Archive for travel

違う場所、違うsnix

2010/06/29 at 10:50 · Filed under atlanta, boston, eww feelings, japan, life, tkd, travel

the past month has really shown me how much a change in location changes how i act. despite all the character building of the past year, i didn’t really act that differently when reintroduced to old, familiar locations.

for example, when i returned to stockbridge, i quickly readopted the unhealthy eating and lack of exercise that marks, well, most of the south, probably. i was almost certainly by far the smallest person i saw in two weeks of georgia, despite being on the large side of normal in japan, and one of the few who weren’t at least overweight, if not obese. (okay, so i did see a high school gymnast – a friend of a sister of a friend – who looked like a stick.) my house was dark and depressing, with the lights off and windows covered in the middle of the day. i tried exercising a couple of times, but the heat and humidity were oppressing, and i had no means to transport myself to any place where exercising wouldn’t be miserable. in the end, i gained at least a few pounds (1-2 kg) in two weeks.

to summarize being in boston: i still have real emotions. i still don’t know how to deal with them responsibly. seriously, i think everytime i return to boston, i experience a year’s worth of emotions in the space of a week. it’s kind of miserable, but keeps me sane for the rest of the year. (probably. hopefully.) also, i really miss doing tkd in boston. only working on sparring all the time is really starting to take its toll. i need an outlet for the side of me that wants to do technical, poomsae, pretty things. maybe this is the time to start shaolin kung fu. or any other martial art that doesn’t cost a lot of money upfront and doesn’t focus solely on beating other people up (i have sensei for that). but i really liked the way that kung fu felt during the one class i took.

in sendai, there are few emotional/social distractions, and i can focus on working and research and studying. what emotions i do have are fairly superficial and simple, and they’re usually pretty easily taken care of. at least, i know how to easily take care of them (whether or not i actually do so is a different matter). つまり、i’m the best snix i can be when i’m in sendai, so that’s why i’m still here. even if i’m secretly really boring.

ps, i really don’t like capital letters. i can deal with them when dispersed from other people, but it just looks weird to me when i use them myself.

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大阪より・・・福岡?！

2010/05/25 at 22:23 · Filed under food, japan, travel

Sorry, Osaka, but as much as I love you, I have this suspicious feeling that Fukuoka will replace you in my heart once I actually make it there. Lots of awesome food and, well, lots of awesome food. Like tonkotsu ramen. And yakitori of things that aren’t tori, like frogs and suzume? And lots of yatai. And gaijin food. Also, 木先生’s hometown. And おかまバー. Oh, I can’t wait until the 福岡旅行. :)

Unless Kyushu ends up being really awesome, though, Kansai will probably remain my favorite region of Japan. The world isn’t ending quite yet.

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b’z love

2010/03/07 at 02:57 · Filed under japan, travel, 日本語

I’ve had absolutely no desire to update recently, probably because I’ve been keeping myself occupied with a number of things. To boil down my life recently, I’d say that lab is going well, and I’m rediscovering both new and old loves.

On Thursday, I took a day trip to Tokyo for a concert. “Day trip,” for a poor post-undergrad in Sendai, consists of finding the cheapest night bus, spending time playing in Tokyo, doing whatever I bought tickets for, then taking the next night bus back to Sendai. Yes, this means I skipped a day of lab to go see a concert. The day before was a festival day, I justified to myself, so no one was in lab anyway.

But this was no ordinary concert.

Actually, it may have been. I only have one experience with Japanese concerts, after all (though I’ve been to two anime musicals at this point), and few concert-going experiences in general. Still, for me, no ordinary concert.

My love for B’z is a consequence of my love for Detective Conan, which is a consequence of randomly downloading anime music in high school. Both things are things I like that are incredibly well-known in Japan, but not so popular among people I know in real life.

I’d had the chance to see B’z at least twice before this point, when they were performing a lot closer to my location. Once in Osaka, over the summer, when I was beginning to run out of money, and once in Sendai, right before I left for Boston, when seeing concerts was the last thing on my mind, and I realized that they were close long after the fact. This week may have been my last chance to see them in the foreseeable future, and I’m glad I did it.

The reason I like them so much? I’d say it’s a combination of the emotion expressed in each song, as well as the sheer range of music they have. No matter what I’m feeling, there’s at least one B’z song to express it, and well. There are sad love songs, slow love songs, fight songs, motivational songs, training songs, Detective Conan theme songs, and they’re all good. I like them because their music is solid, and that’s all they need; they don’t need gimmicks to be popular. Yet, seeing them live added another dimension to their music. As intense as their music can be on its own, seeing it, hearing it live is that much more intense.

The concert focused on their new album, which… I hadn’t heard until the concert. I’m a bad fan. But even not knowing half the songs, the concert was still amazing. The songs I knew were that much more amazing. Even being in the cheap seats at the top of Tokyo Dome, the concert was still amazing. The special effects were amazing – fire, explosions, background imagery, giant screens for people in the cheap seats. I’m beginning to sound like Tara, aren’t I? ;)

Some things that struck me, in bullet point (because, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not too fond of paragraphs):

  • Inaba-san, the vocalist. His voice. His energy. The fact that, even at the end, he was still running around the stage to keep up the energy. The fact that he’s twice my age and in a lot better shape than I am (and looks it, too).
  • Matsumoto-san, the guitarist. There were many times that the camera would just zoom in on him playing things that looked incredibly difficult, and he’s just standing there, eyes closed, doing it all seemingly effortlessly. Watching him, for the first time, I felt like I wanted to learn guitar.
  • The gaijin playing other instruments! There were two gaijin – one playing bass and one playing drums. The guy on the bass had horrible Japanese; I couldn’t understand him at all. The drummist had decent pronunciation; he said something like: 皆さん、大丈夫ですか。僕は全然大丈夫！*pause* -_- (translation: “how’s everyone doing? i’m totally okay! …*fail*” except the word he used for “totally” is only used in conjunction with negative words. but i use the word in the same way. haha.)
  • In 愛のバクダン (ai no bakudan – love bomb?), there were giant black balloons circling around the crowd with a skull and crossbones and said “bomb” in English. Very… cute? Later in the song, there were normal-sized heart-shaped balloons.
  • The crowd was incredibly diverse. At the anime musicals, the crowd was 95% young Japanese girls. At the B’z concert, though, there were people ranging from pre-teen boys to old Japanese women. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the gender ratio was about even.

If anyone’s made it this far, I feel like I should at least offer some recommendations in apology for the length of the post (and this is the condensed version of my thoughts, even). Again, in bullet format:

  • 永遠の翼 (eien no tsubasa – eternal wings): music video + lyrics/translation. Power ballad. Probably my favorite music video, but seeing it always makes me want to cry. You don’t need to know the lyrics for the music video to make you cry, but it helps. (bonus: the guy plays ryoma in the prince of tennis live action movie)
  • いつかのメリークリスマス (itsuka no merry christmas – some merry christmas) music video + live + lyrics/translation. Speaking of songs that make me cry – at one point, just seeing the lyrics would make me want to cry. The music video could have been awesome, but instead is early 90s badness and desert shots (wtf?).
  • 愛のバクダン (mentioned above): live + lyrics/translation. A really fun song – one of my favorites. I really like the chorus:　(愛のバクダンもっとたくさんおっことしてくれ　ねむれないこの町のど真ん中に – drop more and more love bombs for me / in the middle of this sleepless city street)
  • Monster: live + lyrics/translation. One of their harder songs. Maybe my number one training/pre-tournament song, and the song I submitted to the tkd playlist. The image of a monster lurking deep within always puts me in a competition mood. (also, check out those abs. and those arms.)
  • 雨だれぶるーず (amadare blues – raindrop blues): live + lyrics/translation. As the name might suggest, more… bluesy? Inaba-san’s emotional and technical range in this song is ridiculous. The way the vocals and music blend together is also pretty ridiculous. It’s a very… compelling song.
  • 明日また陽が昇るなら (ashita mata hi ga noboru nara – if the sun should rise again): live + lyrics/translation. This is my general-purpose motivation song. All of the lyrics resound with me, but particularly the beginning: (明日また陽が昇るなら　新しい自分になってみよう　そんなこと思い見上げる　夜空はなんだか まぶしい　今日 君に会えてよかったと思う　もっと優しく なりたくなった – if the sun should rise again / i’ll try to become a better me /while i’m thinking of this / the night sky looks strangely dazzling // i’m glad i was able to meet you today / it’s made me want to become kinder).
  • 熱き鼓動に果てに (atsuki kodou no hate ni – the end of the heated beating of my heart) music video + lyrics/translation. Similar feeling to Ai no Bakudan, but more passionate? Song lyrics are hard for me to put into words. >.< Memorable lyric: (汗がひとすじ　頬をつたい落ちて – a single line of sweat / falls down upon a line on my cheek)
  • 今夜月の見える丘に (konya tsuki no mieru oka ni – tonight, at the hill where we can see the moon) music video + hd live +  lyrics/translation. An easy, romantic song. Memorable lyric: (愛すれば　愛するほど　霧の中　迷いこんで – as i fall more and more in love / i’m getting lost in the midst of a fog)

Hopefully, now I’ve gotten this out of my system a little bit, and I can focus on other things as well (lab and tkd and other things).

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flashback! boston

2010/02/07 at 19:46 · Filed under boston, nerdy analogy time, tkd, travel

Being in Boston was rather fun, in a manic-depressive way. I don’t want to bore the internetz with my mundane emotional issues more than I have already, so let’s focus on the fun parts!

As expected, the best parts of being in Boston were getting to hang out with people who are normally very far away and doing tkd. I’m normally rather bad about communicating with people who are far away, for whatever reasons, so it was nice to engage in some low-work social interactions. Especially with people who are still in school (which is… most of them), it seems like people I know are always busy, so I don’t really want to bother them unless I have some ulterior motive to contact them. (that sounds so ominous… hahaha)

Of course, since about 90% of my friends in Boston are Chinese, I ate a ton of Chinese food while in Boston. It was amazing. I hadn’t realized how much I missed Chinese food until there was so much in so little time. There was other food in my life, of course, like Miracle of Science with Risu-san and Longhorn Steakhouse (I know, right? I didn’t realize they existed in the north) with the MIT-Tsukuba contingent and California rolls with Carrington. And Anna’s. And boba! (which, I know, is Chinese) It exists in Japan too, I realized recently (mostly in Tokyo), but it’s usually more expensive for maybe half the volume compared to Boston.

On a side note, it was good to see that the Carrington variable in class snix_exes has been set to the pre-dating value. I guess the awkward_ex state can only be populated by up to one person at a time. Maybe this means that the snix_relationship_karma value has been set to zero. /end nerdy analogy

As for tkd… wow. A month of not working out (due to holidays + dojang renovations) left me unprepared for a week of tkd in Boston. It was good, though. I left with a good idea of where I am right now and some thoughts of things to work on. (and some new, painful ab workouts. thanks, master harb. :) <- only half-sarcastic) Here they are, in bullet format:

  • my long off-the-line turning kick is too slow for real-life sparring situations (so i need to work on throwing multiple shorter kicks)
  • i don’t motion unless i’m about to kick (i’m better about this in japan, actually. haha. i just need to keep motioning in the corner of my mind at all times while sparring)
  • i back up too much – usually when i’m thinking about throwing counters (this ties back to the second point)

I also learned that 15 minute sparring sessions with a person of similar level is probably more immediately beneficial for me, personally, than lots of matches with a number of people. Not that the latter isn’t useful. In the former, there’s enough time to experiment and really hammer out one or two moves and get them real-life-sparring-ready. I kinda wish that, in class someday (here or Boston), someone would announce “pair up with someone of a similar level, and for the next 10 minutes, just experiment and have fun in your match with them.” Especially since I don’t have access to the people – well, person – I would do this with, given the chance.

One last thing I took from Boston. At the end of my last class in Boston, on Friday, Master Chuang was addressing the club, especially the new people, and he said something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the extent of: “if you stick with taekwondo, and you work hard, you will improve. this isn’t the case with everything else in your life, but it’s true here.” It reminded me of why I joined the club in the first place. At MIT, it’s so easy to get caught up in the psets and exams and feel like, even if you work hard, you could still fail the next exam. Especially when you’re majoring in something that doesn’t come easily to you, like physics and me (before I stopped taking physics classes). Even I could start tkd, with my slow reflexes and my inability to think on my feet, and become decent at it. I’m continually humbled by my peers, and my senpai, and elementary school kids, but I’ve come a long way since I started 3 years ago. Taekwondo has truly kept me sane these past years, and my life would be completely different – and probably the lesser – without it.

Next part: Tokyo is freaking awesome and so are anime musicals~

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boston, part 1

2010/01/23 at 17:28 · Filed under boston, japan, tkd, travel

It started with a million hour trip across the world because I misestimated the amount of pain involved in a 12-hour flight with a multi-hour bus ride on each side. Actually, I missed the bus from Sendai to Tokyo, because I was waiting at the wrong part of the bus stop (apparently “Sendai station, east exit” is bigger than one might think). I ended up taking a more expensive bus run by JR that left around the same time, went to the same place, and was waiting at the part of the bus stop that I was. With the help of my “confused gaijin face,” the bus driver was convinced to try to call the bus company of the bus I was supposed to take, but to no avail. I’m not really sure what that was supposed to accomplish.

I had to chill out in Shinjuku broke for a while because the bus arrived before the station opened, and I’d spent all of my emergency money on another bus ticket (and the ATMs didn’t start working for my bank until 7:30 am). With the 300 yen I had left, I bought a train ticket to Tokyo, and secretly traveled to Funabashi, where I could transfer to the line that would take me to Narita Airport. I begged the attendant in the station to let me go find an ATM, since I couldn’t use the one in the station (region-specific banks = fail). I ran over to the closest convenience store, and bam! 7:30 am. I took out some money and made it to Narita Airport with no further trouble.

At the airport, I was patted down near the terminal at a security point made especially for flights to the US. It went by surprisingly quick and painlessly.

The plane ride was about as nice as could have been expected for a ~$500 ticket. ANA flights are pretty good, though, as far as travel to/from Japan goes. The plane I was on had four sections of varying quality, and of course, I was in the cheapest section, in the back, middle seat. At least I had a personal TV, and the bathrooms were big enough to stretch in when sitting became too painful. In addition, there was free Japanese beer – always a plus.

Once I arrived in New York, I BSed the subway to Penn Station, where I caught a bus to Boston that had internet that was incompatible with my laptop. :( Then, I was happily in Boston!

More later.

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