Chinese restaurant called TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

Good times.

New Favorite Song - Mushaboom

Feist - Mushaboom, from the album Let it Die. (download)

So many of you probably know how lots of the music I enjoy comes from movie soundtracks. In particular, I'm kinda in love with the Garden State soundtrack. I was even reading a forum the other day where there was a whole thread about other artists to look at if you liked that soundtrack. There were a bunch of recommendations, including Feist, who I had never heard of at the time. I became and instant fan.

Days later, literally days, the new ipod nano came out and the commercial was basically her music video for her song "1, 2, 3, 4", which is a good song, sure, but I was like... "fuck, now everyone likes her. I'm not hip anymore" So this song, which by the way is way better than "1, 2, 3, 4" is my swan song to the 2 days I was hip. Enjoy.

BTW, if her song had been "1, 1, 2, 3" him... well then... different story.

New Favorite Song - Paper Planes

M.I.A. Paper Planes (download)

So I'm sitting in Delta of Venus eating my Mexican scramble... no wait, I'm waiting in line about to order my Mexican scramble and soy decaf mocha and this song comes on. Delta usually plays some pretty eclectic stuff, so it's a nice place to hang out if you want to hear stuff you wouldn't normally hear. Actually, I'm not about to put my hip cred on the line here, for all I know, I'm the last person to have heard this song.

It's one of those songs that you hear and can't help but nodding your head to the beat. Remember that scene from "High Fidelity" where John Cusack's character throws on "Dry the Rain" by the Beta Band, and everyone in the store starts to bob along. You know, right before the shoplifter scene. Yeah... It's like that. Who doesn't love lyrics like:

No one on the corner has swag like us
Hit me on my burner prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas

The only problem is that I was just doing some video editing and had to download a David Hasselhoff song as a joke for the soundtrack which comes on right after Paper Planes if I don't catch it in time. Lame. So consider this my first installment of my New Favorite Song. Come back for more.

Burning man plans

Hey kids!

Just wanted to shout out (in the parlance of our times) to those of you 1) I know are going to burning man, or 2) I still may convince to go. I'm sure some of you already have plans, but I wanted to let you know my plans and invite any of you who were interested to join.

Look, I've got certain information, certain things have come to light, and uh, Avi and I are going to have a Big Lebowski themed camp, but probably a pretty casual attempt at it, quite possibly the laziest in black rock city. We plan on setting up a bowling lane, offering free white russians and sasperilla, (maybe some lingenberry pancakes) and setting up a generator/laptop/projector

/screen to show Big Lebowski... well... not nessecarily every night. I'm thinking of making a big sign calling the camp either Logjammin' or Gutterballs.

woh... lost my train of thought here.

Unfortunately, I'm probably only going to be able to get there Wednesday night. But I guess that's the way the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuating itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time unit-- aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again.

To get tickets (if you still need them) go to:
http://tickets.burningman.com/
they are currently $295.

Take 'er easy for the rest of us. Catch you further on down the trail,

-Andy

A Show With Everything but Yul Brynner

So we finally left the island about 2 days after we thought we would. I know, I'm in Thailand and there are thousands of other things to do, but... it's a very hard place to leave. I was even asking about internships at one of the dive shops (I'm horribly under qualified by the way). We spent the first 4 nights on the busy part of the island (between Tonsai Bay and Lodalum Bay), and then we moved up to Laemthong Beach for 2 nights on the north side of the island which is a lot quieter. This area turned out to be mostly honeymooning newlyweds so the three of us were a little out of place.

There are a handful of other small islands around the main island, and we hit a number of them, hanging out at the beach or diving. I was looking online for a map of all the islands to add here, but couldn't really find anything to my liking. I'll have to put together some sort of Google Maps/Earth travel map when I get back. Because yes, I will admit it, I've been using my GPS to track where we've been.

I did finally put some pictures up. Check out my Picasa web album to see them. I only uploaded a few of the many I took, because I usually like to go through and edit them before I post them, but I thought a couple of you might be anxious to see what I'm up to.

The bad news is that I didn't make it to Angkor Wat. Mostly because we stayed a couple extra days on Ko Phi Phi and I would have had to skip most my time in Bangkok. Brandon and Doug weren't interested so I would have had to make the trip to Cambodia on my own, which I might still have considered had it been super easy. I called around and checked on the web for tour information and was getting rather complicated and mixed results. I'm sure in the end I could have made it work, but I decided I would be fine spending 2 days exploring Bangkok instead.

Which is what we did. We got in really late so the first morning was spent sleeping in fairly late the next day. Doug went to meet his friend Chin who lives in Bangkok, and Brandon and I wandered around some of the famous shopping areas. Most noteable was the Panthip Plaza, which is 6 stories of consumer electronic shops, and the Chatuchak Weekend Market, which is a huge outdoor market where you can buy pretty much anything from food to cheap cloths to... pets. I wasn't feeling great that night, so I skipped out when the other guys went clubbing.

The next day we went to Wat Pho, the location of the famous reclining Buddha. Next door was the Grand Palace where we saw more temples. After that... more food, more bars, more walking, more temples. Then, a dinner cruise down the Chao Phraya River. Which can only be explained by this video I took.

Our last night we went to perhaps the most amazingly swanky bar I've ever been to. I took a couple pictures, but the ones on company site are much better. I can't describe it, you really should just look at the pictures.

We said goodbye to Brandon in Tokyo, and Doug and I are now staying with our old high school friend Bryan Hollar (remember that guy!?) . We just got here, so I'll post more latter. I'm having a lot of trouble with Bryan's Japanese keyboard, and every time I go for the space bar in the wrong spot my writing starts to 絵えいおえおあ or something. I have no idea what that says.

Editorial note: blogger is giving me trouble right now when I try to upload inline images so I've given up after just the two. I'll try to add more later.

Day 5 in Thailand

I found an internet cafe on Ko Phi Phi so I'll try to take a moment to post an update on my trip so far. Actually, it wasn't really hard to find one.

For a tropical island they seem to have plenty of them. You walk down the street (path really) and the stores go like this: Massage parlor ("Maasaaaage?? You want Maaasaaaaaage?"), tattoo parlor (you don't want to know how temped I am, if only to try to communicate to them how to do a tattoo of Euler's equation.), smoothie bar, dive shop, restaurant/bar, internet cafe, massage parlor and so on with the occasional souvenir shop tucked in.

There's so much to tell, but it's somewhat late, and I'm getting up for an early dive tomorrow, so I'd like to go to bed at some point, but I'll try to hit the highlights. As I mentioned in my last email, we were looking into the scuba diving, and once we got to Phi Phi island Brandon and I signed up for the 3 day course which gives you a lifetime certification to rent scuba gear internationally. Doug is already certified so he's been finding ways to entertain himself for the last 2 days while Brandon and I are in the classroom or out in the water. Doug is going to join us tomorrow, when we go on our last day of diving for the course. I've really been enjoying it, but completely expect that what my brother-in-law Neil warned me will be true: that as soon as you go scuba diving, snorkeling feels pretty lame. In fact today where we dived, there were a handful of snorkelers who were in the water near us, and I couldn't help feel anything but pity sitting on the ocean floor staring up at them desperately trying to dive deep enough to briefly see the fish up close. In just 2 dives today we saw a lion fish, puffer fish, moray eel, jelly fish (or something that looks like jellyfish), 2 leopard sharks (maybe 8 feet long), an octopus and a shit load of other crazy cool fish I've already forgotten the names of.

I can also see why this becomes addictive for some people, both scuba diving, and the whole island living thing. My instructor told me how she began working here. She originally showed up on the island to vacation for a week. She walked into a dive shop and asked them about doing a dive day trip and they asked her how much experience she had. She said she was a master diver and they asked her when she could start. "No, I'm just interested in diving today", "When can you start working?" the repeated. That was 3 years ago.

The island is nice but it is pretty tourist heavy. I'm trying very hard not become That Tourist. You know, the one who complains they heard such and such place was better before everyone found out about it and now it's super crowded without any trace of irony. But I still feel a bit of regret that it's so overrun, tempered with guilt knowing I'm just as much to blame. After a couple of days though, you just start to see through it, and you start to find the little things that make it feel more comfortable. The couple from Canada who you keep running into who are super nice. The amazing sunsets and natural beauty of the land. The bar you like on the beach that isn't so crowded, that serves white russians and pad thai, that plays a strange combination of electronic trance and Credence Clearwater Revival (trust me, it feels more natural then it sounds). Eventually you just kinda ingore all the rest that isn't going anywhere, but isn't really getting in the way of your experience anyway. Dear family and friends: be thankful I'm not a master diver (or have any other tourist industry skills), I'm not sure when you would see me again.

(Obviously none of these pictures are mine. Just like the Guatemala pics, there ones I shamelessly stole off the internet. The two landscapes are actually Ko Phi Phi. I'm hoping to buy a waterproof camera tomorrow, but I'm told the pictures don't really come out that well. And yes, I'm taking plenty of my own pictures as are Brandon and Doug, so I'll have plenty to bore you with later.)

Anyway, We leave on the 9th, and most likely straight back to Bangkok. We are going to try to get at least a day in Cambodia at Angkor Wat, but we've yet to figure out how that is going to happen. Hope you are all doing well. :)

Safely in Thailand

Hey kids! (and Lucas and Stacie who've made it clear they are adults and don't find myfamilial endearments clever)-

Quick note. I made it safely to Thailand. We flew into Bangkok where we spent the firstnight then flew into Phuket today. Tomorrow we are taking a boat to the island of Kho PhiPhi (insteresting fact: it was where the movie The Beach was filmed which probably meansit's going to be way over crowded). I think I am going to get scuba trained while we'rehere because I've heard it's slot more fun then doing it in the states.

Very little is planned after that until the 13th when we need to be back in Bangkok forBrandon's flight home (except we are going to try to pop over the border to Cambodia for acouple of days to see Angkor Wat if we can). Then doug and i fly the next day to Tokyo.We spend a week there then back to Cali in time for me to start the new job (assuming Iactually got it... Long story...er...long other story)