13 posts tagged “travel”

My baby sister has just had a funny adventure in Cambodia. Well it's funny now because nothing really happened to her.

Until two weeks ago, she'd never been in a casino in her whole life. She does love beer though, and she's no idiot. So after winning money and getting free beer at the black jack table, she was hooked. She won money every night, and she went to the casino EVERY NIGHT!

She had fun, she got free beer, she met some fun kids/fellow gamblers. She even met a nice older Korean guy, a generous high roller. He invited my baby sister and her friend (an American guy) out to an expensive dinner. They accepted, "yay, expensive dinner, awesome!"

Of course, the night turned into a complete disaster. The Korean "businessman" was actually scary gangster who was also completely INSANE. He started speaking in scary drunk gangster Japanese and threatening to kill my little sister's male friend, who was scared, despite being ignorant of the fact that his life was being threatened! And this is just half the story (hostesses, and other things also made their appearance).

They ultimately made it home safely. I didn't find the story that amusing. I mean that gangster guy has obviously spent way too long in a consequence-free world.

My little sister's American male friend spent the next day emotionally and physically recovering (he also had a hangover). When my little sister told him what the gangster had been saying, I think he got even more exhausted. "Am I going to be beheaded now?" he asked. "Not if we stay away from the casino," said my little sister.

So that's the beginning and the end of her days as a gambler.

Hiked up a bunch of domes. Yosemite is all about the domes, and they're cool.

Swam in the most awesome stream ever on the hottest day ever.

Survived without the internet for four days. People, this was very very hard. On the second day I started having really freaky dreams.

Saw a bear! It was running really fast.

For some reason, went to see the circus is Fresno. Mariko wanted to go. Surprisingly entertaining.

Had an eye full of lots and lots of wild west dessert space. There is so much space here. There's so much space in the world. The world is just so damn huge. There is just so much I can do.

And I just want to do it all!

I'm off on the Amtrack tomorrow, going to visit the rich non-relatives. Should be a good time. I'm packing my bikini, my electro gadgets, some work, and some prezzies. I'm gonna swim in some lakes and hike up some mountains and I'm not even going to complain while I'm doing it!

I'm also gonna see my mother too, and perhaps my second oldest aunt in 'frisco. 

I'm in LA.

Whew.

I miss Tokyo.

You can't ever leave Tokyo. I love how some people pretend that they can just move on, but you can't move on from Tokyo. You'll always go back.

Best Friend said as much when I was leaving. "You'll be back. Tokyo's not the kind of place you can really leave." She should know. When she tried to leave she kept coming back every few months.

Caught up on all my fellow voxers. Good to see everyone doing well.

Very jet-lagged at the moment, so will now go to sleep.

It was weird hanging out with Marty the photographer in NY. We used to hang out together every single day, and I got really used to having my picture taken all the time. And it wasn't just me, she took pictures of EVERYTHING. At first I wasn't into having unflattering super close ups of my face while I busted a gut and stuff like that. But now i think it's kind of cool that the funnest years of my life so far are so well documented.

I found some old photos of us from those fun days in Marty's apartment. "Marty, we were so cute, and we didn't even know it!" was my reaction when I saw a picture of us looking tanned, young and happy. Youth is so wasted on the young.

She had a good time taking pictures of our hair dying disaster. When I woke up with pink and blond stripy hair, Marty started snapping away and laughing hysterically. When I glared at her through my tears/laughter and tried to tell her to cut it out, she looked at me, held back a burst of laughter, and took another picture.

Oh how I missed her.

For photo stories, I've seen her literally sit right next to people and take a close up of their face when they turned around to look at her. "Ahhhhh!" yelled one victim.

I love her. How can you not love someone that makes you laugh all the time?

Remember the 29-year-old Japanese salaryman who kept talking to me on the flight to NY? The one I gave the book to? I forgot that we exchanged business cards, and he just emailed me. He's probably bored as all hell out there. He said that he can only use the internet at work, so he can only email when he thinks nobody's looking at him. How sweet.

Just as I thought, my boss thought I skipped town because my phone was disconnected (I didn't pay it before I went to NY). So I don't have to go to work until the end of the week. Bye bye money!!! The one good thing about being a workaholic is that I always have more money than I need, but now that I've totally become a lazy non-working girl, I've seen my money just disappear. All my money's gone!!! I think I'm gonna have to start living like a poor person again.

Marty (photographer who dyed my hair disastrously) makes as much as I do on a good month at the club, and she has a real 9-5 job. A surprising number of old friends have become lawyers. Best Friend's book deal has made her a little bit of money too. (In totally unrelated other news, have you read Bar Flower, the best book ever, yet?) My grown up friends are making REAL money. Then again I do have a lot more freedom than almost anyone I know. I can just not show up to work, I can take as much time off as I want, blah blah blah.

However, I'm pretty restricted when it comes to my social life, and in my dating choices.

In that book I read about the MIT kids beating the system and winning millions in Vegas (21: Bringing Down the House), they talked about people REALLY making money. I mean they made millions with their crazy little math-whiz brains, card counting at black jack. But the strippers and hookers and companions were making serious money too. If I was working in a brothel in Shibuya making the equivalent of 300dollars a day, I'd be really pissed to know that my counterpart in Vegas was making 3,000dollars for working less.

I guess the lesson of the day here is that Vegas is the big time for sleazy work. And the other lesson of the day is money for money's sake gets old really fast. I need to grow up and get a real job.

Spent the whole day dying my hair! Hung out with my good friend Marty the photographer today. We're good friends from way back when. She's American, but she used to live in Japan down the road from me. We always have fun together.

She lives in Brooklyn now, and works for a huge news agency as a photo editor (go Marty! When did all my friends grow up, anyway?). It's been over five years since we lived near each other, but we must have reverted to our old immature ways, because for some reason we peroxided our hair! But it just turned out terribly! So we went back and forth to some place called Ricky's that sells professional grade hair dyes, trying to fix our heads. I now have red hair. Like the color red. But it's kind of blond and orange in parts. I just can't handle it anymore. I look trashy and punky, when I want to look classy! The mama of the club is going to poo her pants when she sees me. I'm gonna do the same after I dream that my hair's back to its beautiful shiny blackness tonight, then I wake up tomorrow and see what my hair looks like again.

I think I'm going to buy a box of dark red hair dye tomorrow. No more Ricky's stuff. Or maybe I'll just live with this head for awhile. (><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)(><)(; ;)

Books I've read/movies I've seen this past week while on vacation. Some were by choice, some were not. All were worth my time.

陰日向に咲く (Kagehinata ni saku) by 劇団ひとり(Gekidan Hitori). Very good, and a very fast read. If your Japanese is good but not quite super fluent, and you want a challenge, try it (I'm talking to you, Hopeless in Saga Prefecture)! It's a bunch of interconnected short stories about people struggling in Tokyo. Starts with a salaryman that decides to free himself from the cage of society and become homeless, then just keeps getting deeper and weirder. I guarantee you'll recognize yourself in at least one of the characters in this book. And it'll hit you so close to home.

I finished reading it on the plane, then gave it to the Japanese salaryman who wouldn't shuttup that was sitting next to me. He was 29, and he was on his way to a three month stint in Virginia. His boss told him that he was being sent there last week. Being the corporate samurai he is, refusing wasn't even an option. But he said to me, "I'm saying goodbye to my 20s in Virginia, what am I doing with my life?" Poor corporate samurai. He felt like the salaryman that becomes homeless in the book. I had to give him the book so he could finish it.

Candy Girl by the incomparable Diablo Cody. Man, she does not spare any gory detail in this memoir of her year as a stripper. And when she says she threw herself into a world of sleaze, she really did. she stripped in dive bars, she stripped in high class clubs, she spread her legs wide and showed her goods all over the place. She even took a break from stripping and did shows in a glass box for a few weeks. Supremely honest and entertaining. Side note -- what's with dudes going commando and coming in their pants at strip clubs? Come on boys...

The Heroine Diaries by the also incomparable Nikki Sixx. The also gory and detailed, but incredibly self-absorbed and unhinged diaries from a year in the life of everyone's favorite rock star junkie during the height of his junkie years (keeping a diary while you're strung out is a truly exceptional commitment to being a self-absorbed rock star). I always had kind of a crush on him. Probably because he looks like he couldn't give two sh**s about you, but you still want to save him. What is wrong with girls? Who teaches this to us? My own issues aside, this book was fun, and even uplifting.

Fear and Trembling the movie. It's in French. A girl spends the first five years of her life in Japan and has a life-long love for the country, until she takes an entry level position with a major Japanese corporation and returns to the country of her birth as an adult. It's scruffy but lovably klutzy young French girl against stiff and uptight Corporate Japan. Who will win? If you're Japanese at all, you might feel embarrassed and incensed by the biased portrayal of the country. But Best Friend's dad rented it especially for us, so I kept my judgment to myself and ultimately was entertained.

Hung out with my Russian friend Sabrina yesterday, spent the night at her house. She lives in Manhattan with her Japanese pimping boyfriend. He's a Kyoto guy with a tattoo (I saw it this morning when he was half awake, ha!). He hates Tokyo. I called him on it and he didn't deny it. Kansai people always hate Tokyo.

Their apartment is really cool. You can see the water and Ellis Island and if you could see through the big building in the way, you'd be able to see the Statue of Liberty. Anyway it's very cool. And ridiculously expensive. She pays one third of the rent. He pays the rest, but it's unfortunately half his salary, so now he's living like a poor boy. Sabrina didn't find out until after they moved in that 2/3 of the rent = half his paycheck. She was like "he could say no, why he did not tell me?" I think he was scared to say no.

So I had to keep my mouth shut about the fact that I watched Sabrina spend almost the equivalent of her share of rent on clothes that very evening.

Sabrina brings new meaning to the term shopaholic. She's chronically under-paid, yet goes on shopping sprees buying dresses for hundreds and thousands of dollars. Yesterday I had to do my best to convince her NOT to buy a green, 400dollar dress that made her look like a big giant balloon. She bought it. She also bought 160dollar green shoes. She immediately returned them though. Then I went back to her place and she fed me chicken liver (ewwwwww) and cabbage, and showed me pictures from her Birthday, from New Years, etc. "That dress was 2,000dollars, and that dress was 500dollars" etc., it was insane. She's some kind of financial planning genius, because she always manages to survive. She always looks amazing though.

Her boyfriend said that when he takes her out and she's looking all sexy in heels, she's taller than him, and he feels like everyone's staring at them like "what's that little Asian guy doing with HER?!" I think he's cute, and he's fine. Who cares if other American guys are big and tall. Big and tall's not necessarily a good thing. Anyway, her boyfriend's bigger than mini Boxer.

So I'm off tomorrow morning for New York. Have an annoying three hour stopover at Detroit, and god-willing, without any delays, I should be in JFK right around midnight.

I'm trying not to think about the sore back and neck I'm going to get.

My best friend's getting married!!!!

See you guys in two weeks.