Trying to Be Cool

I finally pulled the trigger on my desire to delve further into family history. I am in Salt Lake gathering some great materials--including a journal where my grandpa says that while serving a mission in Germany in the late 1930s they prayed for Hitler in meetings (which the SS attended) and while tracting they greeted everyone with a 'heil Hitler.' A different time, I guess.

On the plane ride over I escorted Becky, the daughter of a friend, to Salt Lake so she could visit an "old" friend--as old of a friend as a third grader could possibly have. I will be honest, I was worried about being cool enough. I bought $40 worth of airport food to make sure she had enough to eat. I tried to get her excited about my iPhone games. I told her she could listen to contraband "adult" music. I tried to watch youtube with her. She wasn't very easily impressed.

Becky, of course, was really cool. One of the first things she decided to do was to get out a pencil and make a puppet out of her barf bag. She wrote the puppet's name, Franny, on the back and on the bottom wrote "I hope you feel better" and then tucked the puppet back in the seat pocket. We then made hand turkeys that she decided to turn into dinosaurs. As we wrapped up the flight, we took turns drawing mustaches or curly granny hair on everyone in the in-flight magazine. She would bust into uncontrollable laughter as she tried to hide her handiwork from the flight attendant making the rounds. Becky--great traveling partner and a great kid. I just worry if she thought I was cool enough.

Vegas

I dashed off on a poorly planned weekend trip to Vegas that, on balance, was just a lot of fun. Bingo figured into Friday plans and by the end of playing 12 cards per round for 7 rounds, I was visibly hot and flushed from searching and dobbing like a Golden Girl. I had Bingo fever. Le Reve at the Wynn was an excellent show and I am pretty sure it is lifted directly from someone's acid trip. Think Waterworld meets Dirty Dancing meets Little Shop of Horrors. Dancing both nights was fun--bass that makes your clothes vibrate, dry ice foaming out of the ceiling, and a dance-off between a cowboy with a faux-hawk who could pop and lock quite well and a baggy-jeaned brother who, well, just was having an off night. I could have done without a certain female friend who started throwing elbows into the backs of some embroidered-dragon-shirt-wearing Arizona bros in a way that made me look responsible. I just wish that my flight home wasn't delayed, that I didn't lose my favorite sweater (a brown wool hoodie, where do you find those?), and that I didn't leave my camera at home. Argh.

Kim & Wendy in Japan

So, on my whirlwind Asia trip following Chinorz & Manila, I swung by Japan to see college friends Kim (blog-less Hawaii Kim) and Wendy (English teacher in Japan Wendy). I only spent one real day with them--I took the bullet train down from Tokyo to Kyoto and stayed in a hostel with them. I forget what all the sites are called, maybe Wendy can comment in the, well, comments.


Umm, large temple complex...

The Golden Pavilion (that burned down a long time ago and was rebuilt, or something). We each gave our camera to a different person to take pictures at the same time, with predictable results.



Toji Castle, I think.



Umm, giant moat?



Sign says no smoking.



Perfunctory pear blossom.



Ambling along Kyoto's back streets at dusk.

Trying to get a group shot in some hall of Japanese sign-age things.

Large Japanese sign-age thing.



Perfunctory automatic bum washer at the airport. Love it.



Well, I guess that was pretty lame.

Manila, Philippines

After Suzhou, we moved on to the Philippines. Most of the time was spent in Subic, the old US navy base about 2 hours north of Manila.

The view from the home we were staying at. The building in the background at the right is where you can get breakfast, but only if you swim from the beach.


Hard at work during a prep session Saturday morning.


Caretaker's daughter.


With the exhausting prep session completed, we took Saturday afternoon to do some scuba diving in Subic Bay. I am open-water certified with PADI but ignored the depth limitations and did a 27 meter and 33 meter dive. The first was a WWII-era Japanese troop carrier. The second was the USS New York. (The Wikipedia link is pretty interesting, if you like that stuff. The ship was scuttled in December 1941 to avoid being captured by the Japanese) The second dive was swarming with jelly fish. The guide told us they were only on the top 3 meters. At 15 meters when they finally disappeared, I told myself to stab that guide in the kidney. I was stung a number of times on my face--nothing life threatening, no urgent "please pee on my face underwater" requests were forthcoming. But discomforting nonetheless. Both ships have turned into artificial reefs. It is a bit surreal seeing fish swimming around 16" x 35' cannons.

Back at the dive shop we took some incriminating photos.

Airlines I Will Fly

Thirty minutes into a 15-hour plane ride and all I can continue to think about is "What is it about Asian airlines that makes them so great?" An outlet to plug in my computer on a plane, for one.

I admit my sample size is fairly small and I am excluding certain data points. Royal Nepal Airlines gets cut for thinking even though the weather radar failed, they could still make it fine back to Nepal from Bangladesh. That was not the case as I saw my dinner levitate in the air above me when we hit a thunderhead and the plane suddenly dropped a few hundred feet. Turning around to Dhaka, bad. Putting me up in a coach-roach laden hotel, very bad.

Air Pakistan gets the boot for confiscating my Discman batteries and my being picked up in a truck at the airport in Lahore (my host family had been car-jacked the previous day). Well, maybe that is not really Air Pakistan's fault, but at the very least they should have looked into branding their airline better.

Thai Airways, on the other hand, has always been a prize-winning plant. First, handing out dried, fried octopus instead of peanuts is pure genius. You don't even half to like it, you just have to appreciate that you are flying over the Himalayas eating octopus.

In misplaced patriotism (or just successful lobbying) the State Department will not fly a foreign carrier where a domestic one is present. So for much of my time traveling (not time-traveling), I was stuck with flying a domestic carrier as bloated and sour as their stewardesses. Cramped quarters, short-tempered stewardesses, bad food--your standard airline complaints.

Contrast that with my customer service experience at Cathay Pacific--the gate agents and counter agents practically fell all over themselves greeting me, checking me in, answering my every question. Sure they "lost my bag" and "they didn't know which city it was in" but they "felt really bad about it." It is all in the presentation--an agent approached me at the baggage kiosk, asked me who I was and confirmed that my bag did not arrive. He walked me over to his supervisor who had $500 HK ($70 US) waiting to give me so that I could buy toiletries and told me that I could file an additional complaint for the price of a new set of clothes so I could attend my meetings. (Which thanks to Zara I was able to do in an hour for $250 US--quite a feat in Hong Kong).

Finally, we come to my new love, Korean Air. I admit my class of service, in airline parlance, is a step higher than normal, but let me just detail why thirty-minutes into the flight I am forever converted.

First, free internets at the lounges (really pretty standard, but I feel like the internets should always come first). Second, the main steward greeted me when I sat down, knew my name, bowed very low, and thanked me for coming on the flight. We chatted for 20-30 seconds. (Eat that America.) Third, hot stewardesses. Cliché, I know. Chauvinistic, I know. But, men, am I wrong? Am I wrong?

Fourth, in-flight entertainment and it deserves its own paragraph. I haven't really explored it that much, but every seat (even the prolls in coach) have their own screen. Movies, corporate programming, music, updated tracking maps, and views from bottom and front-mounted cameras. Games like you would expect a South Korean would have. What, you want to play multi-player--NO PLOBLEM. What better way to cross the Pacific than to get in your base, killing your dudes? How ironic that just as my flight is tracing the path Soviet bombers would take over the pole, I can play a video game Ruskies created (and the west stole and marketed to great effect and profit).

Finally, the chair. These is probably more a function of a better class, but United is not pulling ish like this on their long-haul flights. Twelve-million degrees of adjustment, including into a fully reclining bed, built in massage capabilities, and a power plug. I could blow-dry my hair right now. I am not going to, but the point is, I feel more secure know that I could. Instead I will do work most of the flight. And blog. I love it. Now