I’ve successfully arrived in Hong Kong with Team Ramen after a surprisingly comfy 14-hour flight and minimal disasters (thanks Foursquare and Twitter for helping us locate each other).
Despite Team Ramen picking Hong Kong and Singapore for our post-graduation travels, 95% for the dim sum and other asian cuisine, we also figured focusing on post-British-colonial-megaurban-Asia might uncover some interesting cultural mishmashyness.
So here we have it, episode 1, our elevator. Here’s the photo (from right outside our apartment), and let’s deconstruct below!
So the strange thing going on here (and props to Boyce for noticing this first) is that the numbers in Chinese and English DO NOT MATCH. It says “13th floor” in English, but the numerals in Chinese are for the number “14”. Um. Kind of strange that those do not say the same thing, right??
Except then we realized that we are “really” on floor 14, because looking at the buttons inside the elevator, there’s a G floor (where we enter/exit) and the next one up is 1, British-style. Apparently in Chinese it’s the same way we do it in America, where the ground floor is 1 and the next one up is 2?
So the answer to the question of “What floor we live on” would be:
14 – in Chinese
13 – in British
14 – in American, confusingly (for us) not listed on the signage, because this is a former BRITISH colony, yo. (So is America, but I’m pretty sure the Brits left before they could imperialize their elevator systems on us). Of course, in American we would also have to be on the 14th floor because there IS NO 13th STORY, DUH!! Did no one here read Sideways Stories from Wayside School?
While procrastinating on your senior thesis, buy plane tickets for 2 weeks to Philly. Tell Facebook immediately.
Make a countdown-till-you’re-in-Philly clock webpage, using your CS skillz for silly and not evil.
When the time comes, pack 7 outfits: 5 for daytime, 2 for partying only, and your workout clothes. Bring your makeup.
Have 2 groups of friends in Philly each with their own house in two different neighborhoods, and spend ~50% of nights at each house, in order to a) maximally confuse everyone as to your location and b) not wear out your welcome.
Head to New York with your Best Fucking Friend and one more friend, and walk around the financial district, realizing the friend you’re crashing with is an analyst on Wall Street and thus the 1%. Make jokes about how you will occupy his apartment tomorrow.
Notice lots of NYC stereotypes on the subway. [Pictured: businessman, sleeping asian lady.]
Sit on a bench and eat nuts from a street cart. Be creeped out by the squirrel who wants to get in on it.
Go out to dinner at Union Square with an old friend and her girlfriend. Meet up with a college friend who didn’t believe you were in NYC until you texted over some photographic evidence:
Barhop your way around the East Village. Talk to some strangers who turn out to be very strange. Take a cab.
In the morning, eat dosa from a street cart. Check into it on FourSquare.
Walk through Central Park. Climb a tree in a miniskirt.
Sit on the steps of the Met but don’t go inside — you can always do that all the future times you’ll be in NYC.
Actually occupy your friend’s apartment and sit in the dark talking all afternoon. Watch TV.
Go out at 10 PM. Get okonomiyaki at Otafuku because they’re sold out of takoyaki. Get free okonomiyaki because the dude who ordered earlier never picked up his food. Try to get into a bar on a Saturday night, but fail because it’s too crowded.
Go to Webster Hall to dance, and realize everyone there is 17 with fake IDs. Get danced on by a guy who won’t go away. Dance with a 50 year old man until it gets creepy instead of ironic. Fall in love with DJ Jess and his adorable antics and entourage of cute stripping manic pixie dream girls. Go upstairs to the 3rd dancefloor and sweat to Designer Drugs.
Leave the club. Go get Ukranian food at 4 AM and take joy in the fact that it’s as crowded in a restaurant in the East Village at 4 AM as it would be at 7 PM anywhere else in the world. Wonder if the couple next to you is on a date at 4 AM because they wake up this early or are still awake this late. Have some perogis and cabbage soup.
Toy with the idea of staying up all night and watch the sun rise on the Brooklyn bridge, but give up, subway home and sleep instead.
Wake up and go to BRUNCH at an overpriced but delicious place in midtownish. Tweet about brunch. Walk to Penn Station and bus back to Philly.
Meet up with friend group #2 in Philly. Catch up on the first chunk of a year’s worth of gossip. Hold a real gun for the first time. Watch your friends play video games. Finally shower and change. Head to the first of four parties that night, with EVERYONE.
Have ridiculous conversations. “Bread snob!?!?!! It’s not even good bread!”
Exchange scandalous stories in a group of people you know extremely well and those you’ve just met. Meet all the relevant new friends and girlfriends from the past year.
Hide in a room and try on tutus.
Head to the second party, then the third, then the fourth, which is where everyone wants to stay. Remember all the people you partied with a year and a half ago and have not talked to since. Talk about programming.
Watch a girl throw up on your friend’s shoes. Talk about Japan. Freak out that people are smoking cigarettes inside and putting them out on a wood floor. Don’t burn down the house, though.
The next day, don’t change out of your skirts and 3 inch heels and walk 2.5 miles to get dim sum. Go shopping at Anthro and buy some fleece-lined leggings because both your shopping buddies say they are amazing. Buy some $10 sneakers at Payless because you didn’t pack anything besides heels and your feet are sore.
Eat Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian anywhere and everywhere in Center City.
Don’t respond to emails for a week and a half.
Walk between the two houses you’re staying in and realize it takes 45 minutes – learn the bus routes between them. Sometimes spend too much money on taxis.
Watch 2 seasons of Misfits, mostly in your pajamas, and make eggs and toast and lots of tea. Become addicted to chocolate chip meringues that your friend’s roommate made.
Camp out in front of the space heater.
Watch Breaking Bad alone in a dark and quiet house and get extremely creeped out. Catch up to your friends and lie in bed watching Breaking Bad together this time. During the credits, shout out the chemical name of each atomic symbol that appears on the screen.
Get lots of sleep because you have no bedtime and no job.
Get five people together for ice cream at Philly Flavors, and then help a new friend move a bed six blocks. Walk with two people carrying the box-spring in front and three carrying the mattress behind. Wonder how this is the funniest thing that’s happened yet. Lust after a cool map in the room where the bed came from. Borrow a car and spend 20 minutes conjecturing about how to turn the lights on. Go get cheese fries afterwards at Sketch and have the worst food hangover the next day. Eat a cookie in the car and start a rumor that your friend stole it.
Take the bus once in your pajamas.
Take the bus once wearing pipe cleaners as glasses.
Talk to your friends about Sweden and what Zuck is like IRL, but attempt to stop yourself before they get too bored. Learn the names of two new Berlin DJs. Listen to people’s stories from work and be fascinated because they aren’t in your field, so how this all works is news to you.
Enjoy watching the current stories unfold over the 2 weeks you spend there.
Have a hard time explaining where you are from to new people. Possible options:
– NOT Philly
– Chicago
– San Francisco, soonish
– 2-hrs-south-of-Chicago-but-just-having-graduated-traveling-for-a-bit-and-soon-to-be-san-francisco
Go running by the Schuylkill River and run up the stairs to the Art Museum because Rocky did it so you have to.
Get your hair cut, restoring it to its fully natural color for the first time in a decade. Model yourself after a minor character from Misfits.
Be excited that the weekend is here again.
Hang out at friends of friends’ apartments in West Philly. Go to a house party in West Philly. Become surprised when someone you’ve just met asks you to produce five facts about yourself, and add that to your repertoire of slightly annoying icebreakers that can be delivered in a way involving minimal OR maximal cheesiness.
Go to a pirate drag party in Center City, dressed as a very androgynous Peter Pan. Dance at Raven and Voyeur. Don’t go to Voyeur before 2 AM on a Saturday. If you do, stop by for pizza next door.
Read 1000 Thought Catalog articles and obsess over Ryan O’Conn. Make a Shit Ryan O’Connell Says video.
Freak out when Ryan O’Connell tweets back at you that he likes your video. Scream a lot. Don’t care that no one else at the party knows who Ryan O’Connell is.
Hear stories about the parties you didn’t go to. Realize that there are too many decisions to make on weekends when everyone is doing different things. Wish you could be in 20 places at once. Talk to a really boring wingman at the club, who reminds you of Marshall Eriksen from How I Met Your Mother. Kind of wish you were still in Sweden where dudes don’t hit on girls in clubs.
Miss the days when more of your friends were students and didn’t have jobs and they could do stupid things all day every day with you.
Occasionally empty the dishwasher.
Use the following words: perf, trude, TWINSIES, “as per us…ual” and struggle with the spelling of that.
Eat way too much pizza.
Go on a capital-A Adventure on a Sunday afternoon. Use alliteration. Sneak onto some abandoned railroad tracks and take photos. Walk around abandoned industrial areas. Drive through North Philly and look at Temple buildings and don’t drive into sketchy alleys. Find “A Street” and drive down it.
Hop on an early morning bus with your friend to NYC again for roughly 24 hours because you feel like it. Gossip and spend a day in a Swedish cafe and make a playlist and look for apartments in San Francisco.
Village it up at night and realize NYC is crazy because not only are things crowded at 4 AM they are also crowded on Monday nights. Try on some $300 headphones and listen to a song you’ve never heard before. Realize hearing city noises in the morning is essential for your happiness.
Miss your bus and stand in the rain trying to catch another one to Philly. When you arrive, find the Korean Taco Truck.
Get your boots complimented on by a boy much younger than you while buying wine.
Do a photo shoot with random props. Sit at home and talk to people as they come home from work. Talk about your enemies from middle school and look them up on Facebook. Celebrate when they look like losers and rage when they look like mild successes.
Hug everyone and get weirdly emotional about saying goodbye even though you’ve only been here two weeks. Have traumatic flashbacks to leaving Sweden and CA this summer. Be genuinely surprised when more than one person mentions that they may one day come visit in San Francisco, because you’ve never lived anywhere before where people might want to visit.
Feel like you could continue living here as a bum indefinitely.
Eat some nutella before bed.
Remember to pack the dress you left here a year ago in your suitcase this time.
The concept:
– Put 2000 exchange students from around Scandinavia on a boat
– Get them really really drunk, whilst boat sails by night from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia
– Dump 2000 hungover exchange students in Tallinn for 8 hours
– Bring them back on the boat before they regain consciousness and get into too much former-soviet trouble
– Get them really drunk, again, as boat sails by night back to Stockholm
There are a couple of different party cruises available to Lund exchange students — I chose Sea Battle because it seemed like the biggest one, and also because I figured I wouldn’t ever make it to Tallinn otherwise.
I’m On a Boat
Here was our boat:
Here is where I slept, on the boat, with 3 other Lund exchange students:
The boat has something like 4 bars and 2 clubs and stuff is just open all night. The decor was so over-the-top trying to look “clubby” that it just felt ridiculous. Club before the storm of dancing exchange students:
This is an accurate representation of what was going on on the boat, from about 1 hour after boarding, until 6 AM.
Seriously, we had free food & drinks at 8 PM, and it was sort of unbelievable how drunken and loud people were before dinner even STARTED. It would have been super obnoxious if I didn’t have a close friend with whom I could roll my eyes. It was sort of like being in the nautical version of the party scene in every high school/college movie ever.
So fun times, but there was one GIANT problem with the boat: no cell phone reception, plus 2000 people, plus enormous boat, means once you lose your friends, they’re GONE. You just have to hope you run into them again. I lost my friend Alex and didn’t find him from midnight the first night until like 9 PM the second night. Really, I don’t understand how people functioned in society before cell phones… you could just, LOSE PEOPLE! If you forgot to make a meeting time/place for next time, you might just NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN! Oh man, I am so dependent on technology.
Tallinn
Woke up, looked outside, saw ICE:
I left the boat alone, because after partying with 2000 people really the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with the same people. Plus, I love exploring new cities solo and doing whatever I want. I had a bunch of tips from my friend Tack who is a Tallinn local now. Other than meeting up with him for lunch (which was delicious — other people on the boat were complaining about the food in Estonia… clearly they were going to the wrong places), I did a bunch of things by Tack’s suggestion. Here they are in picture form, and written down for posterity:
1. Sadama Market – it’s full of stuff! And exposed me to my first Estonian conversations, where I smiled and nodded a lot. Lots of Russian dolls everywhere at Sadama. So in general, that whole “you’re not in Kansas/Sweden anymore” feeling.
2. Climb to the top of Oleviste Kirik – this was my touristy thing of the day. Oleviste Kirik is the church that’s the tallest visible thing when you look at Tallinn from far away (such as in this picture):
Climbing it was awesome. However, you do get kind of dizzy walking up a staircase like this for 20 minutes:
But totally worth it because you are rewarded with this view:
Tallinn is so adorable! (Well, at least Old Town, the part I got to see).
3. Raekoja Plats – peoplewatching and listening to the different languages tourists are speaking.
4. Vabaduse väljak (freedom square) for more peoplewatching and meeting up with Tack for lunch. Nearby, I found a good wall where I could get my Jordan Catalano on.
5. Wandering a bunch of little streets, hunting for cafes in which to use wifi.
6. Climbing Toompea hill and finding more good views.
And that was all I really had time for in Tallinn! But it was lovely, not very cold, and amazingly pleasant to walk around solo for a day. I also bought a pirate hat. Can’t do better than that.
Back on the Boat
Night 2 on the boat was was more chill than night 1. People hung out in their cabins instead of dancing wildly at the clubs.
The only bad part of the trip, however, was the bus ride back from Stockholm to Lund. It’s a 7 hour bus ride, and if that isn’t painful enough, there were 4 guys right in front of me who drank the ENTIRE ride back. They went through three bottles of vodka and probably 20 beers… witnessing 7 hours of unshowered guys drinking alcohol and singing/shouting the entire time too. One of the most disgusting experiences of my life!
