I had been thinking about it all night. What I thought was vanilla with a layer of chocolate turned out to be vanilla with a layer of red bean paste. Totally not what I was in the mood for at 6 in the morning. Luckily I was able to peel the red bean paste off and save the vanilla.
So around 7 I got back to the hostel thinking I had totally out-cooled the other kids in the room. They stayed out till 6am the previous night but I stayed out until 7! Ha! I again prepared before going into the room so I could be as least annoying as possible. Then I walked in and saw no other backpacks. I guess they had checked out. I was back to being the only one in the hostel room. I went to sleep for a while, woke up, then left for the airport.
I got to the airport pretty early. My plan was to get there early, check my bag, then walk around. I like airports. But after waiting in line for an hour I got to the desk and the lady told me that there was something wrong with the plane. The flight was probably going to be delayed, but possibly canceled and becuase of that she couldn't give me my boarding pass. I would have to come back in an hour and see what they decide about the flight. I asked if I could leave my backpack somewhere, she said no. Lame.
Turns out the flight was fine and wasn't even delayed.
The flight was fine. The guy next to me was kind of weird though. It wasn't a full flight and a lot of the middle seats were empty so I was surprised when he came and sat down in the middle seat next to me. I had the window. I thought maybe there were going to be three people. But there weren't. And he never moved. Instead, we both worked to share the arm rest and the floor space. When we were getting off the plane I saw his boarding pass and he had the aisle seat! I don't know if he just likes middle seats, didn't know how to read his boarding pass or just wanted to be creepy.
Danny met me at the airport with a sign that said THE CAT EMPIRE!!!. Funny Danny, funny. I was tired and Danny had a presentation today so we decided to skip the hoppin' Monday night Hong Kong nightlife. Don't worry, we saw some drunk middle aged white people (either Irish or Swedish, couldn't tell) on the train. The Hong Kong people on the train didn't like them. From the train stop we took a scary minibus ride to Danny's university. I was scared. Danny was used to it.
Danny's dorm is like a dorm. His roommate is in Japan right now so I can use his bed. Cool. Oh, the girl's bathroom has a code. Danny didn't tell me this. So I went to the girl's floor bathroom and pushed the door for about 5 minutes. Then i walked away and then saw a girl going to the door, pushing in a code into a keypad next to the door and going inside.
Danny didn't know the code. Or any girls on the floor to ask. So I went back and waited until someone used the code, opened the door and then I ran in behind her. I'm sure she didn't think that was weird.
This morning I slept and he worked on a group presentation he had this afternoon. Then I went to classes with him! The first one was amazingly boring. Danny called it his "reading class or something." I think it was supposed to be Chinese Literature in Translation. The guy spoke English I guess but was really hard to understand. Danny told his professor I was getting my PhD at Madison in Chinese Literature. I tried to say that wasn't true but I don't know if he got that part. Then I fell asleep. Oops. But people in that class do it all the time, and I was a guest so I was even more allowed to. People also walk in late, leave early, answer their cell phones, talk during class, so sleeping was actually one of the more considerate options.
Oh Danny also drank the sake juicebox during this class. You know, to get ready for the presentation in the next class.
The second class was a lot more fun. It was an entrepreneurship class and there were 3 groups presenting their business plans, including Danny's group. The first group was going to start up a skydiving site. Their presentation was ok. The second group was going to start up a "customizable t-shirt" business. Oh my god. I never realized how much I knew about t-shirt production. And they didn't know any of it. They had so much wrong information and lacked so many really important details!! I could have asked so many questions that would have made them look really bad. Some people asked questions they couldn't answer which made me happy. I really didn't want them to get away with being so dumb. Wait, I'm not mean. If they were just dumb I would have just felt bad, but they based their whole presentation on them being funny rather than on actual information and everyone gave them As and A+s on the peer evalutations! That's why I would have liked to be able to make them feel dumb.
To be fair it was only a minor assignment and most of the class is made up of international students and I realize that 1) business plans are annoying and it's obviously hard incorporate everything into a 15 minute presentation and 2) sometimes quality work for class isn't a top priority when you're studying abroad.
So it was just a strange experience. I felt really smart. Thank you Party in the Park and The Cat Empire I guess.
Danny's group presentation went well. He was energetic (drunk) and explained the plan well. But then someone asked some financial info which made the professor notice that the CEO of the company was only making $30,000 Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) a year. It's about $7.75 HKD to the $1USD. Yeah, you do the math. Oops.
I think I'm going to go see if I can buy a cell phone now (Quad band, worldwide)! Stuff is cheap in Hong Kong!!! I got a huge salad with egg and tuna and it was less than $3, and bananas were so cheap ($0.25) I got two! Exciting! The entire train/bus ride from the airport to Danny's stop was no more than $4.
But first I'm going to stand outside the bathroom again.
posted by beth at 11:53 AM
3 Comments:
Hi Beth,
I'm thrilled that we're in Honk Kong. I've always been curious about that crowded little area. Plus, I was a big " world of Susie Wong" fan when I was really young(very old movie).
I'm assuming you're in the same time zone-is the the weather the same? I imagine that you're still looking at fish head and intestine designs at outdoor markets. Have you found any really good chinese food there? Sounds like a silly question, but you know what I mean.
N.Y. 1, a local tv station is doing a feature story on all types of Toyko life- i.e apts, rent, transportation and jobs. It kind of reminded me of nyc,- lots of people in a hurry, expensive-kind of a cinderella thing going on since trains stop at midnight. People say the cab fare to far sections in Tokyo is really expensive.
I'm sure you'll have totally mastered the womans' bathroom code, and will be living comfortably. Looking forward to hearing all your Honk Kong adventures ( with accompanying pictures)
Love,
Barbara-Randy in Reno
Hi Danny -
I know life will be fun for Beth now that she's with you (although you should have gotten the bathroom code for her - but that's OK) ...and good luck with that unicorn thing.
Hey Barbara,
Hong Kong is an hour behind Tokyo. The weather is totally different. Really warm. There are palm trees all over the place and I wore flips flops yesterday. I think it's in the 70s. So far I've only eaten at the University's (mainly Western) cafe so I haven't done much real Chinese food eating. There is much less fish here. Last night I had chicken! It was amazingly bland. Also, Danny wrote an interesting blog about the language here. There's English and it's definitely a lot better than in most other Asian countries but it's still kind of off. Like instead of WARNING: WET PAINT it'll say BEWARE: WET PAINT. So, not wrong, just weird word choices. And in Tokyo cab fare anywhere is expensive. I only used a cab once and it was when I was in Niigata and we shoved 5 people into the cab and therefore split it 5 ways. The base rate is 660 yen (in Tokyo, 530 yen in Niigata) and since Japanese drivers tend to be really curtious and patient (to pedestrians and other cars) it takes forever to get anywhere and always ends up really expensive. But, as with everything else in Japan, it's really safe, they won't rip you off and always very clean. The drivers wear nice clothes and white gloves.
Hope this helps! And I've seen a lot more hanging dead ducks than dead fish since being getting to Hong Kong.
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