DanT1999

I’ve never been very close to my family since I left for university and then to start my own life and career in LA. A couple of years ago, my family came closer together briefly around the time my mom passed away after being ill with cancer. I had the opportunity to bond with my half-brother who was twelve years younger than me and starting his junior year of high school. Despite not seeing much of each other most of the time he was growing up, we had a surprising amount of common interests and eerily similar personality traits. I promised him we would go on a trip together when he graduated from high school…

So, I kept my word, and after he graduated last June I offered to take him to New York since he had never been out of state and he was interested in theater. I had also never there, so I thought it would be fun to discover a new place together…

I previously wrote about my experiences in New York on 43 Things; see the links below:

http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3431963
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3425906
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3430851
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3425201
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3425089
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/3421203

I did learn more about my brother during the trip (good and bad), and there’s always a bit of a challenge in getting used to other people’s habits spending a few days with them after not having previously spent much time so closely together. I think we did grow a little closer though not to the point of becoming “best friends” or anything like that, and I didn’t realistically expect (or necessarily) want that either. Besides the years of being apart, the age difference is also a factor, and I think it seems I’m more like an authority figure/mentor than a friend…

Anyway, what I remember most about New York is the time I spent with my brother (including the time spent in the hotel room watching the Olympics and discussing the upcoming election). I liked New York, but it was so expensive. I almost wish I would have chosen a more affordable place to visit together…

I went to a business meeting for 2 days in June 2005 in Hartford, Connecticut, on the east coast of the USA about halfway between NYC and Boston. Hartford is known as “insurance city”, as over 40 insurance companies are based there. I hadn’t been to the east coast since I was a teenager, so I was pretty excited about going back. Let me tell you though, if you ever plan a trip to the east coast of the USA, avoid Hartford like the plague!! Stay in New York or Boston, but don’t go to Hartford! For being such a prominent city for the business of insurance and the capital of the state of Connecticut, I was shocked to see how run-down the city was, and I didn’t feel that safe walking around there in the evening. The capital building was nice, but it’s hard to find anything else redeeming about the city. It is very poor, and there seems to be a gang problem, and there are police everywhere. There are no good restaurants and all the shops seem to close by 7PM. The summer weather is even very hot and unpleasantly humid. I feel fortunate that most of my time in the city was spent in the safe, air-conditioned conference room of a hotel. Lots of people work in Hartford but most of them live outside of the city (and I don’t blame them at all!) and commute there to work from the suburbs. The nice, talkative taxi driver who took me back to the airport (I remember her particularly because she said she couldn’t believe I was 27 and that I looked like a teenager and too young to be going to Hartford for business… this was the highlight of my trip) said she felt bad that Hartford is the only encounter many people have with Connecticut since Connecticut, she said, is actually a beautiful state… I don’t doubt what she said because from the parts outside of Hartford that I did see, I get the impression it is a very nice place with green everywhere, and I hope that in the future I will have to opportunity to explore the rest of the state…

My first time in Schiphol was in July 2000. I was 22 years old, and it was my first time traveling abroad. My pen pal Volker in Berlin, who was the same age as me, had invited me to spend a couple of weeks with him as he had just gotten his first apartment of his own. Since, I myself had been working in my first real job out of university, for the first time I actually had money to travel so I was excited at the opportunity to see another part of the world and to finally meet someone whom I had only known through letters the previous five years.

The best price I was able to find for a flight out of LAX to go to Berlin was on Martinair Holland to Amsterdam with a connecting flight on KLM to Berlin with an hour layover in between. It was my first time traveling so I didn’t realize then how foolish it was to leave such a short time between connecting flights. I started getting nervous in LA because the flight was delayed about half an hour before takeoff. Plus, I didn’t realize that I would have to go through customs in Amsterdam and recheck my luggage before going on to Berlin.

When I did arrive in Amsterdam, I though I might have just enough time to catch my connecting flight. The line through customs moved more quickly than I had expected. I had never been through customs before. The lady at the desk, who spoke English (I was worried about having language difficulty), just asked me what the purpose of my trip was and then stamped my passport with its first stamp. It seemed too easy. I proceeded to the baggage claim area where I realized there was no way I was going to make my connecting flight since it took forever before my bag finally came out. While waiting, I heard an announcement requesting that the passenger from Los Angeles report back to customs. “Which passenger?” I wondered to myself briefly. I may not have been paying full attention to the message since I was worried about rebooking my flight to Berlin and what Volker, who was supposed to pick me at the airport in Berlin, would think when I didn’t arrive on the flight I told him I’d be on. Since we never met before, I wondered if he’d think that I just stood him up.

After I got my bag, I went to the KLM desk and booked the next available flight, which would leave in a little over an hour, and rechecked my luggage. There were KLM flights from Amsterdam to Berlin every two hours. The ticketing agent didn’t even ask to see my ID or anything when I was checking in, which kind of surprised me. I felt relieved and thought the next thing I would do is try to call Volker, whom I had never called before, at the number he had given me and let him know I would be late. I also checked that I had all my documentation in order, including my passport. Suddenly, I was overcome with panic. I couldn’t find my passport anywhere!

What do you do when you lose your passport? The first thing I did was go to one of the information desks in the airport. When I asked the woman behind one of these desks if she spoke English she seemed almost offended. At that time I didn’t realize just how widely spoken English was in Europe and that the Dutch in particular pride themselves on their linguistic abilities. In any event, she told me that losing my passport was a very serious thing and that I needed to report it to the police. She told me where the airport police station was.

I was beginning to panic that I would be stuck in the Netherlands or have to pay a huge amount of money resolving my passport issue. It seemed like my trip was ruined before it even really started. I was a grown adult, but I still felt like a helpless teenager. When I got to the police station, there were two young officers behind the desk. One was a handsome young guy who looked typically Dutch and the other was a black guy who didn’t speak English as well as the other. I didn’t appreciate the ethnic diversity of the Netherlands at that time. I told the officers I had lost my passport. They asked me when and where, and I said I wasn’t sure but I thought it was probably when I was coming out of customs. Next they asked me my name and where I was from, and I told them. Then, much to my amazement, they pulled out my passport and returned it to me. I couldn’t believe that someone actually had the decency to turn it in. The white officer told me that I was an extremely lucky guy because US passports are very valuable on the black market and warned me to be extra careful with it and to try not to lose it again. I said for sure I would be guarding it with my life. I felt as if I could have kissed him, that’s how relieved and grateful I was.

The rest of the time I spent in Schiphol before my flight to Berlin was pretty uneventful. I couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phone in the airport to make a call to Germany and let Volker know I was going to be late, and I was too shy to ask anyone how to. Fortunately, when I got to Berlin Volker was there. He was surprised and a little nervous when I wasn’t on the original flight, but the KLM agent, who wasn’t allowed to divulge information about passengers, implied to him that I would be on the next flight in…

I went to Victoria in July 2001 with my friend Dennis, whom I had actually just met a couple of days earlier in Vancouver. We hit it off unusually well, even despite the fact he was 14 years older than me. He was going to a town called Duncan on Vancouver Island for his high school reunion and didn’t have anyone to go with so he asked me if I wanted to tag along. Duncan wasn’t too far from Victoria, so I could explore Victoria while he went to his reunion…

Here are just some random memories and ramblings on my first night in Victoria:

The first thing I remember doing in Victoria is going to Eaton’s searching for clothes that could make Dennis look young at his reunion. A woman laughed when he came out of the dressing room wearing a bright orange shirt with navy blue cargo pants as he obviously looked like someone pretending to be younger than he was; he kept the pants but ended up getting a more conservative albeit colorful and bright blue shirt (he wore the shirt the first day he came to see me in California a couple of months later)... We went into a Bank of Montreal branch where Dennis had once worked at so he could make a withdrawal. He really got a kick out of showing me part of his past since he loved to talk about himself. We also went to a London’s drugstore to get shampoo and dental floss…

We found accomodations at the St. James Bay Inn, not far from the legislative building (Victoria is the capital of British Columbia). Dennis, having spent several years as a customer service manager at a bank, had an usual ability to deal with people in that fake sort of way customer service managers have of being sincere without really meaning it, so he was able to negotiate a good price (about $20 lower than listed) with the outgoing young hotel manager. The room we got was actually two connecting rooms, each with a separate bed and TV…

In the brief time we had before he had to board his bus to Duncan, Dennis gave me a whirlwind tour of the legislative building that rivaled that of an annoyed young female Asian tour guide who told him to be quiet since he was drowning out her presentation. At the time there was a drought on Vancouver Island, so the lawn in front of the building was yellowish. Dennis also showed me the main touristy streets near the harbor so that I would know my way around and get an idea of where I wanted to go.

After Dennis boarded his bus, I went out to explore the streets. It started raining and I had no umbrella since I absent-mindedly left mine behind on the ferry on the way over, so I had to buy a new one; I also bought postcards and a souvenir shot glass for my sister… I was hungry but couldn’t decide where to eat; I just went to a sandwich place to get something to bring back to the hotel room since I was tired and didn’t want to be out in the rain; I was still very sore and exhausted from all the walking I had done the days before in Vancouver and Edmonton during the first leg of my Canadian vacation…

Back at the hotel room, I took off all my wet clothes and got into bed and watched lots of TV, mostly Canadian programming I couldn’t see in the States or cable shows like “Sex and the City” that I couldn’t see at home since I didn’t have cable, before drifting off to sleep. I woke up around midnight upon hearing pounding on the door; I had to put on my pants, which were still wet from the rain and pulled a miscellaneous t-shirt out of my bag, as I climbed out of bed saying “Hold on, I’ll be right there!” I had put on the dead bolt locks on both doors as Dennis had told me to do when I was alone. When I opened the door, the night manager was with Dennis, and Dennis asked “What were you doing?” with big eyes and curiosity more than anything else. He had been knocking for several minutes, and I wouldn’t answer. I told him I was sleeping and that I was a very deep sleeper, which I am.

Dennis told me his friend Bert, who drove him back and who also attended the reunion, wanted to meet me. I wondered to myself why. Bert wore khaki shorts, which I thought was strange attire for a reunion and for the cool, rainy weather. The three of us ended up sitting/lying on one of the beds with me in the middle. I still had a sleep line across my forehead which I found embarrassing, and one of the guys said that it looked like I needed more sleep. Bert touched my hair when Dennis told him that I reminded him of their old friend Kevin, who had hair similar to mine. Needless to say, I found that weird. Bert lived on Vancouver Island and worked doing something for the government; he seemed older than Dennis although he was the same age. I talked about being from LA and found that he was unusually knowledgeable about southern California. Bert also commented on the Edmonton t-shirt I was wearing and said he thought Calgary seemed nicer (although he had never been to either city) and that perhaps he would like to go to Alberta sometime. When Bert decided to leave, Dennis and I walked him out to his car, and it was only lightly drizzling then.

On our way back to our room, we made small talk with the night manager at the front desk, an old man who had once been a science teacher but took the job at the hotel upon retirement about a year and a half earlier to be with his wife who had preceded him in retirement with a part-time job in Victoria…

I previously posted this entry on 43Things, but I thought it would be a good fit on this site as well, so here goes…

My first trip to Tokyo was in November 2006. In and around Tokyo, we visited several shopping districts (as shopping is a favorite pastime there), visited a couple of temples where one time we even got to see a traditional Japanese wedding, observed teenaged hipsters in outrageous outfits in a city park, ate at many interesting restaurants sampling a wide range of Japanese cuisine, went out to a couple of bars, witnessed a chaotic morning at a famous wholesale fish market and basically tried to soak up as much of the culture as we could.

It wasn’t so bad getting by without much knowledge of the Japanese language. One thing that really helped was that most restaurants had pictures on their menus that we could simply point to when we ordered. Hardly anyone spoke really good English, but it wasn’t too hard finding someone who could understand at least a little when we needed help with something. We did pick up a few Japanese phrases, and who knows, I may now be inspired to pursue further study of the language.

The most convenient, yet frustrating aspect of Tokyo is the subway and rail system. It is unbelievably complex, and it was very easy to get lost or go onto the wrong train. What’s more is that sometimes the route maps were in Japanese only without the corresponding roman characters. During rush hour, the trains are under siege by a homogeneous army of black-suited men heading to or from a long day at the office. While the subways and trains are packed, interestingly hardly anyone speaks. People are reading books or magazines, playing with electronic gadgets, are lost in thought or snoozing. Our hotel was near Shinjuku station, which our guidebook said was the busiest station in the world with over two million people passing through everyday. I had never been in such a hectic and congested place as that station, yet like every other aspect of Japanese life I had witnessed, it was very clean and highly efficient.

Here are just some other random observations of Japanese culture from my (perhaps flawed) perspective… When eating udon (a Japanese soup with thick noodles), slurp loudly as eating this dish silently is like saying you don’t think it’s delicious. When you make a purchase in any type of store, you present your cash is a small tray only for the cashier to place your change directly in your hand (go figure). Tipping is not part of Japanese culture, so don’t leave one (I can get used to that!). If you’re a woman over 25, it is difficult to get into a professional career or even get married as this is still a male-dominated society where young women are expected to quit their jobs after the wedding and stay home with the kids. Men, younger ones in particular, are overall more feminine than in America. Fashion, hair-styling and accessories (including handbags that often look like women’s purses but are intended for men) are not just a female preoccupation! Short skirts with long black boots seem to be in style with younger women, who apparently wear outfits like this even to work. This is a society where appearance matters.

Needless to say, I would definitely go back!

I previously posted this entry on 43Things, but I thought it would be a good fit on this site as well, so here goes…

I visited Hong Kong for 8 days in late November/early December of 2005…

I stayed in Mong Kok at the Langham Place hotel, which felt pretty luxurious and was reasonably priced and had excellent views. I recommend staying in Mong Kok because relative to the other areas I visited in Hong Kong, Mong Kok is somewhat less touristy and grittier. Just outside of our hotel was an open air market where I saw a woman at one of the stalls casually decapitating frogs that would end up in someone’s soup for dinner that night. These open air markets are pretty cool. You see many different types of meat and vegetables and other stuff that you would never see in a Western market and stuff stored in conditions that would never be acceptable to health inspectors in California. You will see many different types of food unusual to Westerners. It was kind of interesting to walk past one restaurant to see a stack of empty turtle shells in the window. However, it wasn’t too hard to find good vegetarian food. There are many buddhists in China that follow a vegetarian diet and come up with pretty good imitation meat dishes.

One thing that struck me most about Hong Kong was the commercialism. I expected some of that since Hong Kong is known to be one of the top financial centers of Asia. I was still surprised to see so many high end stores like Prada and Gucci all over the place. Even the airport is like a luxury mall. Many of the living quarters I saw seemed tiny and modest, so it was difficult to imagine how this economy could support so many high end shops. I saw lots of Filipino and Indian immigrant workers that seemed to be relegated to a sort of second-class life.

English is one of the official languages of Hong Kong, and it generally wasn’t too difficult to get by in English. English seemed most common in the Central district. However, there were some places, especially the more outlying areas where it was kind of a challenge to find English speakers. I got motivated to study Chinese after leaving Hong Kong!

The public transportation system is excellent, especially the subways. It’s not so fun to ride the buses, however, especially if going to a more isolated area. The roads are windy and the drivers are crazy. I almost got motion sickness on the bus.

The air quality is horrible. I went up to the Peak to get some good skyline views, but even on a clear day the visibility wasn’t so good. Otherwise, the weather in Hong Kong is very comfortable in the late fall. I’m told it’s unbearably hot and humid in the summer.

Hong Kong is I believe one of the most densely populated places in the world. Particularly at night the streets are jam packed with hardly any elbow room to be had. Just imagine the subways during rush hour… The nightlife is vibrant. I think that people live in such cramped spaces that no one likes to stay in and it’s more convenient to be out.

As an interesting side note, I ended up being sick with the flu during the first half of the trip, so I even got to see the inside of a doctor’s office. Seeking medical help in Hong Kong was a bit of a scary thing but it was actually a painless experience and the medications they gave me were very cheap relative to what you would pay in the States.

Hong Kong is a very colorful place full of disparities. I definitely want to experience it again.

These are my initial impressions from my first visit to Toronto, which was from November 28 to December 2, 2002. What follows is copied directly from a letter I sent to a friend five years ago describing my trip (sorry I’m too lazy to clean up and edit it):

One of the things that stood out for me about Toronto was how clean it was relative to LA. Like LA, the streets are congested (in fact I witnessed a fender-bender Monday morning) and parking is criminally expensive, but unlike LA the public transportation system is extremely efficient (though I think it’s better in Vancouver and cheaper, too). It was interesting to see how on a weekday morning the sidewalks downtown are crammed with people walking to work, a sight that you won’t get in LA. Hot dog stands (that even sell “veggie dogs”) are everywhere.

My visit to Toronto was as winter was setting in. There was some freezing rain Friday, and there were snow flurries over the weekend, but the snow didn’t really stick. I was happy anyway. Since I don’t really get to see snow very often I still get excited just to see the little flakes falling from the sky. The temperature ranged from as high as 5 degrees down to minus 8 degrees Celsius during my stay. I felt sorry for the homeless people who slept on the steam vents on the street to keep warm. I didn’t think there were any ferries going to the Toronto Islands, which are popular during the summer for their beaches. In fact, I didn’t really spend too much time near the water because I found that the closer to the lake I was the windier and colder it got. I did, however, get to see a giant fish swimming in the harbor. I think it was a pike.

One of the attractions I visited in Toronto was the Royal Ontario Museum. They had a temporary exhibit on high society women’s fashions in Toronto in the 40’s and 50’s. The outfits were donated by socialites of that time, many of whom happened to be Jewish. (I don’t know why, but I was somewhat surprised to find that there was a prominent Jewish community in Toronto. In fact, there was a very large, beautiful synagogue downtown.) There were many other interesting historical exhibits at the museum as well, but I just vaguely remember looking at a lot of vases and sculptures and stuff from ancient civilizations that all begin to look the same after a while. I was particularly impressed with the natural sciences exhibits (complete with very well preserved specimens and even a case of live bees busy at work) but was a little disappointed with the sparse displays on the peoples and history of Canada.

I think Toronto must be the closest to a melting pot I’ve seen. Sure, LA is very multi-cultural but the ethnic groups seem rather segregated (of course voluntarily) and Mexicans are easily the dominant group. Vancouver seems quite multi-cultural too, but it seems very Chinese. However, in Toronto I couldn’t tell if there was a clear majority ethnic group. Of course, Anglos seem to have a plurality but don’t seem to dominate. I was even surprised to see a sizable black population in Toronto. Although I saw the ethnic enclaves of Chinatown (much better than the ones in Vancouver and LA, in my opinion), Little Italy, Little India and even Little Portugal, the city as a whole doesn’t seem segregated like LA, but in contrast there seems to be more intermingling of the different cultures. In general, from all the time I’ve spent in Canada I seem to get the impression that Canadians are more accepting of other cultures than Americans.

While sometimes it seems like you’re still in the States when you’re in Canada, you can often notice a distinct European flavor in some of the architecture. I really liked the different buildings that make up the University of Toronto. Standing among them, I felt like I was in Europe. The university I attended looks really sorry in comparison. The parliamentary building of Ontario, which is across the street, was beautiful too, but I still think that Alberta has the most impressive of the provincial capital buildings I’ve seen in Canada (i.e. Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Ontario).

On Saturday night at the Nathan Phillips Square in front of the new city hall buildings there was an event called the Cavalcade of Lights, which lasted until about 11 pm. The fountain in front of city hall was frozen for the winter and made into an ice skating rink. There were hundreds of people there: old, young, families, couples, and teenagers. It was a really good time. I didn’t skate, although I could have rented skates if I were brave enough to. (I say “brave” because I’ve never been ice skating before.) A rather good local girl band performed mostly 80’s music, and there were booths that sold pizza and hot dogs. The trees around city hall were decorated with Christmas lights and there was a giant menorah with a couple of the candlelights lit to mark the number of nights of Chanukah. Spotlights of different colors shone onto the skating rink. It was beautiful to watch as snowflakes lightly fell in the multi-colored lights.

My favorite areas of downtown Toronto were Yonge Street (which seems to be the main hangout downtown) and Kensington Market (where I would shop there if I lived in Toronto). Down Yonge Street there are a lot of places to shop, eat and get entertainment. It’s where the Eaton Centre is, the big mall in Toronto. I don’t know what Sears is like in the Midwest, but in California Sears is considered to be one of the more “low-end” department stores. I was shocked to see that in the Eaton Centre, Sears was 5 stories high and carried all the very “high-end” brands. Kensington Market is a section of the city near Chinatown where there are a few blocks of dinky, almost run-down looking storefronts that sell a very eclectic mix of products. It seems like where the hippies go. There’s also a large gay community in Toronto, especially up Church Street. Interestingly, even in the middle of the financial district I saw a surprising number of lesbian couples (and even a couple of gay male couples) on separate occasions intimately embracing in public, and no one seemed to care (which is refreshing and as it should be).

From my short visit the general impression I get is that the people of Toronto seem to have a very fast paced life. They seem to be very materialistic and willing to spend money like it were water from the tap. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has noticed this as on Saturday there were a couple dozen people holding picket signs and writing slogans in chalk on the sidewalks in front of the Eaton Centre protesting against materialism as people poured into the mall to do their Christmas shopping. Yet, I think even in Toronto the people are not as cynical as the Americans. In contrast to LA, the area surrounding Toronto seems very flat with no mountains in sight, but much like LA there seems to be quite a bit of suburban sprawl. I bet it’s just as polluted as LA, too.

I seem to have reached the conclusion that in general the Canadian accent (at least the different variations I’ve heard) is halfway British. I guess it would make sense since written Canadian English is closer to British English and the fact that Canada has had historically closer ties to Britain than the States.

I want to go back to Toronto sometime again but probably when the weather is warm so that I can go to the beaches and maybe Niagara Falls, too.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on Toronto after one brief visit…