.shimgs table { border: 0px solid black; padding: 0px; } .shimgs tr { line-spacing: -20px; } .shimgs td { text-align: center; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; bfackground-color: blue; } .shimgs table table { background-colofr: red; border-collapse:collapse; } .shimgs td td { padding: 0px; text-align: left; }

How I ate Shanghai.

I was really incredibly lucky. I was going to Tokyo and decided I should also go somewhere I hadn’t been while I was out. I was deciding between Taiwan and Shanghai and invited my friend Alan and we settled on Shanghai because it just seemed a little more exotic than Taiwan. I just pretty much randomly picked to
go first week in October but it turned out Alan was between semesters for his school so he had that week off and it was also golden week for China
and most people are off that week. That included my friend Dennis who
recently moved to Shanghai and so Dennis showed us around the entire time.

The first day was pretty crazy. Starting Friday I got up 8am or so and went
to language practice, followed by work. Then I went to some art event that night
after which my friends wanted to go clubbing. We ended up clubbing till
3am and I didn’t actually get home until 5am. I hadn’t packed yet since I
thought I was going to be home much earlier so I got to sleep at 6:30am.
I get up an 9am and it’s off to the airport. 10.5 hours to Narita and I
didn’t sleep. Transfer to different flight to get to Shanghai, another 3
hours. Meet Alan and Dennis at the airport. Get back to our hotel, take
a quick shower and then go clubbing again till 2am!!!

The second day I met up with my friend Scott who now has his own company
in Shanghai and we went to lunch.

Followed by tea and snacks all
afternoon.

I had a new life experience here. The place where the teahouse is is
called Shanghai
Old Town. It’s a place for tourists, Chinese and non-Chinese alike.
Being Golden Week it was PACKED. When I say packed, paths through the
complex were like morning in a crowded subway station. But, the area
directly in front of the teahouse was just FULL. To get from
across the bridge to the tea house we literally had to push our way
through the crowd. Given my 7 years in Japan, I expected that with such
big crowds, anything as famous as the Huxinting Teahouse would have a very long line to get in. It certainly would in Japan. But, when we finally got there it was at least 80% empty.
When I asked why I was told "because the people outside can’t afford the tea". That’s a first time experience for me to be in a place where the difference in incomes are so great. On top of that, by Tokyo standards the tea was not that expensive. Prices ranged from about 25RMB to 100RMB. About $3.30 to $13.30 at current exchange rates. Those prices are for an entire pot of tea, not just a glass.

Anyway, We followed tea by more food.

Another interesting thing for me is that last picture. It’s a pre-wrapped wet towel. Not a paper towel, a cloth towel. That’s something I miss from Japan living in the states. In Japan most restaurants give you wet towel to wipe your hands BEFORE you eat. Well, in Shanghai many restaurants gave us the wet towel but it was wrapped like something you’d buy at a retail market.

After that Dennis took us to the ERA Intersection of Time – Circus. It was amazing. Not just the acrobatics but the presentation that went along with it.

We would have gone out clubbing that night too
but Dennis’s family was planning an outing that started at 6:30am the next morning so we called it a night.

It turned out they charted a bus to Wuxi and Suzhou and took the whole family, about 20
people in all to see different sights. The first stop was the Lingshan Giant Buddha
about 3 hours away. It was seriously huge.

Click the second picture to see how huge. It’s a recently created place finished in 1997. If there is history here I didn’t find it out. There was some talk of it being 1000 steps from the entrance to the summit but we didn’t count. Still, it was easily 10-15 stories worth of stairs over all and it was a pretty hot summer day. Mom and friends smartly took a tram to the top. We walked

After that we had lunch

And then it was on to the Lingering Garden about 2 hours away

The Lingering Garden is supposedly one of the 4 most famous gardens in China. It was built in 1522 and is like a maze of corridors that open up to various open spaces.

Then we were supposed to go to an
embrodery museum but it was closed by the time we got there so instead
those of us with some energy climbed this tower a couple of blocks away (11 stories)

Then after a short drive, dinner

The second to the last picture above is duck tongues. Yum! They actually were pretty good but a lot of effort to get all the meat off.

It was about a 2 hours drive home which was then followed by more clubbing. This time we were in the French Consession area of Shanghai where
there are lots of clubs and bars so we bar hopped through about 5
different places. One we got propositioned by a hooker. One we saw a
live filipeno band, 3 sexy girls, 3 guys doing Western covers. One we sat
with the waitresses and flirted while they shewed off some scam artists
with rented babies. Dennis also taught me my first drinking game.

The last day we tried some Beijing Kaoya (Peking Duck)

We were there for the Beijing Kaoya but the menu at this restaurant was seriously huge. It was a large hard bound book and it must have had 40 pages with tons of dishes

After lunch we did some shopping, then over to the Pudong area where all the famous buildings are.

Being Golden Week it took like an hour and a half or maybe even two hours
to get through the line to the top of the tower but it was worth it. The view was really
amazing. Shanghai just seems HUGE! I’m not sure why it seems bigger than
Tokyo. Maybe because from the Pudong area, as far as you can see there
are tall buildings here and there. It’s as gawdy as HK but more spread
out. Maybe it’s more gaudy with the light up boats and animated
boardwalk.

Then it was time for dinner. We chose a Sichuan) place

It was funny because it was a pretty big restaurant and I was fine with sitting where they originally put us but they had an area of the restaurant that was at a glass wall that overlooked the river outside with a spectacular view. Our friend asked about it and we were told there was a minimum price for sitting over there. 800RMB. Given there were only 4 of us that’s 200RMB each. For us that really isn’t that much money, about $27 US each but for Shanghai, well, that meant the 4 of us had to order a TON of food! We actually failed to reach 800RMB. I think we at least passed 700.

We tried to do some clubbing after that but the two places we ended up
at were hip-hop and neither Alan nor I are really into hip-hop.

I was seriously hoping I was going to like Shanghai as a possible place
to go live. I’ve been studying Mandarin and as my Japanese experience
tells me if I actually want to be able to speak Mandarin I’m going to have
to go live somewhere that uses it.

Unfortunately Shanghai doesn’t seem like the place. I had a great time
for vacation but it didn’t seem like a place I wanted to live. It was
dirty, many people were rude, it was hot and muggy. Dennis pointed out
sometimes you can’t use the restrooms they are so gross. The Great Internet Wall of China was blocking sites from my hotel room.

Somethings were
interesting like it seemed like traffic laws were more of a suggestion.
Our bus driver and all the taxis we took would drive down the wrong side
of the street whenever it suited them. One cab driver took us the long
way around to earn extra money. Scott said sometimes the driver will
refuse to go where you ask him to go.

Oh well, maybe Taiwan

Scott claimed that up until a few months prior you’d hear people
honking their car horns constantly all over the place and that it didn’t
matter where you where you’d hear it all the time but that recently a new
law was passed making it a finable offence to honk your horn when you
don’t absolutely need to and that basically the city quieted down very
soon after that.

I’m a little disappointed I don’t have more pictures to show of
Shanghai proper but to be honest, nothing really stuck out except the Pudong area as picture
worthy. It wasn’t like HK with it’s amazing skyline or its buildings
towering over everything. I kept looking for images that would really say
“this is Shanghai” but nothing really stuck out for me or I didn’t get the
chance to take a picture. A few things I might have taken pictures of if
I had more time. Traffic was interesting. Like I said, traffic laws seem
to be more like suggestions so there were some amazing traffic jams but it
was hard to get a picture that conveyed that. Another was the amount of
bikes. There were lots of roads where there were like 4 lanes in the
middle, with barriers on both sides and outside those barriers a separate
lane on both sides for bikes but for some reason I never got a good shot
of that. Otherwise most areas didn’t stick out. I could have taken the
picture and claimed it was from anywhere and so I really didn’t get that
many pictures of “Shanghai”. Maybe next time I visit.

Still, I had an incredible time, especially thanks to Dennis. We were
so lucky he was there. He speaks Mandarin (as well as Cantonese, English
and Japanese) so he was able to talk to the locals and he really hooked us
up. The circus, the tour, the clubs, the food. We wouldn’t have seen one
tenth the stuff we saw if it wasn’t for Dennis.

The clubs in Shanghai were great. Large, roomy, places to sit and
talk. A far cry from Tokyo’s tiny clubs or SF’s boring ones. I’ll miss
those.

Dennis’s friends were also amazing. Wendy, Elisa and Summer are reason
enough to go back to visit.

Lots of people try to travel and so most of the students in my school were making their plans but I hadn’t made any.  Then a couple of friends approached me and said, "Let’s go somewhere!"  Feeling like I ought to do something with my time off I said "Cool!"  Our choices were limited since most things were sold out and so we ended up going to Cheju Korea even though one of our group, I-san was Korean.

Cheju is an island south of the Korean mainland.

The hotel we stayed at is actually a place that caters to honey-mooners.  Instead of rooms it’s a bunch of bungalows. I was told by I-san that newlyweds in Korea often wear matching clothes and observing quite a few couples wearing matching clothes there were quite a few honey-mooners though it was off season so it wasn’t that crowded.

It was on a cliff above the ocean.  Very picturesque. There was also a historical village connected to the hotel that was featured in some famous Korean drama as well as a couple of restaurants. We got in about 5pm just in time to have dinner and watch the sunset.

Our first dinner was pretty big.  If you have never had Korean food I’ve gathered there are two *main* features.  Lots of it is spicy hot and it’s almost always accompanied by a large assortment of pickle like side dishes the most famous being forms of Kimchee.

Another thing that’s different about eating Korean style is that they use very thin chopsticks made out of metal.  It was interesting to me because although I’ve never had a problem using them, my friend Doreen, from Taiwan, who has used chopsticks all her life, said they were too frustrating for her and she always had I-san ask for wooden ones.

I-san rented a car for us so we could drive around the island.  The first place he took us was a temple in the mountains on the coast.  At the bottom near the parking lot are 2 large structures with lots of people gathered around and even some kind of performance. I thought that was the temple but there were steep stairs leading up from there.

We walked up and ended up at a store where we spent maybe 20 minutes looking at souvenirs.  But, there were still stairs going up.  The rest of the group didn’t want to continue because they though nothing was up there so I went up alone.  It was quite a ways up zigzagging back and forth up the mountain.

Finally it opened up to a big cave.  In the entrance to the cave were a bunch of hanging lanterns and set into the cave was another giant statue with candles all around it.

Looking back down I was quite a way up.  I have no idea how far up but it had to be several hundred feet at least.  The town below and across the some fields looked very small and there were several small islands out in the ocean. (or maybe they were just large rocks)

Next we continued driving around the coast of the island stopping at some other cliffs on the ocean with a nice view.  Both there and below are hotel there were people catching things and serving them up for lunch and dinner.

The people below our hotel where a group of women that looked in their 60s all walking around in black wetsuits.  We watched a couple of them walk out into the ocean and dive for various shellfish and other coastal creatures.  Back in their restaurant they had large buckets with water in them and aerators to keep the animals alive and fresh until eaten.

Continuing around the island we came upon an area where there were lots of fences covered with squids drying in the sun. Literally there were thousands of squids hung up to dry and several small stands setup to sell them.  I was actually surprised at the number of them since it seemed like very few people lived in the area so there must be no way that could sell so many.

A little farther up we stopped in a small town that had 4 or 5 restaurants on the ocean serving fresh seafood.  On the side of the restaurant we picked they had large outdoor fish tanks.  Maybe 5 of them about twice the size of bathtub.  You could point to the specific fish you wanted and they would get it out and cook it up.

I don’t know what kind of fish we ate but you can see it cooked up in the pictures on the right plus we had 2 plates of tai (snapper) sashimi.

Even though we were stuffed, after lunch the girls wanted to try some of the squids hanging outside so we stopped at a stand and they got some.  Think of it like jerky.  Although I like squid jerky which is a common snack in China and Japan the squid we got at the stand didn’t really do it for me. Kind of bitter with a chalky aftertaste.

One thing we did try somewhere else was these round flat fish patties.  They were about the size of a homemade Mexican tortilla and maybe about twice as thick and they had a concentric circular pattern to them.  I don’t know how they are made but I was told they are made out of fish.  They are heated up like a tortilla where they are placed directly on a gas burner and turned and rotated quickly for a few moments so they don’t burn and then served hot.  They were pretty yummy and slightly sweet.  

After lunch we went to the Hallim Park and the Hyeopjae and Ssangyong Caves which are 14km long.  Only a small portion is open to the public but it’s all inside a large park with several sections including flower gardens, rock gardens, an archery range, a historic town section showing what life was like hundreds of year ago.  We were there for probably 2 or 3 hours.

One of the gardens has lots of rocks and also lots of bonsai trees.  Of course they are not bonsai since that’s a Japanese word but I don’t know the Korean word.  Many of them were 100, 150 even 200 years old still in their little pot and still being maintained.

The girls wanted to do some shopping but it was already pretty late so since most of the malls were probably closed we went to a large K-Mart / Walmart type of store.  It was 7 stories tall in a fairly large building. We spent about an hour there with I-san and I looking at men’s clothing.  I don’t know what the girls looked at.  After that we went to the basement level which was a large supermarket.  The girls practically bought the place out.  I was amazed that they were able to get it all home.

For dinner I-san and I wanted to eat dog which Korea is famous for (or maybe I should say infamous for) but the girls said "NO WAY!", so, driving around I-san saw a restaurant and said "Let’s go there. They have a special kind of Korean pig that’s a delicacy!"  The girls kept teasing that it was probably dog and they were being tricked because I-san told us he would not explain what was special about it until we were done.  It looked like big slabs of bacon and we cooked it in front of us Korean BBQ style.

After dinner he gave as the explanation.  The pig we ate is raised on almost nothing but HUMAN FECES!!!!  I’m glad he didn’t tell us before we ate it because I don’t think I could have eaten it knowing what it was beforehand.  It didn’t taste funny though.  I-san claimed that one reason it’s special is because many pigs’ bodies can’t live with human feces as food and so not all of them make it long enough to become food themselves.

Cheju is supposed to be a resort island and in many ways it reminded me of Hawaii.  It is a volcanic island and the culture there had things that looked like tikis and statues made from lava
just like in Hawaii.  Also the historic buildings looked like Polynesian buildings like from Hawaii, Tahiti or Samoa.  But, even though it was May it was not at all hot that weekend.  We had hoped to go swimming but in fact I was wearing 3 layers most of the time.

But, anyway, the next day I-san and Doreen wanted to go scuba diving.  I would have gone too except I had a little bit of a cold but Ko-san and I went along for the ride.

I was kind of nice.  We drove around to another part of the island where there was a fairly large port town.  We drove up to a dock and got on a boat that took us out to a small island outside the harbor and dropped us off out there with the instructors.  There was a large rock next to the island and between the rock and the island is where they had you scuba.  It was a really nice view looking back at the main island.

Back near our hotel was a famous bridge and waterfall.  In fact it appeared there are several famous waterfalls on Cheju.  I don’t know how old the bridge is.  I have a feeling it’s not really that old but it was pretty neat and ornate.  The pictures around the bridge showed the falls being very active but that’s probably during rainy season or else earlier in the year when the snow is melting.  Yes, they get snow.

Still it was very beautiful.  There was a path that led down to one set of falls with lots of people gathering to take pictures at the bottom.

After that we went back to the town where the scuba boat had been and had dinner.  Another feature of Korean food you see quite often is to serve the food in a hot stone bowl.  Hot enough to cook food on. Probably the most famous of this is Toe Suk Be Bim Bap (I don’t know the correct *spelling* in English). That’s made from rice, spinach, sprouts, a raw egg and some special spicy sweet sauce.  You stir it around in the hot bowl and it cooks as you stir.  That’s a fairly common dish though which I’ve eaten both in LA and Tokyo so we wanted to try different things.  We had some kind of Korean chicken soup called Samgyetang.  It’s made with ginseng and it was delivered to our table in hot stone bowls.  So hot in fact that it was still boiling in front of us for at least another 5 or 10 minutes.

We then went into town and did some shopping.  The girls and guys split up again and I-san and I walked around the local shops.  I was amazed at the number of produce shops and pickle shops.

Korea is also known, at least to the Japanese, as a shoppers paradise because most things are relatively cheap.  That seemed true but also when they say that they are usually speaking of Seoul which is a much much bigger city.

The last day was mostly spent returning.  The trip back involved an hour to the airport, waiting for the plane, flying 1 hour from Cheju airport to Ginpo airport in Seoul.  From there it’s an hour by bus to Inchon International Airport, another wait, then 2 hours back to Narita and then another 2 hours from Narita by train back to our neighborhoods in Tokyo.

The last day I did catch one more interesting thing though.  In the Cheju airport in the restroom the toilets had a very curious seat cover.  It was completely covering the seat like a sock or a condom.  There was a button you push that electronically roles up one size and pulls an unused portion from the dispenser around the seat.  Kind of gross if you ask me because if the seat is messy that mess is sucked into the box that holds the used roll of the seat cover.  You can see a movie of it here.

You might also want to read my thoughts about it just as I got back.

Hong Kong (click image for panorama)

Hong Kong, city of tall buildings.  At least that’s how I would describe it.  You’d be hard pressed to find a building less than 10 stories tall and I suspect the average height is higher.  Maybe I missed some suburb area with single story houses but as far as I could tell there is no such area.  It’s all tall buildings.

Tokyo has tall buildings but I’d bet the average is more like 3 to 5 stories.

The second thing that stuck out to me is there’s 2 kinds of buildings.  Brand spankin new tall glass skyscrapers and condos and then there’s grungy old dirty apartment buildings. Sometimes they are right next to each other.  I’m curious what makes them so dirty.  Is it because it’s a humid area so mold and other stuff grows quickly? Is it because the air is dirty and so dust and dirt collects on them?  If you know please tell me.  My hotel had a warning message left in my room about how they have to work hard to keep the windows clean so don’t get startled if the you find a window cleaner outside your window once in a while.

Well lived in

Here’s one of the dirty buildings.  You can probably see all the *living* going on.

I signed up for this vacation with a large travel agency in Japan (JTB).  So large that they have their own ticketing spaces at several airports and they have people to take you to and from the airport to the hotels.  You can even sign up for complete tour packages where every place, every meal and every thing else is already planned for you.  It’s probably not a bad idea sometimes and it would save you the trouble of having to plan any of it yourself.

For me I just signed up for the plane and hotel but they included the bus to and from the airport to the hotel along with a guide.  The guides give out there cell phone number and say call them if you have any questions, need a suggestion or get lost.

Party on the bridge!!

The guide explained that Hong Kong is a mountainous area and that all the people live between the mountains and the ocean and therefore as there is no land they can only build up.  All the buildings from the airport to downtown were 30 story apartment buildings

One thing that made me happy, I understood about 90% of the explanation the guide gave to everybody about Hong Kong even though it was all in Japanese.

Hong Kong the city is divided by water into two major parts.  Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.  There is major city on both parts though my impression was more living in Kowloon and more city on Hong Kong Island.  On Hong Kong Island, many of the downtown buildings are connected by bridges and elevated walkways

Escalator Street

One thing that was interesting to me is that people seemed to be having picnics on these bridges.  Thousands of people.  They’d put down a blanket, pull out the food and games and have their picnic.  I can only assume that there’s just no where else to do it so they’ve resorted to the only space there is to do such a thing.

Hong Kong has the world’s longest outdoor covered escalator.  Actually it’s not just one long escalator it’s a bunch of short consecutive ones but it goes for about 800 meters or 1/2 a mile.  Only up. You have to walk back down.  It’s kind of cool to ride and escalator through town. Almost like something out of the Jetsons.

It goes near Hong Kong’s Soho area where there’s supposedly lots of restaurants.  I guess I saw a few but it didn’t stick out to me.  Maybe I just missed the correct street.  I only took the escalators about half what up I think.

Other thing I found interesting is that Hong Kong money appears to be issued by several different banks.  Above you can see 3 different styles of 20 dollar bills.  At the time I went (August 2001) 1 dollar equaled about 7 Hong Kong dollars.  Prices in terms of U.S. dollars are about the same as the U.S. or slightly cheaper but you have to divide by 7 so at first it’s hard to buy a drink for 23 dollars until you realize that’s about 3 dollars U.S.

Too many coins

There’s also lots of different coins. I wonder which country has the most coins in use.  In the states we have the penny, nickel, dime, quarter which are often used and then there’s the very very seldom used 50 cent piece, silver dollar and Susan B. Anthony.  I guess that makes 7 but as we only use 4 of them it seems like less.  In Hong Kong they have 7 also but they use all 7.  Not only that but some of them are BIG and HEAVY.  The 10 dollar and 5 dollar coins are each about 3 times thicker than a U.S. quarter.

One day I went to the Kowloon side of Hong Kong by myself.  I went to Sham Shui Po which is where a large computer mall is that me friend Voon had introduced me to the day before.  Think of it like a computer swap meet except each exhibitor has a permanent space and of course all software is pirated.  I think only big business buys legit software in Hong Kong.

I found an 8 story local mall.  On the 8th floor was an arcade, an ice rink and an indoor roller coaster.  That’s also where I took the above picture from.

Hong Kong is also famous for it’s hanging signs I think.  Before I went to Hong Kong I had seen pictures like this but I think I always assumed it was just one or two special streets.
gcolor="#000000" align="right" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5">

Night time signs

Well in fact it’s practically every single street.  Some of the signs are enormous and some streets have so many signs it looks like they could probably provide rain cover.

The scary thing about them is they are all hang way over the street with nothing but a few cables holding them up.  I’m curious how often they come crashing down.  Hong Kong doesn’t have earthquakes but they do have crazy tropical storms and typhoons that supposedly ruin windows, buildings and lives.  Seems like they’d take down a few signs even easier.

One day I checked out the Yuen Po St. Bird Garden and the surrounding area.

It’s a place where there are about 20 or more stores that sell various kinds of birds.  I read that the prettier the voice the more they go for.

It was pretty cool to see so many birds.  Literally there are hundreds of not thousands of birds many in very very ornate cages. I have no idea what the different kinds of birds are.  Some stores just sell cages.  There are even special places to hang the birds as part of the *park*.

A Bird’s best friend

Even more interesting though for me was the bird food a couple of different shops were selling.  Can you guess what this women on the right is selling?  Is it bird seed?  Nope.  Some kind of special grass or plant?  Nope.

It’s GRASSHOPPERS!!!!.  LIVE ONES all wiggling around inside those bags.  I always thought meal worms were kind of gross (yea, they had those too) and even crickets but crickets are small.  These grasshoppers were like 3 to 4 inches long.  If that’s the price of keeping a bird I don’t think I could do it.  How about you?

After that I checked out Flower Market Road which is right next door to the Bird Gardens.  All kind of flowers being sold in about 20 or 30 flower shops.

Flower Street

Something a little more random, on the Kowloon side there is a very large mall called Harbour City with over 700 stores.  It’s actually 4 different buildings but they are all connected internally so it’s considered all one mall.

The second building I went into is C shaped and although I guess this shows the geek in me, after walking around the first floor for a while I realized that this mall looks like a set from Star Trek.  All you’d have to do is change the store displays.  The hallways are slightly curved, they are made from brushed aluminum or stainless steal.  It’s actually a little freaky.

That particular part of the mall seemed to have quite a few high end stereo stores for audiophiles types.  Not my kind of thing but…

Finally the last night I went up to the bar in my hotel, the Sherton.  It’s sits on the Kowloon side and faces Hong Kong Island from the 18th floor so there’s a great view.

I regret not taking more pictures.  For whatever reason I really wasn’t in the mood to shoot everything.  Maybe because it was so hot.  Fortunately I’m use to it from Tokyo so I came prepared with a bunch of sweat towels and a fan.  I would have been a mess without the towels and they got pretty darn soaked before the end of the day.  So soaked that they were not dry by the next day.

Another idea I had was that I could just get a book with better pictures than I could take which actually I did but it then I realized that I can’t legally post those pictures here to share so you’ll just have to either visit me or go visit Hong Kong yourself.

Or wait for me to go again

Well I had my doubts that California Adventure, the new Disneyland park in Anaheim, was going to be any good but my friends went and it sounds pretty excellent.  You can read the review here.  Unfortunately I expect it will be *PACKED* for a couple of years.

Here he is in front of his new car.  He’s so happy.  He’s a car nut so any free moment he has he’s working on his car.  I think part of it is having gone without for the last year and a half in Japan.

This is his office building.  It’s in downtown Boston just a few blocks from some of the main areas of the city.  They are on the top floor and that floor is split in half. The front half is actually their landlord’s house so to go in and out of the office they actually have to walk through somebody else’s residence.  It was really hot and muggy the first couple of days I was there.

Boston is an old city for America.  Much old than LA.  Actually that’s not true.  I believe the oldest structures in America are the missions in California.  They pre-date any buildings on the East coast by several hundred years.

But, LA is mostly a new city.  Boston on the other hand has many many old buildings.  It’s also a very modern city.  It’s very interesting to see the contrasts between new and old buildings.

Boston is also a surprisingly clean city.  At least compared to say Philadelphia or Baltimore it seemed very clean.  It took two very big walks around Boston.  Boston the city doesn’t seem that big to me.  I could walk from on side to the other in probably less than 2 hours. By that I mean the downtown area.

I saw lots of cool architecture.

I find architecture very interesting and often inspiring so it was neat to see so many different types of buildings in Boston.

There was a large old church near what is called Prudential Center which is a large mall.  In front of the church was a small park with a few fountains and a small farmer’s market on one side.

I saw some children playing in the fountain.

I also saw these.  East coast tomatoes.  When I lived in Baltimore this is about as good as I ever saw a tomato.  Here in California we have gorgeous tomatoes.

I had to point this out.  Fleet appears to be the largest bank in Boston as there are Fleet signs everywhere marking ATM machines and things like that.  I believe Fleet even owns a stadium or theatre or something like that called the Fleet Center.  The problem is on the west coast at least there is only one thing called Fleet that I know of and that is a brand of enemas you can buy at any grocery store so every time I saw one of these signs I was remind of that brand of enemas.

There is a "freedom trail" that you can follow for a self tour of some of the historic sites in Boston.  I followed it a little bit and came across a few things. This is the "oldest tavern" in the United States according to this plaque.  It’s called "The Bell’s Journey".  I read in some trivia book that the reason old taverns, especially in England for example have names like.  "The Hog and Cow" or the "Pigs Head".   That’s because back when those taverns started quite a few people could not read so it was much easier for them to remember a simple sign that showed a pig’s head for example.

This is the Paul Revere House.  This is where Paul Revere lived when he went on that famous ride to announce that "The British are coming! The British are coming!".

Just down the street is the Old North Churchwhere were hung the lanterns announcing "One if by land, Two if by sea"

Boston does have a subway system called the "T".  One thing that was interesting is that there is a driver on each car.  It almost seemed like somebody had taken buses and turned them into a train but still had the bus driver in each bus instead of one for the whole train.

Boston also has alot of tunnels.  I guess tunnels stick out for me because here in LA we have very few and we have no long ones.  This tunnel goes from downtown Boston, under the harbor and comes up by the airport.  It seems like it must be at least a mile long if not two.

Speaking of tunnels Boston has one of the biggest tunnel projects ever undertaken going on downtown.  It’s called the Big Dig and it’s got Boston all torn up.  Boston is an old city and that makes it hard, with all the buildings pre-dating cars, to deal with all the traffic of the current times.  38 onramps and other freeways empty into the downtown freeway and get squeezed down to just 6 lanes.  Boston has traffic 8 to 9 hours a day.  The Big Dig is supposed to fix that but it’s years behind schedule and billions over budget.  On top of that with the Big Dig having the city all torn up traffic is even worse.  To give you an example, Scott tried to pick me up probably less than a 30 minute walk away from his office.  A 30 minute walk can generally be done in a car in 5 minutes.  It took him over an hour to get to me and then back to the office because of the Big Dig.

Boston is on the coast and so there is are lots of waterfront areas.  I was also surprised at all the lakes and ponds more inland.  Coming in on the plane I saw so many I couldn’t have counted them all.

click for a larger version

Here is the 180 degree view from the parking lot of the Boston Museum of Science.  My friend Scott who lives in Boston doesn’t get out much so he didn’t really know where to take me to show off Boston.  It was raining that morning and his friend Ed suggested the science museum.  It was actually pretty cool.

Here is, I believe, the worlds largest Van de Graaff generator built by Van de Graaff himself.  Those posts are about 35 feet tall up to the tops which you can’t see in this picture.  That thing in the center is a cage that the operator gets inside.  The thing shoots lighting 5 or 6 feet.  They have a 25 minute demonstration several times a day.  The most interesting part for me was to see "St Elmo’s Fire"  I never knew what that was though I had heard the term only because of a hit pop song in the mid 80s.  When there is alot of electricity in the air, almost enough to cause lighting but not enough to actually make the spark leap, something that is nearer to the electricity can get an aura or glow with blue light.  They demonstrated this by putting up a kite near the generator and you could see a blue glow around the edges.  The operator explained that old sailors would see the masts and sails on their sailing ships glow like this which they took to be a sign from St Elmo who I understand is the saint for sailors.  What it really meant was that their ship was likely to be struck by lightning at any second.

Also my friend Scott worked on an exhibit there called the Virtual Fish Tank.  It’s really cool.  It’s an exhibit with like 18 large flat screen displays simulating a giant aquarium.  All of the fish are run by computer in 3D an swim around.  For each type of fish in the tank there is a touch screen kiosk where people can adjust the behavior of those type of fish.  For example for the sharks you can adjust whether they swim in groups or separately, whether they swim in the same general direction, how fast they swim and also how hungry they are.  It was really cool.

Something else that is at the Science center is a very large mural made out of polarized materials.  Looking at it with just your eyes it looks mostly off white as you can see at the top of the picture above but hanging from the ceiling a few feet in front of the mural are a bunch of polarizing lenses.  As you walk around the image appears through the lenses.  Really cool.

This is where I stayed.  This is Ed’s house who is Scott’s friend and also his boss.  Ed lives in Newton which is a suburb of Boston only a few minutes outside Boston.

This is Scott, Ukla, Ed and Taiko.  Before Scott returned to America from Japan, Ed came over to visit.  There Ed was introduced to Taiko and I guess it was love at first site.  At the time of this picture she had just arrived from Japan.  I think she expects to be in Boston for at least 6 months and who knows, maybe more.  Scott met Taiko when she was going to Brown University in Rhode Island.

This is Ukla, Ed’s New England Bull Dog.  I didn’t get any really good pictures because here he looks so angry but he never looked angry in person.  He is so funny because his legs are so short he has such a hard time doing many things.  And he has such a wide mouth he makes very unique expressions compared to other dogs.

One day Scott took me over to the Harvard area.  This is the town directly across the street from Harvard.  It seemed like a nice enough place but like most shopping areas it America (and all over the world) it’s getting filled up by large corporations (ie, The Gap, Starbucks, Foot Locker etc.)  That’s fine I guess but it makes going somewhere much less interesting because I can see those stores at home.

Yes Boston has it’s traffic.  This is the traffic on the way to Brown University.

Scott works (volunteers?) at the Virtual Reality (VR) Lab at Brown University.  Here there is a setup where their is a VR helmet with stereoscopic vision connected to a computer to show you a 3D environment.  The helmet can tell which way you are looking and there are sensors on the ceiling that can track your motion so as you walk around the room so the computer can tell where you are and walk you around the environment.  The coolest thing I saw was a demo of a small canyon with some very small bridges crossing it.  It was a very simple demo but the interesting part was that if you blocked out all of your view so that you couldn’t see any of the room you are actually standing in but just the view in the helmet, when you got near the canyon you’d be afraid you might fall in.  Maybe afraid is too strong a word but I found myself trying to keep my balance and wave my arms to prevent myself from falling in even though I knew I’m was not actually at a canyon but standing in this room.  On the other hand if I could see any part of the room then the illusion was broken.

Yes, I’m a nerd I suppose.  Here’s one of the coolest things I saw the whole time.  This is the Apple Cinema Display.  I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE!!!   It’s a 22 inch LCD display 1600×1024.  Very very very cool.  I’m not sure if it can be plugged into a PC though and it’s $4000.