Zhanga: March 2006
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 (6 comments)
You know those music sites where you give it some songs and it tells you some related songs that you might like? Well, I play music using Amarok (which, by the way, is a very nice music player), and it just so happens to have this site/service called last.fm integrated into it. Basically, every time I play a song, Amarok sends the name and artist (and maybe some other info?) to last.fm so that if I go to the last.fm site, I can see other music that I might like.
In my perpetual quest to entertain you, the reader, I present to you this, which I found on last.fm after I logged in:
Gay Radio
G.I.R.L. Gay Internet Radio
Live Your Soundtrack While
You Surf!
7:49PM
Monday, March 27, 2006 (5 comments)
I have about 250 pictures from Europe, but as I was going through them I realized that they all... suck. 60 of them don't even work because they were taken with someone else's camera which used a really cheap memory card, causing all the pictures to be corrupted. Of the ones taken with my camera, well, I'm not exactly an expert photographer. However, my mom is:
See how skilled my mom is? This is just like at graduation when she took 20 photos yet none of them were clear enough to even see a face. Professional photographers set up silhoutte shots as "art." My mom is so skilled she can make my head and body perfectly black without even trying. Anyways, that's me at La Defense, which I guess translates to "The Defense," which is a really stupid name because it's basically a plaza with restaurants and shops and a mall. Apparently it's a famous spot in Paris, at the end of Champs Élysée Avenue which runs down the background. If you're a rich woman, then that street is where you want to live. It's got more expensive stores than I knew existed. If you follow the road down about as far as you can see in this picture, you'll find the Napoleonic Arch or whatever it's called.
Here's Notre Dame:
I don't have a whole lot to say about Notre Dame, except that my sister kept chasing around pigeons. Go all the way to Paris and what you get most excited about are some stupid birds?
That boy up there sits on a street corner in Brussels and is perpetually pissing. There's some sort of folklore saying that hundreds of years ago, attackers set up explosives outside some city around here, and this little boy pissed on the fuse and saved the city. He's all over the place now. I got my mom to buy me a 4" tall model of him. He has a bottle opener protruding from his head, and a 4" large corkscrew protruding from elsewhere.
My mom with a hand in Holland, her left foot in Belgium, and her right foot in Germany:
Also, about 50 feet from that rock (in the direction that the shadows are pointing), there is an even less interesting-looking rock that marks the highest point in Holland.
Here's Waterloo, where Napoleon got raped. It's really, really boring. It's just a huge mound with a stone lion on top. Aren't there supposed to be dead bodies and stuff littered all over this place?
The Eiffel Tower looks pretty cool at night. This was taken from a boat on the Seine:
I just felt like throwing this in because I like the picture. I think it's the only acceptable picture I took all trip (1/200 pictures = 0.5%. I am so good at taking pictures!). We stopped for about five minutes in Luxembourg, apparently at some sort of famous gorge. I didn't know Luxembourg was big enough to have a gorge in it, but here it is:
11:28PM
Friday, March 24, 2006 (3 comments)
Me: Hey, one of my high school friends is coming
here next week. Would you mind if another person stayed in our room for a day or two?
Dan: No. Is this kid Asian?
Me: Yeah
Dan: A guy?
Me: Ye--
Dan: Damn.
Mary: Yujing's going to Duke. You two are going to
have lots of babies.
Me: Umm. With girls, right?
Mary: Right...
I might post some pictures from Europe in a few days. I'm too lazy right now.
Pretty much the only other thing that's happened in my life is that I got a jar of really hardcore Chinese hot sauce. This stuff is intense, and by that I mean it is absolutely on fire. The first time I tried this stuff, I dipped a little bit of meat into the sauce, so little that you had to look really carefully at the meat just to see a small spot with a slight orange tinge. My mouth almost exploded.
Oh yeah, that reminds me, I have a dumb story about hot sauce. I've gone to Bali Hai, that Mongolian place where you cram as much food as you can into a bowl and have them cook it, pretty much every Friday for dinner. There are a bunch of sauces that you can choose for them to cook your food in, and of course I always get the spicy one. The first time, I asked for spicy 10 since they said their scale goes from 1-10, but I had to eat about half the plate to begin tasting the spicyness. So every time after that I asked for spicy 30 or 40, and that was a lot better. Then the last time I went, which I guess was two or three weeks ago, the chef guy yelled at me for stacking too much food in my bowl. I guess to punish me, he put about three times as much spicy powder as usual in my food. My tongue corroded, hard.
4:18 PM
Saturday, March 18, 2006 (6 comments)
I forgot to mention that I had real, freshly squeezed orange juice for the first time ever this week. It tasted like heaven. I love the "100%, not from concentrate" juice that I'm used to, but this stuff is just amazing.
Today was kind of interesting. I rode a train for four hours and went to Berlin, then walked around and looked at all sorts of stuff. A few sections of the Wall are still up. There's still a remnant of Checkpoint Charlie, but it costs like 2 Euros just to take a picture with the fake American soldiers there. I don't even think they can speak English. Speaking of Euros, it costs between 0.30 and 1.10 Euros to use the bathrooms here! Seems like this is the case even in restaurants. So it costs about as much to get rid of piss as it does to buy water to produce it in the first place. How lame.
I need to get up at 4:30, and it's midnight right now, so I need to go to sleep. This post and the last one is just to let you know that I'm alive.
5:56PM
Friday, March 17, 2006 (4 comments)
It's Saturday over here already, but still Friday back home, so the title is still Friday.
I haven't had any Internet access and I can only stay on for a few minutes right now, but I've been writing a few lines here and there so I'll post those. Europe doesn't seem to have free hotspots, and people like to turn encryption on (unlike dumb Americans) so you can't steal their wireless. That sucks.
Anyways, here's what I've been doing:
Tuesday the 14th
Saturday the 11th:
My mom, sister, and I arrive in Frankfurt and take a car through Germany to Belgium. Apparently I have an aunt or something who lives in Belgium about twenty minutes from Aachen, but I don't know what the city in Belgium is called. Anyways, I didn't do a whole lot that day. I just mostly slept. I don't think that this aunt of mine is actually my aunt, because my mom isn't supposed to have a sister, but I'm not sure. She and my mom grew up together or something like that.
This aunt of mine has a daughter who's a year older than me. So apparently, I also have a cousin that I didn't know about. Supposedly we met when we were one or two but I don't remember this happening. Where this mystery branch of family suddenly came from, I have no idea.
Sunday the 12th:
We went to Cologne, looked at stuff, went to somewhere else (I think), looked at stuff, and looked at some stuff in Aachen. Not much of interest to write about, except that the church in Cologne is freaking enormous.
Monday the 13th:
We went to the point where Belgium, Germany, and Holland meet. Holland's highest point, a really dull-looking rock, happened to be about 50 feet from there, so we saw that too. We also went to see a US war cemetery in Holland, where there's loads of headstones for American soldiers in WWII. The headstones formed really cool patterns.
In the afternoon, this other lady and her husband came to pick us up and go to Paris. I haven't yet figured out whether she is another mystery aunt or whether she is just friend of my mom's. I'm hoping there is no relation here, though. This would double the number of aunts I have. Not to mention that she has a daughter too, and if this girl is a cousin of mine then that doubles my cousin count. That's, like, twice as many relatives as I had a week ago. Can you imagine when these cousins (if they are) start having kids? Ahh! Mayhem!
We drove to Luxembourg to take pictures, which was kind of boring. I did get a pretty good picture of this bridge though. Yeah, I know. If that's the highlight of my visit to a country, then the stop was clearly not worth it.
Next stop was Paris, I think? It was already late so we didn't do much when we got there.
Tuesday the 14th:
The Eiffel Tower, the palace at Versailles, the Napoleon arch-thingy, some Egyptian obelisk thingy, and the Louvre.
The Louvre is gay. They are closed on Tuesdays. Wtf is that. The Eiffel Tower is pretty gay too. To get all the way to the top, you have to take the lift, but there's only one and there's a huge line. So I didn't get to go all the way up.
At night, we went to the Lido, which is one of those risqu�theaters with a bunch of girls prancing around in thongs. It's just a tad bit weird watching that with my super Asian mom. Sometimes I really hate being Chinese, or at least having Chinese parents. And whoever's idea it was to bring my sister along is clearly a genius.
Wednesday the 15th
Today we actually went into the Louvre and looked at stuff. I didn't know the Code of Hammurabi is there. Check it out sometime... it's big and black, can't miss it. The Eiffel Tower looks pretty cool at night. Going to Louis Vutton, Lacoste, Chanel, etc. with my mom and another woman is really, really lame.
I found out today that my aunt is my second aunt or aunt once removed or something. I have no idea how relations work in the English language (or in Chinese), so I'm just taking a wild stab at it. She's my grandma's brother's kid. I guess that mean I do have one more cousin than I want to have, but at least she's not a first cousin so I guess that makes her not a real cousin.
I've noticed a couple of things about Paris. First, there is an abnormally high proportion of Asians. I mean, practically 1/3 of the people I see are Asian. Between 9 am and 10 pm today, I don't think I went more than about 30 minutes without seeing at least one Jap. Why are there so many Asians here?? Oh yeah, while on that subject... there were loads of tour groups in the Louvre. I figured I could leech and follow one of them around, but it turned out that they all spoke Korean, Japanese, French, or Frenchified English. No Chinese or English.
The second thing that I noticed is that there is an abnormally high proportion of hot women. Maybe it's because I went to Walton, maybe it's because I live in Brown, maybe it's because I just drove here from Germany. I don't know. In any case, I see hot women every time I open my eyes. Loads of them. How nice.
Friday the 17th
Thursday the 16th:
Waterloo, some place, Amsterdam, red light district, interesting places but there's not really much for me to write about.
Friday the 17th:
Dikes and stuff, and then to Hamburg where I am right now. We stopped for lunch at a McDonald's where they played great songs like Everytime and Behind These Hazel Eyes. What a great country.
I went to some amusement park today. The beer here is a lot better than the crap I leeched at K-ville. And Chinese German fobs speaking English while slightly intoxicated is really funny.
6:19PM
Thursday, March 9, 2006 (8 comments)
My mom sent me a pretty funny email the other day:
Dong,
Now you will find one who's English is worse than your mom. :)
That was pretty funny. I had never seen my mom use a smiley face anywhere before. So then I scrolled down to see what she was talking about:
Ms Lena
Hey I know you are keep call me, yours ticket ready issue but have a little bit
promble here I need to soft that first with the Delta airlines and will call you
back after done.
This would be funny, except it's not. Because I was going to go to Europe, right? The travel agency told us three weeks ago that they had tickets for my mom and me. I was to fly to Hartsfield and transfer there, flying with my mom to Frankfurt. A week later, we'd take a flight back from Frankfurt to Hartsfield, then I'd transfer and fly to Durham. Thing is, they didn't actually have tickets but pretended they did.
Last night, the dumb place finally called my mom and gave her ticket numbers. But on the return trip, we're not on the same flight. My mom is really angry now and refuses to go unless they fix my return flight to be the same as hers. Rightfully angry, since we were supposed to be on the same flight until they decided to screw things up about 38 hours from departure time. That's not very much notice considering they told us they had tickets on February 15, and provided for us a schedule of those tickets.
I'm guessing my mom is going to call the credit card company and make the travel agency eat $1600 or so of chargebacks. I need to ask my mom why, of all places, she chose a travel agency on Buford. At least pick a place that knows the difference between "soft" and "solve"!
I'm going to be rather unhappy if I'll be in Atlanta instead of Germany over the break. In fact, I may spend my entire week at the travel agency's office building causing general havoc. I really wish I could get my hands on some cane toads right about now!
1:48AM
Sunday, March 5, 2006 (7 comments)
Yeah, so Duke lost. That was pretty gay. Go to hell, Carolina.
So many things went wrong today, and UNC was just the beginning. Marie cheated the tenting system and got a spot in the second row, with people who had been tenting for two months. That's bad enough, and then you throw in the fact that she had tented, but quit after being out there for about an hour on the first night. She stood in the second row when other people who tented for two months in the freezing cold watched the game from behind her. Even I stayed in the tent more than her and I watched from like the tenth row, where I couldn't see anything. Like, I couldn't see if Paulus had just passed it to blue, white, or the cameraman. I wonder what Marie would do if I put her stupid rat into a Snapple bottle with some dry ice and capped it.
After getting back to the dorm, I was starving since I just had a hot dog and hamburger for dinner. So I went to Trinity, but apparently they were closed. It was 1:00 by then, so I looked up Papa John's and found that the one down the street closes at 1:15. The guy put me on hold, and at 1:05 Rosie walked in. I asked her if she had any food and she said yes, so I hung up on Papa John's. Then she told me she hadn't cooked any, and when I asked her if she felt like cooking she apparently got really offended and walked out. Generally, when I ask for food, it doesn't mean "do you have food that I can't have?"
So I called Papa John's at like 1:06, and the guy put me on hold. At 1:36, I got really annoyed, hung up, and called again. This time, a different person picked up, and this is basically what happened:
Me: "Hi. I've been on hold for the past thirty minutes.
Are you ever going to get to me?"
PJ: "Yes. Would you like to order something?"
Me: "Yes. I'd like to order a pizza."
[...]
PJ: "The delivery time is about two hours."
I wasn't about to wait until 4 for my food, so I made some ramen. Half got eaten by leeches, but at least that was ok because I made twice as much as I was actually going to eat.
The only non-angry, but more depressing, thing I have to say today is that I sent Dutter a card a couple of days ago. Here's the front:
On the inside, it says "They're filled with Heal-ium. Hope you're better soon." I thought that was rather appropriate.
Oh yeah, I told Henry that Walton's Science Bowl team sucked hardcore and he laughed really hard. Columbus High School? What is Columbus?? Henry wasn't aware that Columbus, GA has any high schools, either. How can you lose to them in anything that doesn't relate to milking cows or growing cotton?
3:42AM
Friday, March 3, 2006 (5 comments)
On Wednesday, I heard Dutter had a stroke. Great. I also lost my Science Bowl frisbee that day, but didn't realize it until Thursday. Also great. I guess Parkview is getting revenge. I think it would be pretty funny if Henry has my frisbee right now (he lives down the hall).
Hey, isn't tomorrow the day when you guys (Yash et al., I forgot the rest of your names, including Yujing's) have the Science Bowl tournament? Wait, what's Dutter going to do? Oh no! Pepple again? Well, at least she won't make fun of you guys for missing stupid questions, I guess. But what's the fun in that?
Last night in K-ville, we were tossing around a frisbee. It was dark, so I couldn't see well, especially while running. One throw bounced off my right hand and smacked me in the face, causing my head to turn to the left and my eyes to instinctively close. Well, what I didn't realize is that a tree had suddenly grown right in my path (it wasn't there 10 minutes before). So as soon as I turned my head back around to see in front of me, I was already in the tree. It's not like I headbutted a large tree trunk, because that could have been bad, but I ran into a bunch of small, hard branches that gave my face a nice set of scrapes. I guess my face kinda looked like I lost a fight with that Retarded Asian.
Maybe if I just make a bunch of short, stupid posts, I'll be able to post more than once every two weeks. Let's try that for a while.
12:40PM
Thursday, March 2, 2006 (0 comments)
Sorry for the lack of posts. The draft of a 6-9 page research paper on the Savannah River was due Tuesday, and on the same day in the same class, I had to give a group presentation about invasive species (cane toads!) worth 20% of the semester grade. Another 6 page draft was due Wednesday in a different class. I'm really tired.
Duke lost yesterday. That sucks. The UNC game is soon... make sure you watch. Apparently ESPN is going to provide continual coverage of the crowd now, rather than just the game. So if you're watching us on TV and you see somebody wearing a blue shirt that isn't really Duke Blue and also uncannily resembles a Windows error screen, that's me. Actually, they're right next to the tents, right now, so maybe they'll even show something tonight or tomorrow night.
Today the CS professor was gone, so she put the grad TA in charge of lecture. The grad TA is an Indian guy, from India, who speaks with your typical Indian fob accent. You figure that, as such, he probably knows everything there is to know about computers, right? Unfortunately, this isn't the case, and he doesn't actually know much... sort of like the guys in Delhi who work at tech support call centers.
Anyways, I'm usually supposed to get to class 20 minutes after class starts at 8:30 since the first half hour of class is lecture, followed by lab when they write code and stuff. This time, though, I was aiming to get to the classroom by the beginning of class because that guy was just going to confuse himself trying to give a lecture.
Unfortunately, I woke up at 8:12, and it takes about 20 minutes to get over there. I scrambled and brushed my teeth and stuff and got there at 8:39. As I walked in, I heard, "So are there any questions? ... No questions? Okay, you can start working on the assignment then." Somehow, he managed to cram half an hour of lecture into nine minutes. Imagining him talking really fast with a super Indian accent is pretty funny.
I'm at the tent (for the UNC game) right now, and writing this entry is a huge pain because the wireless is really slow. I might compensate for the inactivity here for the past two weeks by dedicating my next post to that crowd of retarded Asians. I'd write the name here, but it's so stupidly spelled that I can't even remember what letter it begins with.
6:31PM
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