Hawaii! First impressions

The crazy flight from Austin took a total of 12 hours traveling time. Needless to say I am tired from traveling. On top of all that flying, there is also 4 hour time difference. So, what is 10 o'clock here is like 2 in the morning in Austin. So basically I'm giving you my excuses for wasting my first day in Honolulu.... =(

I landed at around 4. Picked up my car rental then went to the hotel to check in. Apparently, the ENTIRE hotel, the Marriott at Waikiki, is booked. It's like a zoo there. There's so many people! I was looking around to see what kind of people come to Haiwaii and I've come to the conclusion it's mostly old retired rich people. There's some younger people but they have kids. I also saw a few business people as well. For the most part, my dream of having a ton of single hot girls running amuck is not true. Of course there's plenty of them around, just not as abundant as I thought.

Also, i was expecting to see lots of polynesians around but it turns out Hawaii is the giant melting pot. I see Europeans, white people, and a plethra of Asians. For example, I had a Korean waiter, polynesian bus boy, and in another booth there was a white girl dating a Chinese looking dude. Oh, and there was a huge table of Japanese woman ordering breakfast next to me.

What else. I notice people here are nicer. I don't see any crazy road rage (although there is plenty of traffic on H1.) People wave for merging, and no one honks their horns. People open doors for you here (I hear that is rare in the East Coast, not in Texas). In a strange way, this place reminds of Austin, mixed in with San Fran. Why? It's the food here. I went to Walmart and saw Asian snacks like dried plums, Japaense crackers, and local candies and produce. Plus it's like Austin because they're also into recycling, organic foods, and I think I see hippies here. I'd hate to say it but i'm really getting a good vibe here.

I digress. So, back to my travels. I forgot to mention I got lunch/dinner before I checked into the hotel. I went to a place called the Diamondhead Market & Grill. Here's some pics of the sign and the food I had. The handsome guy is me, and my fat head is blocking the sign.
The next pic is the food. I got the surf and turf which was amazing. It had korean BBQ pork (I would say some of the best I had in my life) Chinese BBQ pork (the red thing- a little sweet but good), wasabi ahi tuna (had a hint of ginger and wasabi with a sweet soy marinade - good!), garlic shrimp, and teriyaki chicken. Oh, that's brown rice on the side. Overall an amazing meal. I consider it a bargain for the food. It cost me 16.50 including a drink.
There was also a simple salad that came with the meal not pictured here. Overall, the idea of food being expensive here is wrong. If you look hard enough, there's bargains to be had and overall it's still cheaper than NY.

So, back to my travels. After resting and taking stock on my how terrible my packing skills are, I had to go to Walmart for some shopping. After returning from walmart, I was planning on going to see Waikiki at night. There's tons of shops and people walking around. Unfortunately it was already 8ish by then and for me that translate into after midnight in Austin. Too this day (even if it is the day after) I am wracked by guilt for not maxamizing my time here!!!)

So, today, I woke up early, grabbed breakfast at the Original Pancake Restaurant and had their sweet break french toast, polynesian sausage, and eggs over easy. What made this place great was the very helpful and friendly staff and also the syrups. They have a coconut one and a polynesian syrup. Both delicious! Also the meal was cheap, under 10 bucks not including tip. Here's the pic.





So, here I am after breakfast at a coffee shop called Glazer's trying to blog and study. Today, i will devote to studying until at night where I will try again to conquor Waikiki boardwalk at night. Tomorrow is my interview and after that I will parteh!

Good News!

I have 2 job interviews, one is next week at Honolulu. Another would be a week after that in Temple at Scott and White Hospital. Needless to say, I want to make either one really bad. REEEAALLLLYYYYY BAD! Both are great institutions and have great programs. If i'm going to suffer next year through a residency program, I'd rather do it there. So, wish me luck and keep me in your prayers.

On another note, on a more personal level, I am turning OLD. My birthday is coming around the corner. It says I have already passed 1/3 of my life. I remember when I was 25 and i was freaking out saying I'm a quarter of century old!! Now, I'm old and don't care. Hahahahah. I guess I have mellowed out some throughout the ages. I sometimes feel like I haven't done enough though. I haven't seen the world, eaten enough foods, meet enough people, done enough activites. They say the thirties are the twenties now AKA the time of your life. I hope so! Seeing I didn't meet the girl of my dreams in the twenties, I'm hoping the thirties will be more eventful.

Day 2!

From my last blog, I've been in Taiwan only for 1 night. The next day, we started the day pretty early. My parents went out early that morning and fetched some breakfast. Here's how Taiwan works in terms of meals. For the most part it is cheaper or about the same price if you eat out. Most Taiwanese choose to eat out, so about 70% of the store fronts will be serving food. Sometimes, you'll even have food stands (AKA street food) parked in front of stores selling food. The amazing thing is most of the food here is delicious. The reason why is there's so much good food is that competition is fierce and if the food sucks then they wouldn't be in business too long.

Here's some more thing about food here. Chinese food here rocks. I mean, AMAZING. I'll post pictures when I can (i know I say this all the time... be patient!) There's famous restaurants for beef needle soups, Chinese sandwiches, teas shops,, bakeries, pretty much any Chinese food. What's not good is Western food. I mean, there's Mc. Donalds, but I didn't fly across the Pacific for the Golden Arches. When I do try western food, mostly through the hotel breakfasts, they suck. I mean, uber suck. For example, breakfast usually consists of western and eastern food. Eastern food is the normal breakfast consisting of congee, the stuff you put in congee, soy milk maybe, same Chinese bread (man tuo), and other local favorites. The western stuff for some reason always come with toast (the only thing I eat because they can't mess that up), hash browns (usually greasy but still edible), salad (disgusting. consisting of lettuce, weird salad dressing, tomatoes, and some miscellaneous vegetable that we wouldn't put in salad like bell peppers). Well, i know you would but bell peppers in salad but for breakfast? Only those 3 vegetables! blech. There's other hot foods for breakfast like i one place had pasta for breakfast (WTF!?) Also they try to have western sandwiches too but they suck. They usually include white bread, ham (one slice), and some form of condiment that I call mystery sauce. Not good. Another example of weird food is pizza. You can get a normal pizza here, or you can get the Chinese version. Last time I was here in Taiwan, I ordered pizza at an amusement park. It consisted of the pizza with corn and cheese for the topping. Then they had sauce packets that you squeezed onto the pizza. It was good actually, but you would never see that at Pizza Hut.

Ok, enough about food for now. So my parents fetches some soy milk, egg bread thingy (dan bing), and some Chinese donut thing (you tiao). The breakfast for 3 cost us 2-3 dollars a person. Not bad eh? An IHOP breakfast would have cost us at least 20 bucks for 3 people. After breakfast we headed out.

The first thing on our list of things to do is get a cell phone. Imagine walking around without a cell phone. You would practically feel naked. or rather naked, alone, and stranded. Without an immediate form of communication you can only resort to 2 things. 1) smoke signals or 2) public phones. The first should be ruled out since setting things on fire in a major metropolitan area is an arresting offense, and plus I don't know to make columns of smoke into "Hey John Doe, want to go catch a movie at 6?" The second one involves major inconveniences. You have to find a public phone first. Then you have to buy a phone card. Then you have to look up whoever your calling. No saved contacts or recent calls on public phones. Plus, no one can call you back. A phone is a must.

All Asian cell phone companies work with GSM, technology similarly used by T-mobile or AT&T. If you have their phones in the US, you can unlock them (meaning you can use them with any other phone companies) and replace your SIM card with the new one to make phone calls. We bought my parents' phones from China town in Houston so they already came unlocked. All we needed was to get a new SIM card from a Taiwan phone company. At first glance we thought it would be simple as signing up, but it turns out to be a bit more complicated. In Taiwan, they need at least 2 forms of identification. One would be a driver's license or government ID, the other being something my parents didn't have. It ended up we couldn't get one! Gah! I'm going to have to start learning smoke signals! JK. It turns out the attendant was wrong. We could use a passport as a second form of ID. Too bad it took like 2 hours to figure it out and waiting in line 3 times (no kidding). Mark, a friend of mine from Atlanta came to Taiwan, said it took him only 15 minutes to get a new SIM card. Lucky bastard. And he even got to use his US passport.

So, the whole morning was spent getting a phone. After that, my mom called up her old high school friend living in Taiwan. She picked us up and treated us out for lunch. We went to a local place for a quick bite. After that, we went shopping for household items at IKEA and Carrefour (kinda like walmart), then we went to an all you can eat hot pot. AWESOME! End of day 2.

Day 3
More errands! (You'll see a trend here with running errands)
On day 3 we head to Taipei city! Our very first trip into Taipei. Very exciting. Where we live really isn't in Taipei. It's kinda like a city suburb outside the city. It's kinda like Sugarland and downtown Houston. We found a shuttle stop behind our apartment complex and headed into the city. We were dropped off near the MRT (subway in Taiwan). You know what? i'll update more later. It's getting late and this is starting to turn into a novel. later.

Quick update #2

There's another typhoon coming into Taiwan. =(
It's going to delay our flight to Japan on monday. The curse of the typhoons!
If you're counting, this is the third one to disrupt our travels. I'll talk about #2 typhoon when I update in the future.

update

I know it's been already a week since I last posted so here's a quick update. Upon leaving LA, we arrive in Taipei without much fanfare. The typhoon delayed the flight to Taiwan 2 days, but we have now arrived. It is sorta an odd feeling stepping off of the plane into another country. It is as if the plane is a gateway to a strange new world. When you step off the plane everything changes. The people, the society, the spoken and the written language. It is truly a sight to behold. Even though I am Taiwanese, being raised in America makes me a foreigner. The locals say that just by looking at my appearance such as my dress and my gait they know i am not from around here. Especially my American Chinese accent gives me away. Talk about a fish out of water. =/

My family prearranged for a car to pick us up from the airport to our condo in the suburb of Taiwan. The address is (for those of you who care) is ling ko (that's the city), wen hua san lu, yi duan, 366 hao, building I, 6th floor apartment 6. The complex is called wen lai chen. If you want to visit me when I'm here, stop on by!

Here's a funny store with some background. We bought our condo through our aunt. None of my immediate family have set eyes upon the condo so we were pleasantly surprised. It is a 3 bedroom place with 2 baths, tile floors, a mini patio, outdoor laundry room. My aunt had already bought much of the necessities. We had furniture, basic kitchen goods, and other essentials. The only problem was how to use half of the stuff in the place. For example, Taiwan, being located in the subtropics has a very humid and hot climate. Even at night it can be a bit stiffling. We spent half an hour trying to figure out how to turn on the AC. My dad, being the inquisitive type started pushing buttoms indiscriminately around the apartment. There's this big red button located in the bedroom next to the bed. He thought it might turn on the AC, instead it sounded a piercing alarm. A guard immediate was sent up to see what was going on. Fortuantely, he was nice and patiently explained that that big red button was an emergency button. Right before he left, we asked how to turn on the AC, but he didn't know. Back to square one. Finally eurika! We found some remote control looking things that turned on the individual AC units in each room. After quick shower, we slept well in our nice new air conditioned condo.

That was our first day in Taiwan. Awesome.

Btw, I have a lot of great food shots. I'll upload them as soon as a can.

Daniel

Day 2 in LA

Now we are on day two of our LA excursion. In the morning, we found this "cute" little local restaurant called Coffee Co. that had good food. It reminded me of Kirby Lane but different. It had more of a southern comfort feel with breakfast (you could add fried chicken wings as a side for your omelet). Check out this restaurant if your near LAX. Here's a link to yelp for Coffee Co. FYI I got the eggs benedict. yum! Also, if you go, there's a really good korean waittress there (she's also really cute!)

After breakfast, we went off to run errands. I got my phone not fixed by Sprint (they made us wait 3 hours to tell me that they couldn't fix it and then they erased all my info on my phone to upgrade to windows mobile 6.2). The nerd in me tells me it's WORTH IT! I now get Sprint TV, free NAV from sprint, and now I can have my text messages appear like chats like google mail. YES!

Finally we went to go see some family in LA. My aunt lives here along with Larry my cousin and his wonderful wife Rebecca. I finally got to see teir new kid, Ethan. That kis is 10 months old and completely adorable. He was full of energy, laughing with us (more like laughing at us), and really well behaved. I vow to spoil that kid rotten when I can.

We met at a Shanghainese restaurant where we dined like kings. I wished I took some pictures but I forot to bring my camera. I vow to never do that again!!

If you're not Asian and you're reading this, do you know what happens at the end of the meal between two relatives? The biggest fight you'll ever see. It'll make UFC look like babies fighting. Usually there is a lot of screaming, tugging, illegal grabs, and death moves. Why all the fuss? To se who gets to pay the bill. Fortunately, my Mom had the foresight to get to the restaurant 30 minutes early, order the food, then pay for the food before my Aunt even have a chance to step through the door. A clear victory for my mom! or was it? It turns out my Aunt gave my mom some pastries for our plane ride to Taiwan. Inside she snuck in "hong bao" or red envelopes filled with money for me and my brother. With that counter move, she not only got my mom back but did it in the guise of a good gesture. Brilliant!

Ike! Take a hike!

I saw that sign "Ike! Take a hike!" on the news posted by a galveston resident. It appears Ike is going to make landfall and will plow it's way through Houston. Southwest canceled our flight from Houston to Los Angeles. My parents had to drive up to Austin so we can make our flight to Taiwan on time. Unfortunately mother nature doesn't seem to want us to go to Taiwan. A typhoon called sinlaku is making it's way to Taiwan and it looks like it will make landfall on Sunday, the day of our arrival.... =(

Check out the picture of the Typhoon. I wonder which is bigger, Ike or Sinlaku.

Click me to see current satellite of Sinaku

Anyways, right now I'm staying in a Sheraton Four Points near LAX airport with my parents. We're trying to figure out what we're going to do. If our flights are canceled to Taiwan I guess we'll chill longer in the city of Angels. For now, our plan is to go to Chinatown and probably eat really yummy chinese food. You know me, I'll post some good pictures of that when I get the chance.

For those that are curious and more for me since I'm going to forget what happened. Here's a quick breakdown of the sequence of events.

6:00PM- Jeff and Oliver drove my parents and me to the Austin Bergstrum Airport (Thanks guys, I owe you food or extra loving)

7:40- Suppose to take off but delayed for 20 minutes. I hate delays... =(

9:30 (Las Vegas local time)- landed in Las Vegas. Our connecting flight was for 9:45. We didn't make it to the gate in time... or so we thought. It turns out that plane was late as well. I love delays. So we waited in the lobby of Las Vegas airport. What do you think people do when they 1) have money 2) are bored 3) slot machines located conveniently around every corner blinking and making happy sounds. Lucky for me I'm a cheap bastard. I burnt 2 dollars and then stopped. My dad on the other hand last 5. Stupid Vegas. Can't wait for tomorrow. foooooddddddddd...........