mokudekiru

I moved to San Francisco last last Thursday. So, thoughts.

Thought #1: The gargoyles here are all hipsters.

I feel like I’m inside one of those dreams featuring you and all your friends in some magical definitely-not-real-yet-oddly-familiar location (partially constructed from somewhere you once lived, and partially constructed from Monterey Pop videos and partially from watching the Shit Silicon Valley Says videos 9 times before bed. One of those dreams where you keep running around doing things and seeing these people over and over, but if you were to wake up, you’d realize that it really doesn’t make sense for all of those people to be in the same place at the same time because they are from totally disjoint parts of your life and oh my god why is any of this happening.

But mostly I don’t live in the real world anymore because I actually live in the Internet.

Here’s how to move to San Francisco, Mo-style:

1 week before pre-move - start to think about facebook messaging your friends asking them if you can sleep on their couch while you look for an apartment. Instead, your friend Bhargav (who just moved out there and is in the couch-sleeping phase as well) asks you to move in with a third guy you’ve never met but is allegedly cool and Good Roommate Material. At this point it’s only been roughly five days since you were hanging out with Bhargav in Hong Kong and Singapore together, duh.

Crawl Padmapper for about 3 hours together, and have your on-location roomies check out the place, make you a FB album and take video. Beat out the other potential tenants and just fucking sign already, because you snagged an enormous sweet-ass place a couple doors down from Janis Joplin.

Pack your bags, er, boxes, and take them to the post office. Feel really good about this distributed-computing approach to moving across the country, fire up a fb event and throw yourself a going away barcrawl and party with everyone, except for the 50% of everyone from UIUC Computer Science who has already moved to San Francisco in the past year.

Farewell of #Champs

Day of move – Hop in a plane, feel weird that this is the first time you’re doing a permanent move in the 23 years of your life, despite having lived in every continental time zone in the US and a country each in Europe and Asia. While drinking tea in O’Hare, receive the first of many future texts that go like:

“Hey Mo, I’m flying in to SF from Philly with a couple friends this weekend. Wanna hang/show us around?”

Consider the ridiculousness of “showing someone around” a city you’ve been a resident of for under 24 hours, but of course accept enthusiastically and hop on your next flight.

Arrive at the airport and meet your new roommate for the first time IRL. Go home and dump your suitcase in a completely empty room and roll out the sleeping bag for later. See the 4 friends you have who are living within a 15-minute walk of you and give them the grand tour of your apartment, once you practice and work out which way is the kitchen and which way is the living room.

Barhop to half the places within a 5-minute walk of your place and witness more and more people show up throughout the evening. Meet some more internet friends IRL for the first time and talk to your friends about the web-tech companies they work at and the crazy and/or gorgeous people they have recently been talking to on OKCupid.

Coin the term #IPOIPA, and tweet it.

Friday

Wake up to find your roomies have already gone to work. Wander around the various empty large rooms of the apartment, playing music and wondering what to do with yourself. Tweet something about the Haight and make brunch plans with an internet friend who apparently lives in the neighborhood. Again, brunch spot is a 5 minute walk away. Wonder why all the other people at brunch don’t have jobs.

Post-brunch, wander around the neighborhood for a while and find out that yes actually EVERYTHING is a five minute walk away, and learn which street to walk on to avoid the hills. Shop your way around Haight Ashbury and see tourists taking pictures by Ben & Jerry’s and hear street performers and the Beatles kind of everywhere.

Go home and find the roof.

Receive a phone call from your new roommate at 4:26 PM. “Yelp IPO party. Get downtown now. Harlot. 2nd and Mission. I have a wristband for you. I can’t hear you, bye.”

Run for the nearest MUNI stop and get your ass to SoMa. Talk to the friendliest bouncer ever and walk in and instantly see Evan in the sea of 500 people at this bar. Talk to everyone and realize you recognize at least 10 people at this party. Congratulate them all on their IPO and confuse them by not being a Yelp employee, and then score mad points when you mention who your roommates are.

Follow a crowd of 20 people back to Yelp HQ so they can drop off / pick up their stuff. Start barcrawling your way around SoMa and wait way too long at Eat Box for 3 orders of window bar-food, that take at least 40 minutes longer to arrive than you were promised. Wonder if this could potentially result in some bad Yelp reviews (apparently, it didn’t). Hang out in Tempest for an hour and then follow some French dudes to The Mission.

Notice Yelp people peel off as you head around the Mission to random bars, meeting up with more new and old friends from school and previous internships and the internet using your roommate’s phone once yours has died.

Realize everything is working out FLAWLESSLY.
Realize via bathroom graffiti you’ve been hanging out at some classy venues this evening.
Decide IPOs are fun and clearly a normal part of life.

Saturday

Walk around the Haights, smell lots of weed when you walk by Buena Vista Park.

Meet up with people in Dolores Park and watch the hipsters. Check Instagram occasionally and realize everyone else you know in the entire city is also somewhere in this hipster swarm beach. Don’t try to meet up with them though because that would be impossible.

Wait for your south bay friends to arrive on your doorstep. Spend a while naming the Facebook group for this friend group. Try to get Ramen at Izakaya Sozai but fail because people take forever to eat ramen, apparently. Go to a nearby chinese place and call it done.

Go back to your place and sit on the floor because there is no furniture yet and make drinks and call cabs.

Realize getting out of the Haight on a Saturday night is an incredible challenge (but don’t learn from this anytime soon). Finally find a couple of cabs to take you club-wards and go hang out in Butter and receive a text along the lines of “be right there I just need to take four shots.” Meet internet friends and go to Bootie across the street. Dance your ass off for many hours and tweet about it mid-dancefloor. Hope your friend does not sustain injuries from falling off one of the dancing blocks.

Wind up under the golden gate at 4:30 AM and decide it’s probably time to go home, though nothing is particularly stopping you at this point.

Sunday

Wake up the forces. Go get some crepes.

Use your party people for good, not evil, and move the entire contents of Evan’s U-Haul into the apartment. Get it done in under an hour. High five and enjoy the breakfast nook.

Go to Sleep Train and buy beds and feel like the Princess and the Pea. Go to IKEA and feel like Zooey Deschanel. Pick out a rug whose color is optimal for spilling a variety of everything on it (red).

Meet up with Yelpers at night at the local brewpub and listen to their startup idea and call them out on it being Silicon Valley Bullshit.

(But still tell them to make the app because you would use it).

Discuss the Foursquare names for each of your respective apartments.

Hang out in your brand new living room and spill drinks on your new rug, just as promised. HOME.

The weekend is over, but don’t let the internetyness stop there. Get San Francisco blog recommendations from your barista on an iPad in a cafe where each and every patron is on an Apple device. Make Friday night plans on Path and in reaction to Foursquare notifications. Don’t hit up the club for your favorite swedish DJs until 11:30 PM because they tweeted they wouldn’t be going on until midnight. Sit in your friend’s living room with her cat and troll OKCupid and have the cat Skype your friend who lives a mile away. Sit in Mission bars and bitch about particularly pretentious Instagram feeds.

HOME SWEET HOME, INTERNETS.

Impression of Singapore after spending about five minutes in the country:
It’s shiny, modern, tropical, and everything is running swimmingly.

Singapore is run by a benevolent dictator who has spent the past couple of decades turning this country into a well-oiled socialist machine, that people seem legit happy with because it’s working out pretty well for everyone.

Yeah yeah don’t spit your gum, but loiter outside 7-11 and mix your cocktails.

One thing about traveling is that you learn your own countrymen’s stereotypes about the places you’re visiting. Just tell people, “Oh I’m about to travel to ______.” and let the stereotypes spout forth. For Singapore, the first thing any American tells you is that you can be thrown in jail for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk. I suppose this is meant to indicate they’re really strict in Singapore?

However, upon arrival, we immediately realized that this was the ONLY information we knew about Singapore, and that it was effectively useless. First of all, WHO SPITS THEIR GUM ON THE STREET, that’s just a jerk move. Alright, some people must, but I have never done this before and wasn’t about to start. Second of all, this is useless info because it doesn’t give you a sense of ANY OTHER LAWS in Singapore. We saw people jaywalking everywhere, which doesn’t seem to jive with the crazy-strict vibe of the no gum rule, so we were like, are all these people risking their lives jaywalking? Or is it just like any other place in the world? Hmmmm. (We jaywalked.)

Turns out, the gum rule was instated after they started construction of the MRT (subway system) and people vandalized it by putting gum in the doors, causing them to stick closed. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH GUYS, no more gum.

Here’s a more practical list of subway rules. Try really hard to remember not to bring durian, because it smells bad (though, there doesn’t seem to be any fine…?)

Okay, so don’t spit your gum, but you can drink and smoke in public (no open container laws, plenty of smokers), and you can apparently also loiter in front of 7-11 mixing cocktails. We wandered into a 7-11 around 12:30 AM one night and sitting outside on the curb was a group of three or four teenagers (definitely looked really young). They had an impressive array of supplies: plastic cups and bottles of liquor and mixers, and were actually sitting there making drinks.

KEEP IT CLASSY, SINGAPOREAN YOUTH.

Culture and Language Mishmash

There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. So there’s a huge mix of different people and each minority group is really huge. According to my friend Yan, kids growing up are required to learn the language of their ethnic background — so Chinese kids study Mandarin, etc. It’s not clear to me how many of these people are speaking the language at home as well, but school is normally taught in English. According to Wikipedia, the second language taught is determined by the father’s ethnicity. Interesting.

It was pretty common to be surrounded by 3-4 different languages at a time, and signage could be really lengthy/complicated since everything had to be translated into the FOUR different languages.

There is some geographical segregation of the different ethnic groups — Little India, and Chinatown for example, but I felt like it could have been way more segregated than it was.

Staying in Chinatown

We stayed at Winkhostel, a brand new hostel in Chinatown and apparently the best hostel in Singapore. It was really nicely designed and well-located for foodie adventures. The security was better than any other hostel I’ve been to — you got swipe cards for the rooms and your own personal lockers, also with key cards. The beds were pod-style and had nice green lights.

Winkhostel was a little less social than other hostels I’ve been to. I think this is partially because the only air-conditioned rooms were the bedrooms, where people tend to avoid talking if there’s sleepers, and not everyone was as excited as I was to hang out in un-airconditioned sweat-inducing temperatures. Also as my travel buddies suggested, not everyone’s English was as good as travelers in say, European hostels. I did talk to a couple of people, who seemed cool, and ended up having a very bizarre relationship with the dude at the front desk, who would give me useful tips (like to check out the parade going on a block away) but also question my travel habits, e.g. why are you not napping before your 5:30 AM flight???? No seriously, your friends are napping, you should too!!

The answer to this (and all questions, of why I might not be doing something, ever) was of course: Dude, I’ll get to it MAYBE, I’m busy reading the internet.

Aforementioned parade, with master photobomber

Places to Go

Merlion – Singapore’s weird-ass mascot. “Singapura” means lion and fish is fish, so clearly. It’s out by the bay where you should be going anyway, for good views of the city and to check out the Marina Bay Sands.

Marina Bay Sands – Kind of the most amazing hotel ever. How’d they get a boat on it!?

The most important thing about this hotel is that there is an infinity pool on the ROOF. The problem is, only hotel guests are allowed to swim, so you’d best be booking a night there. We made the mistake of not doing that and were full of tears and regrets.

I mean, this hotel is cool enough to basically be the subject of an entire Martin Solveig video.

We did manage to spend an evening on the roof though (tragically outside the pool) by going to the Chocolate Bar on top of the Marina Bay Sands. At the very least, do this. Go forth and be decadent.

Stand on the balcony on the opposite side from the pool, cuz hey, boats! (I like boats!)

Okay I swear I’m shutting up about Marina Bay Sands now.

Orchard Road – Mall country. You cannot cross a street without being sucked into a 4-5 story underground mall.

This is how it works: “Oh hey, there’s a big road and no crosswalk, but looks like we just have to enter that glass bubble thing to cross the street…

…oops.

15 minutes later, $15 at MUJI and a takoyaki snack later, you have re-emerged on the other side of the street. Why were we crossing the street again? I’ve already forgot. Let’s go back to MUJI instead. Or maybe let’s explore one of the 29 other malls.

Siloso Beach

Take the MRT from HarbourFront and get off at the beach stop. Lie down on the beach and be really happy because you are on the beach and it’s February out. Go in the water and it will be warm and the seaweed is cute instead of disgusting. Also, Siloso Beach appears to be the beach with the fewest children, which is probably the most important beach-selection criterion. Party tunes emanate from the bars behind us.

This is how each of us felt about being on the beach, and also how I felt when Boyce spilled his smoothie on me. Verdict: his smoothie was yummy! But smoothie bodyshots, probably not for me.

Wander over and find some rocks when it’s time to go think on rocks.

Haw Par Villa / Tiger Balm Gardens – A strange park where you get a tour of the Ten Courts of Hell, and you learn which sins on Earth result in which punishments in Hell, and illustrate said punishments it through creepy sculptures. Here’s a helpful sample of the crime/punishment menu:

Other fun part about visiting, you can legit tell your travel buddies to go to Hell.

Also, there are some animals with guns. Might also has something to do with Hell.

That’s pretty much all we did that didn’t have to do with food or partying, so stay tuned for the next two posts!

Time for Party Mode.

After extensive googling and asking friends, it became clear that the two party places to check out in Hong Kong are Wan Chai and Lan Kwai Fong. Wan Chai is semi-chill and LKF is very dance/clubby, so it makes sense to hang out in Wan Chai on the weekdays and LKF on the weekends (it is slightly RIDICULOUS on weekends). Also stay tuned for a romantic picnic spot and some incoherent sentences about the highest bar in the world.

Wan Chai – just go to Carnegie’s and dance on the bar

Children, gather round, it’s time for your lesson on Wan Chai!

Wan Chai is kinda old, grungy in a good way, and full of ex-pat bars and topless bars — it’s got a red-lighty history but seems tame these days. There are people out and about any night of the week, up and down Lockhart Road, but it can be sort of a weird crowd. Lots of older ex-pat dudes in groups, sometimes accompanied by local and/or southeast asian ladies (prostitutes? probs). Outside each nude bar was always a little old asian lady sitting there, but she didn’t do much to try and solicit us in. Not really our scene, old white dudes and hookers.

For a more student-aged crowd, follow the internet’s advice and go to Carnegie’s on a Tuesday or Wednesday (why YES, they DO have an angelfire website!)

But be warned: as soon as you step inside Carnegie’s, you will no longer be in Hong Kong, but in total ex-pat/exchange-student/traveler’s Narnia. White people THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

For my Lund friends, Carnegie’s is just like stepping inside of VGs on Wednesdays / Kalmars on Tuesdays (all exchange students all the time!) Seriously, the resemblance was eerie…
Same playlist /waka waka.
Same demographics (Australians, New Zealanders, and Germans, I swear you’re EVERYWHERE.)
Same “It’s Tuesday And Therefore We Must Party” attitude.

Also, Carnegie’s is apparently THE ONLY PLACE.

I went there both Tuesdays, and then after the horse races in Wan Chai (a Wednesday), the exchange students we had just met and were hanging with were like,
“We’re going out in Wan Chai, want to come?”
“Maybe, where to?”
“Carnegie’s, where else?!”
SERIOUSLY??? I have been in this country for seven days and already know to be affectionately annoyed that we always go to that place. (Like I said, it’s Hong Kong VGs.)

So the deal with Tuesdays is that vodka-based drinks cost 10 HKD = $1.25, so yes, people are ordering (and consuming) in bulk. I wouldn’t wear my favorite shoes.

The other deal with Carnegie’s is that when the clock strikes midnight, you are GETTING ON THAT BAR and doing it Katy Perry style.

11:59 PM…

MIDNIGHT. And life is like this.

When you’re done getting your Sexy And You Know It on, go get keBABs at Ebeneezer’s with everyone and scream and shout, then hop in a cab and go home. Good job, you’ve just Wan Chai’d.

Lan Kwai Fong – Let’s cram all the party of Hong Kong into a two block radius.

I have never seen a more densely-packed party district. You sort of wonder what the point of having streets is, and then you remember that if there were no streets there wouldn’t be enough room for people to stand. This place is INFESTED with partiers on Fridays and Saturdays.

When you see this mural, you know you’re basically in the right place. (It’s not that hard though, go to Central and follow the exits to Lan Kwai Fong).

If it’s a weekday, you can chill at any of the numerous bars and sit outside people-watching. No bars really seem to have doors/very many walls, everything is very open and inside/outside run together. It’s seriously tiny, but everything is a bar or a club. Illustrated by this really wonky map of LKF.

If it’s Friday or Saturday though, not a lot of sitting will be going on because this will be happening:

I think it would be physically impossible to go to LKF and go to *a* bar. First of all, it’s totally unclear sometimes where one bar starts and another one ends, due to the general lack of storefronts/walls, and second of all, it’s a party tidal wave and you’d best just ride it out, wherever the current takes you.

Case in point, we stopped into one bar, Stormies, because we were mildly overwhelmed and this place looked relatively empty/calm. Then:

Me: “This looks like a chill place. Let’s just stop here and get a beer.”DJ: “EVERYONE IN THE BAR GETS FREE SHOTS”Cue “Shots” by LMFAO.

— Robert Boyce (@rboyce) February 10, 2012

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen bartenders pouring shots DIRECTLY into PEOPLE’S MOUTHS from the liqueur bottles before. Like, ALL CASUAL and stuff too. We spent a lot of time on this trip trying to identify precisely where the Zombie epidemic would start in Hong Kong, and in retrospect I think Lan Kwai Fong is a likely candidate. Zombies take note: start the apocalypse on a Saturday night.

So, clubbing.

I was told by an internet friend to go to Beijing Club, but when Boyce and I got in line there, we were shuffled by a bouncer to a different line a block away, for Magnum Club. Turns out this is a new place (looks like it opened in the past few months), so maybe that’s why they herded us that way.

Although the streets of Lan Kwai Fong were filled with trashy, trashed white people (the young ex-pats strike again), once we got into the club it was suddenly 100% well-dressed Chinese twentysomethings. We were literally the only non-Chinese people we saw for the next three hours. But if these people were never in the LKF street crowd, WHERE WERE THEY? And how did they even get to the club?!?!

Entering the club was as Twilight Zone-y as entering Carnegies in Wan Chai was, but in reverse: going from ex-pat zombie crowd -> Chinese mob.

The club itself was a well-executed, definition-of-club type club: club music, club lights, club outfits, club djs. I was really excited when they played Knife Party because that song is a) ridiculous, b) involves The Internet and blocking people on Facebook, c) Zombie-apocalypse appropriate, and d) danceable in a cray way.

Knife Party – Internet Friends by Knife Party

Queue the several hours of dancing. I wasn’t sure how into dancing Hong Kong peeps would be, but this crowd did not disappoint. They seemed like young professionals (lots of suits) rather than students, which isn’t surprising considering the outrageous cover, but also mostly guys, which is REALLY surprising, considering the outrageous cover…

The Outrageous Cover:
For girls – free.
For dudes – $400 HKD = $50 USD WHAAAAAAAT (okay, not as bad since mine was free, so we split it, but STILL.)

And yet, the club was somehow FULL of dudes. Boyce didn’t feel like it was super sausage-festy, meaning there were probably girls around there somewhere who I never actually saw because I was too busy being literally swarmed by dudes. Who were unexpectedly aggressive. Not in a scary way, or anything…but just, AGGRESSIVE. One guy who I had not yet seen, talked to, or danced with, who was standing a few people away from me, shoved his phone past 3 innocent bystanders and into my face, asking for my number. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT’S WITH THE LONG-RANGE NUMBER-GRAB ATTEMPT? Perhaps swarmy tendencies were further aggravated by me being the only foreign female in the establishment? Or maybe they were extra ragin’ because of whole $400 cover situation, who knows. Maybe this is just how things work in Hong Kong.

But so, so strange.

Eventually we left the club because it was 3:30 AM, and we hadn’t finished our LKF tour yet. We wandered into Club 97, which was a more Wan Chai style club, with a bunch of 19-year old looking dudes jumping and hitting this low-hanging vent at the back of the club for some unbeknownst reason. But it was annoying and we left, heading for old faithful 7-11, and then sat on the curb people-watching as the zombie-mob walked down the hill when 4 AM rolled around and the bars and clubs began to close.

We watched, entertained, as some dude puked down the street from us. We knew it was time to leave when a dude with a bleeding head (bottle smashed on it, perhaps?) sat down next to us to chill for a sec, with his friends. They looked harmless, but, come on, bleeding head? Cab time, BYE.

In conclusion…
Lan Kwai Fong probably had as much party mojo as the entire city of Lund, except that it was all packed into a 2 block radius instead of distributed evenly across town. I hereby challenge all future travel destinations to outdo LKF’s ridiculousity. Best of luck.

For a Super-Romantic Evening, Head to the IFC Mall Rooftop

Okay, you’re totally overwhelmed by Carnegie’s and LKF, and it’s time for a relaxed, romantic evening. Go to the IFC Mall Rooftop and have a picnic! Stare at the view of Kowloon, and ask someone to marry you.

The chairs/tables on the roof are for the public, but there’s a real bar here too. Also, lots of color-changing lights.

Then, take pictures with the pretty lights, and call it a successful evening. The mall is open until 1 AM so you have plenty of time, and on the way out be sure to stop by the bathrooms in the mall, because they are super-nice and you can get your shoes shined in the men’s room, as reported by Bhargav.

Ozone – Highest Bar in the World

I have no more energy to write anything even partially coherent here, but it’s on the friggin’ 118th floor. Drinks cost infinity dollars, and it’s ritztastic.

Don’t go on a foggy day like we did (oops) and get no view. It could have been 118 floors underground for all we know.

Which might actually have been MORE AWESOME.

Do bring your friends to Ozone, unless you want to hang out with groups of old asian businessmen, who are the only people who can afford this place and want to be at a bar 118 floors in the sky in a district where there is nothing else going on.

So, there is fun to be had in Hong Kong. QED.

The good news about food in Hong Kong is that it’s really hard to go wrong — everything is delicious. The bad news is that you’ll, at some point during your day, have to decide what to eat and it’s not easy.

How to Find Food

The only internet tool you need to aid in restaurant selection is OpenRice, Hong Kong’s Yelp equivalent. I recommend filtering by the location and then by dish or restaurant style – there is so much good food around that you shouldn’t really bother crossing town for something. Pay attention to prices and photos on OpenRice, and even if you can’t read chinese, it’s sometimes worth clicking on those reviews for the pictures.

Option B is to wander the streets, and though I did this if I was out shopping (okay, actually I would just go to the SOGO basement and buy takoyaki) it’s too easy to become paralyzed by choice. Just OpenRice it.

Dim Sum

Why hello Hong Kong. We come in peace, and in search of Dim Sum.

I mean, who doesn’t? Dim sum isn’t difficult to find in major US cities, but between the trek over to your local Chinatown and the social barrier to choosing dim sum over traditional (read: pancakes, omelets, and mimosas) brunch, the dim sum stars align less frequently than I would hope back home, particularly in large groups.

But with a dim-sum-ready team of travelers and readily available goods on nearly every block, all obstacles were vanquished. We sleep in, we wake up, and we DIM SUM IT!! to our hearts’ content.

The dim sum report is that actually, much of the available dishes were pretty similar to ones that exist in the US. Typically there was a bit more variety, but we didn’t see anything incredibly surprising on the menu or on other peoples’ tables.

The big difference though, was that every item had approximately 170% the flavor of the dim sum I’m accustomed to. This is your tongue on drugs? No, this is your tongue on Hong Kong dim sum.

If you’re ready to get militant about dim sum, apparently the place to go is Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin one-star restaurant. I’m sure it’s lovely, but we stopped by one day and the queueing was of the variety I normally reserve for Swedish clubs. In light of me being in the final stages of recovery from Post-Traumatic Queue Exhaustion after a semester in Scandinavia, we passed. And still ate plenty of good dim sum, elsewhere.

The hardest part about dim sum blogging is that since your food comes out one dish at a time, you will have the urge to just dig in, and may forget to photograph it…so I don’t even have pictures of some of the best things we ate. Alas.

One other tip: what are dim sum restaurants by day are often hot pot restaurants by night (dim sum is more of a lunch thing, hot pot a dinner affair). Which brings us to…

Hot Pot

A wintertime classic, hot pot is a mandatory experience in Hong Kong, as well as an exercise in teamwork. Bring four or five of your best friends to Tao Heung in Tsim Sha Tsui and put your name down on the list. While you wait, play in the electronics store downstairs, Fortress. Then head to 7-11, and loiter in a staircase for 15 minutes before heading back up to the restaurant.

When you finally get a seat, begin Challenge 1: Battle the Cantonese-only menu and order based on pictures (roughly 1/4 of the menu), color-coded lists of Cantonese words (the rest of the menu), using a combination of luck and basic kanji mastery.

Our results: We ordered WAY too much food.

After you order, they bring out a bunch of things and you make your own sauce. SO many things. Jane’s expert strategy was to just dump everything in in large quantities, and hers at least appeared to be the most delicious, so that’s the algorithm I’d advise.

Challenge 2: Order the dish pictured below.

We pulled this off successfully by pointing at the table next to us (who had received this before us), making hand gestures, and using the words “rice” and “leaf”. Not sure which of those steps were essential, YMMV.

Finally, our hot pot arrived, along with 20 plates of our mystery-order food (the waitresses were sort of giving us weird looks). Throw it in!

Hot pot is very similar to Japanese nabemono, although the dipping sauce is different and the Hong Kong version seems to involve more fish balls. (Either that, or we just ordered too many fish balls.) We also ordered this tube of fishball paste, where you squeeze it out of a tube (like icing a cake!) and it makes sort of a fishball noodle in the hotpot. Pro tip: cut the fish-noodle before squeezing the entire tube into the pot in one, long string.

The tofu rolls in the next photo (bottom right corner and just above the plate of meat) were fun — submerge them in the water with your chopsticks for ~30 seconds, sauce them up real good, and enjoy.

If anyone can identify the white stuff in the bottom left corner (yes, that’s what she said) please tell me what it is, because it tasted good but none of us could figure it out. Mushroom? Fish-based? Alien intestines?

In Japanese families doing nabe, there’s typically one family member who completely dominates all things nabe – temperature, when to put in what, when to take it out. I believe the technical term for this control freak is a nabe-bugyou in Japanese, a bugyou being a certain feudal-period shogun administrator. I’m not sure if there are nabe-bugyou in Hong Kong style hot pot, but none of us were particularly domineering, so after about an hour of hot pot our pace dropped off considerably, yet we kept slowly trying to push forward and consume most of what we’d ordered.

After people started dropping off like flies, we gave up, got the bill (surprisingly low), and headed back to HK Island, only partially defeated by the hot pot experience.

By far our most intense and epic meal. (For locals, this was probably just Regular Ordinary Cantonese Meal Time).

Cha Chaan Teng

Think Hong Kong-style diner. A wide range of comfort food, including pastries and omelets, but also sandwiches and meat, so you can choose whether you’re feeling more breakfast, more lunch, or both. This NYTimes Travel article explains cha chaan tengs pretty well.

We went to Honolulu Coffee Shop in Wan Chai one day for our usual 2 PM brunchtime. Went both breakfast and lunch, ordering egg tarts, an egg & pork with rice dish, and sandwiches (not pictured).

See, kinda dinery? I drank some yuanyang, a mixture of coffee and milk tea, making it taste like a cantonese bizarro chai bomb.

Friggin’ amazing. Huge fan of egg tarts and how they’re just slightly sweet. And flaky.

Props to Bhargav for capturing ALL THE YUMMY of this dish in one fabulous photo

Char Siu at Joy Hing

Here’s one where we were Doing It Right, thanks to Bhargav’s local resident friend, YinTing, who helped us follow in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain. She brought us to Joy Hing, a char siu (bbq pork/other meat) restaurant deserving of its own Wikipedia page, and totally took charge. Like a boss.

Basically, all I can say is MEAT. Go there. Order some stuff. Eat it.

The green stuff is full of garlic and incredible.

Tan Tan Noodles

This was purely an OpenRice discovery — the best Hong Kong style food in our immediate vicinity while staying in Tin Hau was a restaurant called Sister Wah, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place like Joy Hing, serving Tan Tan noodles, which we discovered were incredible. The broth was very peanuty, and the dumplings were probably the best dumplings in a soup I’ve ever had. The only problem was that I could only eat approximately 1/3 of the noodles. Luckily, my travel buddies left a less embarrassing amount of noodles in their bowls.

Other Asian Food

Just because you’re in Hong Kong, don’t feel pressure to eat chinese food for every meal, as they have delicious eats from all around asia. The thai food we had in SoHo was very interesting (no pics, sorry) and didn’t taste anything like thai food I’ve had in the US. Having not been to Thailand I can’t comment on authenticity. That restaurant was where I discovered that my maximum mango enjoyment comes in the form of mango + sticky rice.

Time for a whirlwind tour of our non-chinese asian eats.

Indian Food at ChungKing Mansions – a giant apartment complex full of apartments-turned-Indian-restaurants. At the bottom, you’ll be hassled with flyers from each of the restaurants, so find the one you want and you’ll be led up some sketch-ass stairs to your restaurant. Ours was called Taj Mahal and pretty yummy, but not super spicy. Here’s the fish masala, my favorite of our selections.

Korean food at Arisu – where they start with completely the appropriate amount of kim chee. Do Korean bbq, and try the seafood pancake, which seems to be Korean okonomiyaki. It’s sort of like hot pot, but less of an Event and more like dinner.

Japanese Ramen at Ippudo – a Japanese chain that has come to Hong Kong in the last couple of years. I’ve had better ramen, but it was still quite yummy, and who doesn’t love some spoon decor?

Japanese snacks from 7-11 – I told you we were addicted. Let’s get Crunky and Meltykiss! This is what Katy Perry would do at 7-11 if she ended up there on a Friday Night.

Don’t forget your shanghai food

When you’re exhausted thinking about all your food options, don’t forget about your garden variety chinese restaurants. Our favorite was Shanghai 3.6.9, down the street from our Wan Chai crib. It was the very first place we ate in Hong Kong, around midnight after the 13 hour flight.

Tired and jetlagged, this is when we realized: well-chosen vacation destination, team.

If you’re still hungry, check out CNNGo’s 40 Hong Kong foods we can’t live without.

6 Reasons Hong Kong feels like being in Blade Runner:

1. Hong Kong looks like Blade Runner. Duh.
2. It never seems to sleep (e.g. everything happens at night).
3. Similar mixture of Asian people/food/languages with western ones
4. Both have pretty reasonable technological advancement. I think HK has fewer replicants, but at least they have full cell connectivity EVERYWHERE in the metro, even in tunnels. Good job making progress towards the expected tech accomplishments by 2019, HK.
5. In both places people mostly seem to mind their own business, and not stare at you or care what you’re doing. Unless you’re Harrison Ford, in a bar. That man cannot seem to stay out of trouble in bars.
6. Blade Runner would’ve been filmed in Hong Kong if it could’ve. (Thanks Marquis!)

Looks like Blade Runner

City. Mountains. Water. Three of my favorite things, together. In fact, I think this should be a requirement for any city (I suppose it sorta was back in the day, when boats were the only thing going on.)

As far as cities go, Hong Kong is GOOD-LOOKING. First of all, it has some sexy topology. Flying into Hong Kong is a definitively 3D experience. You feel like you’re docking your spaceship in Coruscant rather than landing on a 2D map.

But like human beings, Hong Kong is prettier at night. Suddenly you’re at the top of Victoria Peak and you are looking over all the skyscrapers like you’re Batman.

The Peak Tram is probably the most touristy thing I’ve done in my LIFE, but one way or another you MUST get yourself up to Victoria Peak. Non-negotiable.

Or you can cross over to the peninsula (the Kowloon side) and you get a crazy-nice view of HK Island. The nightly light show starts at 8 PM, which will make you wonder if the entire city is actually a TV screen. Cue a creepy-crawly feeling about consumerist modern society, slight existential questioning, and cheesy light-show music.

So take your pick. Blade Runner, Coruscant, Batman, Ghost in the Shell, or pretty much any other vertical city with flying spaceships that seems only to operate at night, and you’ve got the city layout down.

English and Cantonese

British rule technically ended in Hong Kong in 1997, and Catonese and English are the two official languages, yet I was surprised to see how much English there was around. Every sign, most menus, even our elevator signage (see previous post). Having never been in Asia outside of Japan before, where I could speak the language, this felt very weird at first due to the high crossover between written Chinese and written Japanese. I could ~read the signs, but they all were translated into English anyway, and I couldn’t understand what anyone around me was saying.

It felt like I was in Tokyo, except someone had removed the part of my brain that knows Japanese (a perennial fear/nightmare of mine) and simultaneously subtitled the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Gahhhh.

No resting!!!

Before embarking, I learned a tiny, tiny amount of Cantonese (via Pimsleur) which was almost entirely useless, except for of course, the two things Pimsleur is ALWAYS good for:

1) Knowing what the cab driver was talking about when you hop in and he’s like, “Bindouh wa?” (SHOCKER, it means, “where to?”) Sidenote: cabs are really cheap there. You can effectively cross the city for about $9 USD and there’s no tipping. There are cabs everywhere. Never feel stranded after 1 AM when the MTR stops).

2) Flirting in clubs when locals ask if you can speak any Cantonese, and then blurting out the one or two sentences you can actually say (but at least you can say them WELL, thanks to the Pimsleur repetition strategy). Seriously, this is the main application of Pimsleur and I think they know it. They teach you “I can’t speak [language you're learning]“, “beer”, “wine”, and “your place or my place?” with a few other things thrown in on the side. I see where all this is going, 1960s-era language method).

Mostly, getting by on English was very doable, though we didn’t go anywhere particularly remote. Most people at stores and restaurants aren’t going to speak English to you like at all, but they will ~understand what you say and do the right thing. They just won’t really speak in sentences to you. If you ask for something, they sort of look at you and often spew something off in Cantonese to another restaurant worker, etc. It was disconcerting enough that if I lived there, I would definitely want to pick up more Cantonese, though I imagine it would be hard to get practice since you’re not fully immersed in it often.

The only total Failure to Communicate situation happened when I was trying to buy laundry detergent. From 7-11. Then a drugstore. Then a grocery. Then finding it in the grocery. Each time, I struggled greatly with what the appropriate charade for “laundry detergent” is. It’s really hard to point at your own clothing in a meaningful way, without pointing at yourself. I eventually did find laundry detergent, no tears involved, but in the future I would have looked up the word before setting out for something that you don’t know is FOR SURE at 7-11.

Where the Fuck Do You Walk?

HK has a population density that’s allegedly the same as Manhattan (70k per square mile in the developed parts) but it feels roughly 4x as crowded. Seriously, PEOPLE, they’re everywhere. Japan sort of immunized me to crowded asian cities (Osaka Loop line before a concert, anyone? Tokyo at rush hour?) but there were two very weird things about Hong Kong and crowds:

1) The subways are not that crowded. In fact, even at rush hour, I don’t think my body ever touched strangers’ bodies inside the trains. The train *stations* were incredibly crowded — hordes of people on the escalators, going through the turnstiles… the throughput of the MTR was highly impressive, but each individual train car was still comfortable. Rush hour in Tokyo, you are being sardined into the train car by the 7 people you’re effectively spooning with, and you’d better hope your hands and your phone were already at eye level, because you won’t have room to move your arms. But in Hong Kong, I saw people actually WAIT FOR THE NEXT TRAIN instead of cramming in. No one touched each other — perhaps they have a more British sense of personal space?

The station is sorta crowded…why not the trains?

2) There is no correct side to walk on. UMMM!??!?! This is my first encounter with a culture that has not figured it out. In the US (and most of Europe I’ve been to), walk on the right. In Japan, walk on the left. And on escalators, there’s a standing side and a waiting side (in Japan which side is which depends on whether you’re in Kansai or Kanto, but in each place it’s at least CONSISTENT).

But no, in Hong Kong, just… MADNESS. CLOWNTOWN. Escalators were (generally) stand-right walk-left, but once you got off the escalator, the staircase might be the opposite way, and once you’re on the street GOOD LUCK, KIDS. The worst part is that in train stations, there are often arrows on the floor/walls to direct traffic, and from station to station, which side the arrows are on varies. Is that *really* necessary?

In light of this, I advise against walking-and-texting in Hong Kong.

I think the ambivalence about which side to walk on contributes to the overcrowdedness and mass chaos. Team Ramen also felt it might be indicative of a culture that was sort of refusing to make up its mind about some things.

Navigating this is your warmup.

Simple solution: spaceships and flying cars.

HECTIC!!! Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Tsim Sha Tsui, for the food. Kowloon side, first MTR station. Come here 7 PM or later and it will just be madness. It’s also where some amazing food goes on. In this particular picture, where we got spicy crab and ate on the street (around Temple Street, probs), but Tsim Sha Tsui is also where we got Hot Pot, Korean food, Indian food, etc. Just be prepared for dinner to take a while, and that you probably will have to wait. The locals don’t seem to have a huge drinking culture, instead food culture is central, and people seem to spend all evening at dinner. Restaurants will be just as busy at 7 PM as 11 PM, and I never saw one closed before like, midnight (San Francisco can we do this, pretty please?)

I think too much spice/garlic to the crab ratio at this place, but spicy crab is theoretically a good idea

2) Ladies’ Market – I bought an excellent purse here. You’ll have to bargain for stuff; start with ~half the asking price. Also, do Temple Street at night.

3) Filipino nannies/maids all over Statue Square on Sunday afternoons. It’s a thing.

4) Causeway Bay if you want to shop like you’re a teenage girl in Osaka (which I do). Go to SOGO in the morning, Island Beverly Centre after 1 or 2 PM (they only open in the afternoon, presumably for the schoolgirls), and visit all the shoe/clothing stores along Lockhart Road just north of SOGO. World Trade Centre (another block north) for your Uniqlo and MUJI fix. Takoyaki is in the basement of SOGO, as expected. Also, go to Retrostone for vintage stuff.

Two of my fave stores: Apostrophe, where I walked in and asked to buy the jacket the shopkeeper was wearing. She said “Okay but you should wear it in brown.” (hers was black). I tried on both colors and she was right (They always are. Ugh, I love shopping in Asia.) Second store, BESS, felt like an Anthro for slightly more edgy but equally rich girls. I purchased the only jacket I could afford.

Like, a third of the stuff I picked up. And Causeway Bay is just ONE good shopping district of HK.

5) Happy Valley horse races in Wan Chai on Wednesday Nights. Full of old ex-pats gambling on horses and drinking beer. Starts at 7, last race happens around 11 PM so you have a nice wide window in which to get dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui and then head to Wan Chai.

Now that you think you’re going to explode, time to chill out.

Calm Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Kowloon Walled City Park – This used to be a super-dense mishmash of apartments built on top of each other, and very slummy, back in the day. Sounded pretty creepy and horrible, but it was demolished in the 90s and now there’s a nice park there instead. There’s bonsai! We went at dusk and it was peaceful though maybe a bit eerie.

A gate and some old stones are the only thing left, and we did many a photoshoot there. Here’s Boyce swaggin’ it by the ruins.

2) Hong Kong Park

There’s an excellent tower, from which I took the first picture in this post. Also, we were pretty big fans of the Tai Chi garden and its many statues we abused.

3) Place on the way down from the central mid-level escalators

The Central Mid-level escalators is the longest set of covered, outdoor escalators in the world (FUN FACT!) and riding them takes you on a walking tour of SoHo (lots of nice-looking restaurants) but without the walking. Eventually if you ride ALL the escalators (this takes a while) you end up alone at the end, the tourists mysteriously having disappeared from your side (how did they all know when to get off, anyway?) You’re standing on a road in super-residential Hong Kong. So what now? Luckily, I have the answer for you.

Turn left, and walk down Conduit Road for a while, until you see this staircase. Then take it, and you’ll be in a magical world under the roads, and the coolest place we found in Hong Kong.

I like it because it’s quiet, peaceful, and green, but you’re still reminded that you’re in Hong Kong since there are literally cars driving over your head. Real jungle meets concrete jungle. I also found a good spot to perch.

Photo by Jane Dinh

After you pass by this point, you will wander into the Botanical Gardens/Zoo, which had a very Jurassic Park feel to it.

4) Cyberport – It’s not really near anything, but I befriended some Australians who lived out here and this is the view they wake up to. Daily. UMMM??? The only thing better than finding awesome views while on hikes is finding them in your living room. So either go befriend some randos who live here too, or else try to get similar views from HKU.

I learned in HK and Singapore that I have a thing for views with lots of cargo ships and islands in the distance.

5) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – More crazy views and an entirely vertical school.

This is where Nelson is studying abroad (so jelly that he’s still in HK) and the layout of this school is ridiculous.

All the classes are in a single building and then you take a 10-story elevator down to the dorm (no floors in between, it’s pretty much a vertical tube), and then take another 10-story elevator down and you’re ON THE BEACH.

A few last tips about places

- If you like running, try Happy Valley (awesome view, you get to feel like a horse) and Victoria Park (nice running track, workout equipment scattered around it).
- Go to 7-11 religiously. It is your Japanese snack food haven, source of hydration, entertainment while waiting, and cell phone minute replenishment. They are everywhere.
- Stay somewhere convenient. We Airbnb‘d places in Wan Chai and Tin Hau for 5 days each, and these were crazy convenient and almost as cheap as hostels. Tin Hau was also next door to Victoria Park and Causeway Bay, so a good base for shopaholics. Beware though that your place may be so nice that you just stay in all day, watching Breaking Bad and reading metafilter. There’s no shame in that though, as you have all night to go eat dinner, watch horses race, and experience the Cantonese magic that is Hong Kong.

Wondering where’s the dim sum? Worry not. Posts on HK food and partying, plus all the Singapore stuff, coming up!

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?

Wolf Gang – Lions In Cages by 1000songs

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.

6 Follow Me by Designer Drugs Official

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.

Find out one of your new friends is in a band you have listened to before:
The War On Drugs, Come To The City by dance yrself clean 1983

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.  

A Place To Bury Strangers “In Your Heart” (Cereal Spiller Remix) by Cereal Spiller

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.

Hello world, I’m at Facebook

I’m currently just past the halfway mark of my Software Engineering Internship at Facebook. People often ask me what it’s like working at Facebook, so I may as well start writing it down. For background, I’m on the Profile team and I’ve been here since the beginning of June.

So here we go, Chapter 1: WTF is so good about industry (other than $$)?

I didn’t really get the appeal of industry before this summer. Until now, I have been somewhat solidly in the academia camp. I did REUs at Carnegie Mellon and UC Santa Cruz the past two summers, both of which I enjoyed greatly. Work was fun, interesting, and laid-back.

However, back at school (UIUC), most top Computer Science students seem to have little interest in academia, which always sort of mystified me. I saw mostly similarities between industry and academia – like that you get to work on hard problems that you [hopefully] find interesting. Industry involves bigger bags of money certainly, but there’s no way that explains what I perceive as an almost complete disinterest in academia – most kids I know in CS are definitely not in it for the money anyway…maybe they just hate school?

So I considered my summer at Facebook partially an experiment to determine what people actually like so much about industry. Results: semi-conclusive.

I’m in Your News Feed

One afternoon around 3 PM of my 3rd week at Facebook, I was in the middle of some work and refreshed my news feed. The first or second story in my feed was from one of my friends in Sweden who had just updated part of his profile. I glanced over the story, and then basically did a doubletake. WAIT a MINUTE, that story seemed a little TOO familiar. I realized it used code I had written over a couple of days the previous week. And it was now on real, live Facebook…

NO WAY!!!

It had never occurred to me to be concerned with how long it would take from starting work and getting code on Real Live Facebook… Turns out, it was about a week – half a week if you discount the few days of orientation at the beginning where I wasn’t writing code.

A week!? I had never even written or read a line of php before coming to Facebook.

“Move fast and break things” is the Facebook engineers’ catchphrase, but it’s also thanks to the release engineers / release infrastructure that we, as engineers, can actually do so. I am impressed.

Building Stuff People Use

Merely getting code shipped fast is not something I can see myself getting super-excited about though. The essence of the awesomeness I felt here was that I made something and a few days later SOMEONE I KNOW is using it, and bonus, I actually get to SEE them use it. This was so exciting and motivating, and I think it’s the key to industry for me – there was no moment in either of my previous two internships that had the same oomph, simply because there was no way to immediately and definitively see that what I was working on was USEFUL because it was being USED, then and there. Perhaps my work had the same or greater long-term impact, but there was no way for me to tell in a concrete, non-theoretical way. Hmm.

So this realization does sort of limit my employment interests to a couple of rows of icons of iPhone apps — I no longer am interested in working for a company unless I use their product a lot. But given that, and the fact that my level of Facebook addiction over the past 6 months may have, at some point, reached clinical insanity, I’d say coming here for the summer was probably a good call.

SEA BATTLE happened a couple of weeks ago.

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!

As always, more pictures of Tallin on Flickr!

Never have I been so happy (or surprised!) for spring.

Sweden in the spring is magical. (Allegedly, summer is even better, but I won’t be able to report on that.)

In the last two to three weeks, the sun has come out, the trees have blossomed, the weather has warmed up to a balmy 20 degrees…and most importantly, everyone has gone into permanent spring picnic mode.

Every piece of grass or bench or seat outside in Stortorget is covered with PEOPLE. If it’s the weekend, they’re sitting in the park, drinking (see: Valborg, this Saturday), otherwise they’re just sitting outside. On big rocks, overlooking Stockholm, until 9 PM when it finally starts to think about getting dark.

It has become our full-time job to enjoy the weather.

Actually, I totally forgot spring was coming.

It’s not that the winter in Skåne was even that bad. Since January, it was consistently 0 degrees and grey — not that cold, by my standards. I never even used my heaviest jacket once. But when I arrived, everything was covered in grey ice, the sky was grey, the sun set at 4 PM, and it never even got totally light out.

I got so used to the consistently dreary weather (2.5 months straight of exactly the same weather?) that spring seemed like something that only happens in other countries, like SUVs, carpeting, and hip-hop.

But then it happened, almost overnight. All term, I’ve had Swedish class from 5-7:30 PM — it used to be dark long before I even walked to class. Suddenly, now it’s light for hours after I come home.

The whole country is in SUCH A GOOD MOOD.

And oh man, the grilling. It’s been going on for WEEKS. Grilling is big here. Like, constant 4th of July-mode level big.

(Actually, I think we jumped the gun on the grilling a little bit — it was an odd experience to stand around in the light at 8 PM, grilling a pineapple, in my winter coat.)

(Yes, you can grill pineapples.)

It’s no accident that Easter break is happening now, followed a week later by Valborg. After 9 months of winter, we have earned the right to enjoy the weather.

As my friend Polly says, “I now understand why ancient cultures worshipped the sun.”

The sun is here and it’s time to celebrate.

I think spring celebration is something I was missing out on in the US. I mean, we occasionally would sit on the quad, and I remember quite a few pleasant warm evenings eating pizza on apartment balconies, feet up. But Japan has hanami, Sweden has Valborg… I am missing the American equivalent here.

Then again, maybe it’s because Illinois has exactly 1.5 days of good weather before we go into hot&humid or tornado mode, or maybe it’s because spending more than an hour outside means my allergies will cause my immune system to self-destruct.

Point is, byebye seasonal affective disorder, hello a month straight of chilling outside. The music festival Popadelica wrote in a recent Facebook status, “Förresten, sa vi att vi bokat solen till Popadelica 2011 också? Det har vi.” (“Btw, did we mention we’ve booked the sun for Popadelica 2011? Well we did.”) NICE.

Only bummed that I’m leaving too soon for midsommar and the midnight sun…

Last Thursday, in order to celebrate a quarter-year spent in Sweden, the coming of spring, and my general aversion to having a lot of hair, I decided to go on a haircutting adventure.

I bought a couple hair magazines, looking for short, Swedish-looking styles, and the one that kept recurring was some variety of this Robyn look. Or this one. Sounds good, I thought.

No one I knew had any salon recommendations in Lund, so I sort of randomly chose Klipphuset downtown.

My hairdresser was a middle-aged woman who really didn’t speak English (everyone in Lund speaks perfect English…except for my hairdresser!) So, the number of ways I could describe what I wanted was rather limited. I could basically say:

- I want it very different
- I want it like these pictures
- I am sick of having lots of hair

She was very skeptical of my haircut desires. She kept being like “your hair is so thick, it will end up SO short and SO manly…”

She then tried to get me to pick a different hairstyle and I kind of sat there awkwardly for a while, not choosing one. She was like “Do you want to think about it and come back?” At which point I said something to the effect of “No. I want a haircut now, short is ok and manly is ok.” And then she sighed and said “Okay, well, we’ll try.”

Then, halfway through the haircut, she started getting really into it, and was all, “what if we do this side really short and leave this side long, it’ll be asymmetrical!” Oh, NOW you get into it?! Well, whatever, I think she succeeded.

And +1 language accomplishment — definitely one of the first times I felt like “Phew, good thing I’ve been vaguely learning Swedish for the past three months.”

Before:

After:
(apologies for inconsistency of mirror vs. non-mirror pics)

With straightening

Action shot with Jennifer!

And, when necessary:

In a particularly deep conversation last night with a Swede and a Canadian, we realized Swedish kitchens (especially in student korridors) have several things that are incredibly useful, but we don’t really have back in North America.

1. The knife magnet

So much easier than those stupid things you stick the knives in and then can’t see their relative size and/or if they’re serrated… magnets for knives appear to be more common here.

2. The cheese slicer

EVERY kitchen has not one, but MANY cheese slicers. Giant blocks of cheese? No problem, still make a convenient snack. No knives and cutting boards to mess around with. Swedish friend was astounded we don’t have these. HOW DO WE SLICE CHEESE!?? It’s a hard life in the US.

Apparently, cheese slicers are a Scandinavian invention.

3. The disco ball

Because festing is an important part of Swedish culture. Almost, but not quite, as important as IKEA. But you don’t have to choose, since Swedes get to fest right in their IKEA-decked-out kitchens.

This may be a good time to bring up the fact that there will, in fact, be a fest in MY korridor tonight. The very disco ball pictured above will be there. So should you. I’ll be there around 11 maybe, but you can text me. If you bring any cheese, you’ll be all set.

I was going to tell you guys all about how I went to Hamlet’s Castle (Kronborg, in Helsingør, across the water in Denmark), but Joanna who also writes for Lundagård totally stole my thunder with her post A Reminder of the Old Days. I did the exact same trip (though it was less icy when I went), and all I have to say about Hamlet is that he must’ve had some killer parties in that ballroom of his.

However, I did find another major Scandinavian attraction that’s almost as good: a candy store.

Behold:

Since I haven’t explained, candy in Sweden is definitely a “thing”. Every grocery store, 7-11, or other convenience store has an entire aisle devoted to candy in bins that you scoop out. I think there’s actually two candy aisles in the smallish ICA I shop at. You get a bag and buy it by weight. It’s cheap, and grown adults can often be seen doing this too, not just children.

Here’s what the candy bags from ICA look like:

And one might choose an assortment like this:

However, the candy store pictured above puts ICA and 7-11 to shame. There’s 3 huge rows of lösgodis (the candy in bins), as well as packaged candy.

Check out that entire WALL of bilar in the background:

(Bilar, for those of you who don’t know, is Sweden’s best-selling car. Even more popular than Volvo:)

I can’t really offer advice on WHICH candy to buy — typically I put in just one or two pieces of anything that looks mildly appetizing into my bag (lösgodis is very low-risk, it’s the speed-dating of candy…) and 80% turns out to be edible, and 20% turns out disgusting (to me, anyway. Swedes are really into licorice and it has a tendency to pop up when you least expect it).

For more advanced blogging about lösgodis and why you eat candy on Saturdays check out these two posts on Welcome to Sweden.

No color-changing lights? The packaged candy feels ignored

For all I know, this is an average everyday candy store in Sweden, but to my untrained American eye, it was like walking into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

They also have a whole row of kitschy toy-like candy (think 1000 variations on ring-pops).

They also sell cigarettes.

How to find this magical place:
The store is called “Candy People” and located at Bankgatan 6 (downtown). Walk in, grab a bag and a plastic shovel. Thank me for your next sugar rush.

I followed Robyn to Amsterdam last weekend, mostly because her tix for Copenhagen had been sold out for months before I even arrived in Sweden. Robyn seemed as good an occasion as any to do the Amsterdam tourism thing, and with a Swedish buddy and a lot of recommendations from my friends and the internets, the trip was a smashing success!

5 days is a rather long time to tour one city, so I’ll skip the storytelling (about how it was awesome to meet up with friends from UIUC, Lund, etc.), and just go with a list of things that were cool and might help you plan your own trip to Amsterdam.

Good Things to Do

1. Canal Tours

On day one, we took the City Canal Cruise which leaves from Leidseplein and takes you all around the city through the major canals, and even out to the harbor. It was great except that the recording for the tour was broken, so we didn’t actually learn what most things were that we were passing. However, most of the sights we saw on the tour became landmarks we used later to help us navigate.

Where the bout tours started

I’m on a boat

Harbor!

2. Openbare Bibliotheek (The Library)

By FAR my favorite place in Amsterdam. Olga recommended it to me and I only wish I went earlier — free internets, nice interior design, food, and a great view of the city. I went 3 times in 4 days. Plus, the library is just a short walk from the Centraal Station, so NO ONE HAS AN EXCUSE NOT TO GO. It’s open kinda late, too!

Lots of construction approaching the library from the station side

inside

Nice setup

STUDY-POD

Bathroom costs 20 euro-cents but it’s worth EVERY EURO-PENNY.

Library elevator hyperjump.

3. The Red Light District

When recommending places to go in Amsterdam, people tend to be weird about *sort of* recommending this place but not ACTUALLY… (maybe they’re worried that if they say to go here, I will think they hired a hooker?) Anyway, I would like to unambiguously say YES, do go there — it is fascinating!

BUT, be warned, that there are not only prostitutes there, but LOTS OF SWANS.

For some reason it didn’t occur to me that there would be actual red lights all around… The main street, with the canal running through, and the tiny, red side streets, was quite pretty. Definitely go there on a Friday or Saturday night, so the district is in full force. Every street (especially the smaller side-streets) has prostitutes standing in windows (as expected). However, there were a few unexpected things:

- If you make a lot of eye contact or walk really close to the windows, the girls start to tap the glass at you. A little eerie.

- On the other hand, about half of the window hookers look incredibly bored and are on their cell phones, texting, or reading facebook, or trading stocks, whatever it is that you do when you’re a hooker in between customers

- Many of them were actually quite attractive

- A lot of the side-streets were narrow enough that it was hard for two people to pass on either side of each other without careful coordination – which is especially challenging if you are busy gawking at the prostitutes less than two feet away.

- Swans.

4. Live Music at Dam Square

There was almost always live music going on here, and it was pretty good! Also a good place to just hang out, people watch, eat food, etc. (I always love finding those places in big cities).

5. Heineken Museum

It was kinda cool — the reason this isn’t higher on my list is that what made it cool was the nice interior design of the brewery/museum, which was greatly surpassed by the awesomeness of the Bibliotheek. So, you can definitely skip the beer thing by just going to the library.

They had some cool chairs though.

6. The Best Tree in Vondelpark

We found the best one. I can’t really tell you where it is, but it’s sorta far into the park. You’ll find it. Good for watching bike tours go by, but watch out, the kids can get pretty territorial and you have to really defend your spot in the tree.

This spot’s MINE

This kid had the sweetest ride

7. Shopping on Kalverstraat

One of the big pedestrian shopping streets in Amsterdam. There are a bajillion shoe stores (LOVE), and I found exactly the boots I have been looking for all winter but haven’t found in Sweden, at a store called Manfield.

I also got a dress somewhere that had cute, cheap clothes, and the LONGEST QUEUE for the dressing room EVER. Every single girl except for me was there with a boyfriend and she would come out of the changing room, model, ask if it made her arms look fat, contemplate for minutes, and then move on to the next item.

WAY worse than the infamous queues at the Anne Frank Museum.

8. ROBYN @ MELKWEG!!!

This would be first on my list of course, but unfortunately Robyn is not ALWAYS in Amsterdam, so it doesn’t really work as an Amsterdam tourism tip.

Just as predicted, Robyn was a friggin’ awesome live performer. She clearly loved her music and performing just as much as we loved watching her — no diva vibe from her! She danced around (yes, on her own), and we danced along right with her.

My travel buddy Philip has a magic power: weaving through a crowd like no other (Swedish queueing skillz in full force), so we quickly made it to the very front.

Everyone behind us — suckers!

<3

“Hang With Me” was the clear winning song, but everything else was wonderful as well. So perfect.

At the end of the show, we found out that everyone else at the front of the crowd was also Swedish (I’m serious about this queueing thing), because we were all shouting “EN GÅNG TILL!!!” which is what you shout to get an encore… in SWEDISH. The girl next to me and her friends turned out to all be from Luleå, and we met a couple from Stockholm as well. After the concert, we were suddenly a gang of 12 Swedes (and one American, of course) and we went galavanting around Amsterdam for hours together. THANKS ROBYN! Best last night in Amsterdam ever.

Food

- Thaise Snackbar Bird – Really really good thai food. We ate here twice in the 5 days we were in Amsterdam. It’s tiny though, so you always end up sitting next to strangers. Sometimes, very very high strangers.

- Fries sold in paper cones on the streets – the mayo looks gross but it was actually quite good. Everyone seems to be walking around with a cone of fries, it’s hard not to want one yourself.

- Stroopwafel McFlurries – I really only go to McDonalds to experience local McDelicacies, but this is by far the best item I have ever found at McDonalds. Stroopwafels themselves are one of the best things in the world — I have been enjoying them for years and I had no idea they were Dutch! This is how you eat a stroopwafel.

There was no other restaurant that compared in any way to Thai Snackbar, but if you want other recommendations, check out Spotted by Locals Amsterdam – they know what they’re talking about.

Bars and Nightlife

Bulldog Hostel – After we found our crowd of Swedes at Robyn, we ended up hanging out at the hostel bar here until like 4 am – there was no bartender for miles around, but no one seemed to care that we were there.

Cafe Mokum – in Leidseplein, a long but narrow bar with a platform at the back and a lot of dancing. And man, were people dancing. Unfortunately, it closed at 2 AM on Sunday night (how dare they?) so we had to move down the street to…

Bubbels — which was definitely the Amsterdam equivalent of Joe’s, complete with the annoying DJs who turn the music down so you can yell along with the song. Additionally, the bartenders had these bells they would ring randomly. Incredibly obnoxious. This club, however, was the first place in Amsterdam I found where people couldn’t speak English. LOTS of Dutch yelling.

Male attention in Amsterdam… PLENTY to go around. In Sweden, getting a guy at a bar to even give you the time of day requires a powerful magic love incantation — not so in Amsterdam (or at least in this club). Don’t make eye contact for more than 1 second with anyone unless you are INTERESTED. And if you’re a guy, the drink-buying competition is fierce — Philip reports seeing guys buying beers at the bar, turning around, and shoving them at literally THE FIRST GIRL they see, before anyone else can get to her. Actually, the guys at this club made the jerks at Joe’s seem totally tame. Whoa.

The dancing situation in Amsterdam was halfway between Barcelona and Sweden. No grinding of course, no circles of people (like in Sweden), but people were actually dancing (unlike in Barcelona) — just not in any particular formation. The timeframe of going out was also halfway between Sweden and Barcelona — people seemed to go out at 12ish and clubs would close at 4.

Stuff that was Meh

Really the only thing we did in Amsterdam that was skippable was the Anne Frank House. It was sorta cool, but wayyy too touristy and corporate. I felt like just reading the book made so much more of an impression on me than visiting the museum ever could. My two cents.

For many more pictures…

Of Amsterdam and even my mini-adventure to Roosendaal, see my Flickr.

After 6 weeks of dreary, dark, just-at-the-freezing-point weather, I needed a break. So, inspired by the fact that the weather is 20℃ there instead of 0, and more importantly, this song, I headed to Barcelona last weekend:

I was traveling with one friend, and we stayed at Sant Jordi Alberg which was apparently the 6th best hostel in the world in 2009, which sets the bar pretty high. Indeed, it was quite nice, and small enough that you could meet people without feeling anonymous. Every night the hostelers go out and party together, and usually you don’t have to pay cover at the clubs if you go with the hostel group. More on clubs later.

Barcelona Attractions
We had 3 full days to explore, which was to see all the main things there are to see. Some were good, some were not so good.

1. El Gòtic, the Gothic Quarter, was nice. Lots of street musicians, narrow streets, lots of people walking around. Also, this was the only place in all of Barcelona that we found horchata, for some reason. Lack of horchata (especially when it was on the menu and then they claimed they didn’t have it) was a major source of angst this weekend.

2. Park Güell, the Gaudi Park, was actually a bit underwhelming, but it’s at the top of a hill on the very edge of the city, so you do get some good views from there:

I think after living in Kobe, I just get really excited about any mountain-city-ocean situation.

3. Magic Fountain of Montjuïc was probably the most epic thing in all of Barcelona. It is also surrounded by another row of epic fountains and a huge museum with beams of light behind it. This place is the best.

Row of fountains

And the actual fountain, in video form (coordinated with music):

4. The Sagrada Familia was cool, especially the inside (the outside is bizarre looking but not nearly as stunning as the inside):

Sadly, the towers were closed to visitors the day we went.

5. Las Ramblas, the big shopping street, was stupid. It was completely filled with slow-moving tourists and street vendors trying to rip them off. There wasn’t even anything cool to buy, either. Definitely can skip.

The Barcelona Metro
The metro was incredibly and unexpectedly good. Here’s what made it great:
- it’s well designed / easy to use
- the trains come very frequently (every 4-5 minutes maximum)
- the clocks on the platforms tell you when the next train is coming TO THE SECOND… not minute, but SECOND. I’ve never seen that before
- it’s clean
- in many of the stations there are little shops selling cheap yet really useful things. I bought a white circle scarf (see above photo) and a purse in two of these stops. My scarf is just like the ones everyone in Sweden has, and yet it was much easier to find one in a random Barcelona metro stop than in Sweden. Go figure. It felt really weird buying winter accessories when it was still warm there, but since it’s Barcelona, 20 degrees meant everyone was freezing and wearing winter coats and boots, etc. Hahaha.

Spanish Party Time
It was amazing how fast we assimilated to Spanish Party Time — everything in Spain starts and ends very late, and everything in Sweden starts and (sometimes) ends in Lund much earlier. The first night we were in Barcelona, we asked Duda, one of the staff at the hostel (with a really great name) what time to be around for that evening’s activities. He told us 11 PM as the meeting time, aka pre-party start time. So our daily routine was always something like:

explore the city during the day/evening
8:30~10 PMish – get dinner
11:00 PM – be at the hostel, get ready to go out
11:30 PM – leave hostel for first bar
2:00 AM – leave first bar to go to club
5:30 AM – leave club
and then sleep in until 12:30 or 1:30 PM

So we were first stepping foot in a club right when the clubs in Lund are closing. Jeez. This also meant I had significant “jet lag” coming back to Sweden, despite the fact that Barcelona and Sweden are in the same time zone. Oops.

People Don’t Dance in Barcelona Clubs
I was extremely surprised by this. I expected everywhere to be a massive rave all the time. Instead, what I got were a series of ENORMOUS clubs (all at least 4x the size of the largest club I’d ever been to before this) where there are one or more huge huge huge dancefloors that are incredibly crowded, but instead of dancing, everyone is just kind of standing and drinking and talking (yelling) at their friends. I don’t quite get the point of being in a club in that case…?

The queues for these clubs are also enormous — like 200+ people at a time, but it takes just 10 minutes or so to get into the club. SO fast! In the queue to Razzmatazz on Saturday night around 3:15 AM, one of the biggest clubs in Barcelona, we actually ran into our friend from Lund. We knew he was coming to Barcelona that weekend too, but it was quite odd that we ran into him in a queue at the same time and same club, and furthermore that I actually spotted him in that line. Crazy!

Spanish in Barcelona
I didn’t know any before this trip, and I still don’t really know any (and I definitely didn’t know Catalan!) You can really get by on just a couple of words. Everyone did seem to know English (especially in restaurants, etc.) but unlike in Sweden, where they just switch to English as soon as they figure out you’re foreign, they actually use Spanish with everyone here. If you need missing vocab though, saying it in English usually did the trick.

What you CANNOT do is ask them to speak in English. Everyone will say no to that and some people will take offense.

So Many Americans
For some reason, every single person in our hostel other than a Japanese brother/sister pair, was American, mostly students studying abroad elsewhere in Spain or in France. I forgot that I hadn’t been in a group of more than 3 Americans at a time in a month and a half, so it was strange to suddenly be meeting people from Minnesota instead of Munich.

There were lots of foreigners at the clubs too, and several times someone would come up to me attempting to make conversation, but then panicked at the last minute, as if they had just realized that they didn’t know any Spanish. Surprise! I don’t know Spanish either. I also managed to find a Japanese guy who appeared not to speak either Spanish or English. See how useful it is to just-so-happen to speak Japanese?

However, I did notice that Swedish is starting to interfere with my Japanese too — I would think in Japanese and sometimes Swedish words (that I use very commonly) would come into my head. So either this means I’m making progress on Swedish, or I’m just getting confused.

Other Upcoming Travels
I’ve soaked enough sunlight up in Barcelona to tide me over until real spring happens in Sweden (I’m still optimistic that it will, in fact, happen). So now, my travels will be motivated not by weather but by live music: Amsterdam for Robyn, Berlin for I Blame Coco, and Copenhagen once more just for kicks, should round out March. April and May are relatively wide open, and I hope to get some more serious Scandinavian adventures going on then.

The full set of Barcelona pictures here!

I am in love and I can’t not tell the world. About these scones.

Every Tuesday afternoon, at Sydskånska, there is a wonderful event called “Teasdag” — basically a very cozy cafe where you drink tea, eat snacks/desserts, and hang out and talk with your friends (aka fika). “Teasdag” is a play on the word “Tisdag” (“Tuesday” in Swedish). Tea + Tuesday. Anyway.

Teasdag is probably my favorite weekly event at a nation. It’s also the only one I can think of where no one is either drunk (pubs, clubs) or hung over (rehab/Sunday brunch).

But all the aforementioned things explain only about half of why Teasdag is magical. The other half, is the SCONES.

Seriously, these are the best scones I think I have ever had. They are the perfect texture – slightly browned and crispy on the outside, and fluffy on the inside. They come with raspberry jam, marmalade, and a milky/creamy dip. With a cup of rooibos or lapsang tea, I am floating on a cloud made of happiness and fika.

Sydskånska, you really outdid yourselves with these. The only drawback? Knowing the BEST SCONES EVER are only available once a week, at Teasdag. I’m already dreading the inevitable withdrawl when I return home. But for now, if it’s Tuesday, you know where I’ll be.

I can see my house Malmö McDonalds from here!

The geography of Lund is pretty much like the geography of Champaign-Urbana: really flat. There is a slight hill to the town, where the university is north and up, and downtown is south and downhill (just like Santa Cruz, actually)… not a lot of good views.

But apparently, there is ONE hill. According to Wikipedia, it’s called Sankt Hans Hill. Of course, it’s fake (a former dump). My friend Philip showed me this place on Sunday, which was conveniently the only clear day this month, meaning we actually had a view!

Let’s check it out. Pretend you’re me, and we will face northish, and turn counterclockwise in a circle.

To the north, you can see a bunch of cute, middle-class houses with red roofs.

Turn west, and there’s wind turbines, and a train passing by every once in a while.

If you start facing southwest, you can actually see all the way to Malmö (okay, it’s not actually very far away) and its iconic Turning Torso.

Continuing, we can see the Lund Cathedral with the double-towers (our landmark, I suppose), which is where downtown starts.

Turning toward the east, we can see school. The LTH observatory is sort of the north end of campus, but since it’s the technical school that’s sorta home base for me.

And finally, turning once more and completing the circle, we see the most important landmark of them all….McDonalds. No, I haven’t been there.

It’s here if you want to find it! (the HILL, not McDonalds…come on now, guys)

View Larger Map

Although the nations are the core of the Lund party scene, there is one other equally important form of party to understand: the Korridor Party. And finally, the “pre-party”, its customs, and its relationship to both nation parties and korridor parties.

Korridor Parties

Korridor parties are a result of the logistics of most Lund student housing. Almost every student lives in a “korridor,” which is a single hallway with rooms on either side (yes, a corridor) and a shared kitchen at the end. Korridors have somewhere between 8 and 15 rooms along them, and while everyone may not know one another, you at least run into almost everyone in the kitchen at some point. Kitchen duties are also divided up in some way – in my korridor, there are 2 kitchen bitches per week, who have to make sure the dishes are put away, trash is taken out, etc., and each person does this for 2 weeks throughout the semester.

So a korridor is in some sense a community. Sometimes, the korridor wants to throw a party, either as a group, or just because one or two people feel like having a party at their place. In that case, the kitchen becomes the party zone, since it has enough room to crowd and dance, and because it is accessible to everyone (if you partied in one person’s room, it may be unclear as to whether new people were invited). Most korridors seem to have a stereo system and a TV in their kitchen as well. Ours has a disco ball (super necessary). At least one person’s room (usually the host of the korridor party) leaves their room open so that guests can use their bathroom.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any fabulously wild korridor party pictures (though some of them can get pretty ridiculous), but here’s a very small one from a few weeks ago in Sparta B:

Because korridors are completely under the control of the residents, they can of course go much longer into the night than nations (which usually end around 2), at which point sometimes the party moves into one person’s room for chilling, dancing, etc. But korridor parties can also be incredibly short — 60 people piling into the kitchen, partying from 7-9 PM, and then vanishing. This usually happens when a korridor party is also a pre-party.

Pre-parties

Pre-parties are the Lund equivalent of pre-gaming, but they are a bit more formal than what we do in the US. Pre-parties can be held in a korridor or someone’s room depending on how large the group is — which can be anywhere from 3 to 60+ people. Afterwards, you usually head out to a nation (though sometimes you just go to a different korridor party). I suppose the original idea behind both practices is to drink before you go out to avoid expensive club drink prices. Here are the main differences I notice between pre-parties in Lund and the US:

• Unlike American pre-gaming, pre-parties usually have their own Facebook events

• EVERY party here has a set of pre-parties, whereas it is most certainly optional in the US

• The ending time of a pre-party is very definite. If you are going to VGs on Wednesday, the pre-party ends around 9:15 or 9:30, and everyone is GONE. Do NOT try to go to a pre-party at 9, people will give you weird looks. It’s usually a bit more challenging to kick everyone out of your place in the US.

• You are, on special occasions, allowed to pre-party for pubs, which is a little ridiculous since pubs start at 6 or 7. I think the earliest party I went to here started at 4:30. But since it’s Sweden, it was long past sundown, which is I suppose the international GO signal for party.

Korridor Party Locations

Most korridor parties seem to occur in the Sparta and Delphi residences, because they are very large, and have the kitchen/korridor style. There are occasionally korridor parties at Klostergården, but each resident has his/her own kitchens, so the korridors there tend not to be as social. Östra Torn residences are pretty much individual apartments, and there isn’t even really a korridor, and that covers all the residences I have been to personally. Sparta seems to have the most — you can sort of just wander around on any given Wednesday – Saturday night and find several korridor parties going on. We also have a lot of international students, who are some of the biggest korridor partiers.

Korridor Party Economics

People must bring their own drinks to all pre-parties, korridor parties, etc. (basically, anything that isn’t a nation). There are often snacks too, usually provided by the party-thrower. So the drink and food costs are minimized, but there is one cost that is externalized by the partygoers – cleanup. Nation parties cost more to go to, but you can effectively trash the nation and it’s up to the nation to clean up. If you throw a korridor party, it’s up to you, and usually, the last thing you feel like doing the morning after throwing a party is wading through a trashed kitchen to get to your Yoggi and Müsli.

A Time Diagram of Party Types

For you more visual learners.

Got my A machines in the table
Got my B machines in the drawer
but WHERE IS ERIC!??!

This weekend I made my first attempt at travel within Europe. The plan was to take a nice easy trip to Copenhagen, which is less than an hour away by train, see a Sleigh Bells concert, and spend Sunday exploring the city in daylight. It turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than we planned.

Part 1: Leaving Lund and Losing Eric

Alex, Josh, Eric, and I walked down to the Lund train station and bought train tickets. The train arrived when everyone except Alex and Eric had finished purchasing tickets, so they rushed through ticket purchase, and made their way over to the open doors where Josh and I were standing. The conductor’s bell was ringing, and Alex and Eric rushed towards the door. Alex made it on board – and then the doors closed, literally right in Eric’s face. It was a moment of comedic genius like I have never before seen in real life.

Josh tried to push the doors back open, I was pressing all the random colored buttons by the door, and Alex was running through the train to try and find the conductor. The train sat in place for about 10 seconds, we unable to get out, and Eric unable to get in, and just staring at each other and laughing uncontrollably (those of us inside the train, anyway).

We were pounding on the door and shouting “ERIC!!! ERIC!!!” and in general making a huge scene… the weird part was that everyone else in the train AND on the train platform was staring, and laughing uncontrollably too – audience-at-a-standup-comedy-show laughing too, no stifled chuckling here.

And when the train pulled away and we calmed down, we had to face the reality that Eric didn’t know exactly where we were going… and his phone had no minutes.

Survivors of the train incident

Crossing the water over to Copenhagen

Part 2: Accidental Eric Recovery

We hung out in the Copenhagen H station for about an hour, standing on various platforms, hoping to see Eric. No luck. Eventually, we went up to the McDonalds in the station to get Wifi and found some Facebook messages from Eric, that he had already arrived in Copenhagen, and a cab driver had screwed him over and taken him to the wrong place on purpose. Oops. We tried to come up with a game plan that would involve Eric taking a cab to meet us later and us paying the cab. We left the station…. and 15 minutes later ran into Eric on a street corner. Problem solved by telepathy!!

Part 3: Onto the concert

We found some food and got ready for the show. Sleigh Bells was playing at a venue called Loppen in the heart of Christiania, the hippie/druggie neighborhood in Copenhagen. There was lots of graffiti everywhere and your occasional trash-can fire, but we made it to the show without being offered drugs or being too sketched out, and everyone at the show was a college student from DTU or other Copenhagen schools anyway.

I have no clue what the opening band was called, but they were pretty good, and a lot like Sleigh Bells actually. The lead singer had a completely see-through shirt, but luckily my camera never decided to focus properly on her, so my photos amazingly turned out PG.

And finally… SLEIGH BELLS!

The show was rockin’ and Miss Sleigh Bells herself stood 3 feet in front of us the whole time, in her custom jersey and her white skull-covered nopants. The above picture is about the farthest she ever strayed.

Sleigh Bells’ noise pop grittiness was only enhanced by being right up in the action – so while their performance didn’t deviate much from the album versions, the album versions aren’t missing much – just the volume, the makeup, and the other 150 people jumping up and down with you and screaming, of course.

They waited until towards the end to play their best song (Rill Rill), but the entire show was sorta like being inside the last 30 seconds of the video for Infinity Guitars:

They ended their set promptly without encore, and then the house music turned back up and we kept dancing for an hour or so, met a bunch of random people, and finally left the club only to get lost for at least another hour on one of those great nighttime city adventures. The man with the dog who gave us directions but spoke no English may have been the best. I led our group to the train station McDonalds again that we had grown so fond of, where we way-past-midnight snacked with about 100 other Danes (the McDonalds was debatably more crowded than the show). I would comment on regional McDonalds differences, but I don’t really go to McDonalds in the US so I dunno. If I had to guess though, they probably don’t have Toblerone mcflurries in the US though (reported by Josh to not be very good, but I’m not sure I believe that).

Part 3: Rules of Copenhagen Architecture

The next day we explored Copenhagen by daylight. It’s gorgeous! Everything is so majestic and huge. We started by heading to Strøget, the big shopping street, and getting some danishes, coffee, and wifi at a hip looking cafe.

On the way, we discovered the rules of Copenhagen architecture:
1. Steeples everywhere.
2. When you can’t have a steeple, have a crown.
3. When in doubt, put horses or other creatures on the very top of whatever.
4. Lots of horse statues.

Rule 1 – You thought it’d be an alley, but no, steeple.

Rule 2

Rule 3

Rule 4

Onto the canals, also plentiful and quite nice.

I love these multi-colored buildings. So adorable.

Someone had a bad day.

But the boats are cool.

Seriously, it’s just a streetlight? Is this really necessary? Rule 3.

Part 4: The Little Mermaid

This is one of those Famous Copenhagen Things so we did it. It was okay, but full of tourists, and most importantly, the guidebooks leave out one key part of this experience… the giant factory in the background. See:

The version you see in guidebooks…

vs. what it’s treally like – groups of tourists standing in front, and giant factory.

Part 5: Carlsberg Brewery: Probably the best playgrounds in the world

We then crossed the city west on foot towards the Carlsberg Brewery. It was quite a long walk, but a good one to see a large chunk of the city. When we arrived at the brewery, we expected to find a visitors’ entrance or something of that sort. Instead what we found was a series of some of the most dangerous playgrounds I have ever seen, leading up to the entrance of the brewery.

It was as if they lured us in with pieces of candy on the ground. What kind of message they are trying to send us by putting this next to a brewery, I don’t really want to think about. Law suit waiting to happen?

Playground 1 was a forrest of ropes hanging from the ceiling that you tie yourself to make swings. MOST FUN THING POSSIBLY IN THE WORLD.

Playground 2 was tetherball, hammocks, and giant metal platforms on springs…

There was a third playground filled with square shaped bars to climb on, but they looked too cold to climb on. After all this, the brewery itself was a little underwhelming, though the kaffebar at the top did have foosball.

Afterwards we were pretty exhausted. We walked back to the train station and headed home, too tired to even carry on a conversation. Exploring cities is exhausting! This time, we made sure not to lose Eric.

Reflections on Denmark

It’s interesting how foreign Copenhagen felt, despite the fact that I’ve only been in Sweden a couple of weeks, and still know very little Swedish. But Danish is just different enough that I was once again disoriented (I’m now used to all the streets ending in “gatan” and “vägen”, not “gade”!). Also, some differences are attributable to small town vs. big city differences. Here’s what I noticed:

- Everything is REALLY EXPENSIVE in Copenhagen. People said Sweden would be expensive, but really it hasn’t been too bad. But we had to look long and hard to find ANY meals in Copenhagen less than $20. Even $40 seemed to be normal, non-fancy places. Probably Lund is just cheap because it’s a college town, but the difference was astounding.

- Drivers will kill you. In Lund, the cars all stop for you, the trucks stop for you, the buses even stop for you if you decide to step out in front of them in the middle of the street. Which is nice, since at home they stop around 50% of the time, so you have to do that awkward dance of figuring out if they are going to stop or not. If you’re in Lund, the answer is they WILL stop. If you’re in Copenhagen, they WILL kill you. We were almost killed at least like 10 times on this trip, when we had the right of way, but cars and buses just go out of their way to find and destroy you.

- The average Copenhagen resident has an average of 2.8 more piercings than the average Lund-er. There was a grunge factor that just isn’t there in Lund, where everyone is much more Scandinavian mainstream looking. I’m pretty sure Copenhagen had the first dreadlocks I’ve seen since arriving in Scandinavia.

- Even though Copenhagen is less than an hour away, a trip there can still be wild, crazy, and adventurous. Especially if you lose your friend and cannot communicate! Looking forward to attempting somewhere ACTUALLY adventurous and seeing what happens.

And as always, there were plenty more pictures from this weekend. Enjoy!

Weirdest night so far in Lund.

Part 1: Dirty children’s songs at a Sittning

The night started with a sittning at Krischansta nation. A sittning is apparently the traditional Swedish way to party – you sit at a really long table and eat and drink and sing — they give you a song book with song lyrics in it, and there’s a person in charge of telling people when to sing. Normally all the singing would be Swedish, but this was a sittning organized by the Erasmus Student Network, so it was only for foreigners and most of the songs were English (and a few various other languages).

Many of the songs, however, were extremely dirty. And involved sexual positions/preferences of either girls, or worse, cartoon characters (I know way too much about the private life of Yoggi Bear now).

Our table:

Oscar was in charge of leading the singing:

Other side of the table:

Sometimes we had to stand on our chairs while singing too:

After the sittning was over, they cleared out the tables to make room for the dancefloor and the Kristchansta pub/club started. It looked like this:

Part 2: Awkward dancing and the mystery of the disappearing iPhone

Now, I’ve been to a ton of club nights so far. Usually I don’t have a huge problem with unwanted advances, and if you’re not up for meeting new people it’s pretty easy to stick with your friends (due to the non-grinding rule of swedish dancing). But for some reason, tonight, several guys of various nationalities decided with great certainty that I was highly interested in dancing with them for extended periods of time. I’m really not sure where they got this from — probably the lack of eye contact. After awkward dancing encounter #2 or so, I realized my phone was gone!!! DISASTER!!! I figured it had fallen out of my pocket on the dancefloor and that someone would eventually return it to one of the bars or counters (or that it would be trampled, but I didn’t see any iPhone crumbs on the ground).

So phoneless and avoiding a large percentage of the attendees at this club, at some point I went to the bathroom just to take a breather.

Part 3: Strange Bathroom Encounter

The girls’ bathroom had 4 stalls, and 2 sinks. When I walked in, there were about 5 girls standing in front of the mirror doing makeup or washing hands, and all the stalls were full. After about 30 seconds, two guys walked out of two of the stalls simultaneously. People here apparently don’t take the gender segregation of bathrooms very seriously. Actually, there seem to be hardly any bathrooms that are even separated by genders — most bathrooms are just 1 room for each toilet/sink anyway, but I’ve seen some larger bathrooms with stalls that are also coed. Anyway, I digress.

So the dudes walk out of the stalls, and despite all the other people there (maybe it’s because I was giving them a weird look) they started talking specifically to me. Our conversation went like this. My commentary in italics.

One of the Dudes: Hej.
Me: Hej…? (but probably it was actually “hey” since I have an American accent)
Dude: Whatcha doing?
Me: Umm… just chillin’, I guess
Dude: Who just chills in the bathroom??
(so first they come into MY bathroom and then question ME what I’m doing there? Do not understand)
Me: I dunno, it happens.
Dude: I’m a guy so I don’t really understand the concept of “just chillin’” in the bathroom
(I’m pretty sure that by having this conversation with me they were, in fact, “chillin’ in the bathroom”)
*Awkward pause where we stare at each other*
Dudes: Well, see ya.
Me: Bye…?

Then they left.

Part 4: Meeting Swedes and the great iPhone search

If this night is sounding just full of awkward, here’s the part where it takes a turn for the slightly better. I found some cool Swedish people to talk to while I waited for the club to end. Once the lights went on, I asked everyone working at the pub/club/door to look for this phone, and after about 15 minutes, someone said they’d found it! She had seen it on the dancefloor, taken it into the kitchen, but then claimed it had disappeared once more. She did eventually recover my phone though, for which I was quite grateful. I worked hard to get that thing to work here.

Part 5: Chili-chocolate ice cream

This was probably the most successful part of the night. Ian and Jack walked me back to Sparta in exchange for snacks. My favorite Swedish ice cream flavor, chili-choklad, was involved. It’s mostly just chocolate ice cream but then you occasionally get a spicy piece of chili pepper. I swear it’s better than it sounds.

And proof that my korridor keeps its countertops clean and shiny: