The Last Leg

Mumbai, India

Something I forgot to mention about India was the presence of cows, which can be seen just about anywhere, from lounging in the middle of a busy road in Goa to eating grass on the sidewalk in central Mumbai, the country’s most metropolitan city. People feed the cows and touch them for good luck as they walk by, and drive carefully around them as they mosey along the medians and shoulders of the roads. Tony almost got bludgeoned when we stopped to take some pictures of a herd of road warrior cows in Goa.
After we saw Krrish on Sunday the 13th, the whole gang of us went out with our Indian friends to Juhu Beach, where thousands of clothed people hang out in the sand playing with monkeys and staring at foreigners. Sarah had a crowd of at least 50 people around her, ogling as she got what looked like a henna tattoo, but it turned out to be paint laced with kerosene. It took an evening of washing and icing her arm to get it to stop burning, but luckily we didn’t have to go to the hospital.
On our last day in Mumbai, Sarah and I went to Haji Ali, a mosque on an island in the Arabian Sea connected to the mainland by a narrow road which goes completely underwater at high tide; we got in and out that morning without getting stranded there for hours, which happens to tourists occasionally. Then we took a cab to the Dhobi Ghats, which can be described as an open-air “factory” where the entire city’s laundry is washed by hand. Any time laundry is sent out in Mumbai, it ends up here, being scrubbed and beaten against a wall by semi-naked guys in murky puddles of water, and hung to dry on cables zigzagging the workplace. We got a view of the Dhobi Ghats from an overpass next to the Mahalaxmi train station, where we saw overstuffed trains with no doors shuttling thousands of people into central Mumbai. Ashish told us that roughly 10 people die on the rail system PER DAY as a result of people falling out of the doors, climbing on top of the trains and getting electrocuted, or children wandering in front of trains.
Later on that day, Sarah, Tericke, Tony and I checked out Victoria Terminus, Mumbai’s main regional train station, which was renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus after India gained independence from the British in 1947. Chhatrapati Shivaji was a freedom fighter in the Indian uprising against Mughal rule back in the 17th century, and he must have been pretty cool, because they named both of their airports, their national museum, municipal parks, and several schools after him as well. We spent the rest of the day strolling through Mumbai’s open-air markets, which have pushy vendors selling everything imaginable; one observant vendor flagged us down and tried to give us a great price on an electric razor, which I apparently needed.
The cab ride to the airport that night was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Traffic was terrible, it was pouring rain, and our cab ran out of gas about halfway to the airport. As we waited in the huge line at the gas station, I was able to cut a deal with a new cab driver, so we hauled all of our stuff into cab #2 and continued the ride. Two and a half hours after we left our apartment, we finally arrived at the airport in time to check in for our all-night flight through Bangkok to Cambodia. In retrospect, Sarah and I are both still shocked that we were never in a traffic accident in Mumbai, although despite the chaotic driving, we never saw a single automobile accident the entire time we were in India.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

The next morning, we arrived at the airport in Siem Reap, where we were picked up by our personal driver and tour guide, Hann. We headed straight out to Angkor Wat National Park, where we hiked around for a few hours. Angkor Wat is one of the world’s most sacred Buddhist religious sites, having somehow survived centuries of warfare and remaining in surprisingly good shape. Hann said that it was built over the course of 28 years by King Suryavarman’s one million slaves in the 12th century. The National Park contains several temple sites, including Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Prohm (where Tomb Raider was filmed) and the Terrace of Elephants, where the ancient kings inspected their armies and held elephant races. We hiked throughout the park for most of the day, checking out all of the temples and ruins, feeding wild monkeys, and learning some of Cambodia’s history. As we drove back to Siem Reap, we passed by rice paddies along the roadsides where minefields had been cleared by international organizations, and stopped at a memorial for the millions of people massacred in Pol Pot’s killing fields, which can still be seen lining the roads all over the country. One of the things we noticed about Cambodia was the noticeably tiny number of middle-aged people (presumably they were either in Pol Pot’s army or killed by them – between one and three million people were killed in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s dictatorship form the 1970’s through the mid-1990’s). That night, we ate an outstanding meal at another hotel, which served us coconut chicken curry inside a hollowed-out coconut, along with Cambodia’s own Angkor Beer.
On Wednesday, Hann took us outside of Siem Reap to a floating village called Chong Kneas built entirely on a muddy river, with floating schools, restaurants, houses and gymnasiums. We cruised through the village on a big green longtail boat, past floating houses with no toilets and hammocks for beds, equipped with satellite TV and electricity, oddly enough. A bunch of naked kids were swimming all over the river, even right next to an alligator farm where a chain linked fence was the only thing separating them from hundreds of hungry alligators. On our way back to Siem Reap, we climbed up a hill nearby and got a better look at the river, which eventually dumped into Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s largest lake. After stopping for some lunch, we saw a few more temples and then headed out to a 16 square km man-made lake at West Baray, again built in 28 years presumably by the same 1 million slaves as the temples in Angkor Wat National Park, according to Hann. Unfortunately, our tour had to end at that point because I was too sick to function; I had brushed my teeth with tap water and eaten part of my raw, pre-cut coconut “bowl” at dinner the night before, so the swift, violent intestinal problem that ensued was my own fault for not being careful. Lesson learned…
As a result, we didn’t accomplish much else in Siem Reap, which exists, seemingly, solely to house Angkor Wat tourists. All of the hotels are extravagantly decorated, inside and out, but the town itself (as well as Cambodian tourism and hospitality) is still a bit of a mess, especially compared with the level of service we experienced in the touristy parts of Thailand and India. Most of the roads in Siem Reap were constantly flooded and full of potholes, if they were paved, and outside of the main drag of hotels, the place is still very much a third-world country. U.S. dollars are the only currency dispensed in Siem Reap’s ATMs, and businesses there (even the National Park system) do not deal in U.S. change; the only change you can receive is in Cambodian Riel, which are worth about 1/3800ths of a dollar. Our hotel, which was gorgeous even by Western standards, was full of geckos and mosquitoes - I woke up one night covered in huge bites on my forehead and feet and flipped out, crushing Benadryl tablets and rubbing them into the super-puffed skin in order to calm myself down.
On our way out of town the next day, we were greeted at the airport by a hit squad of two cops and six random, scraggly Cambodian guys who had showed up to ensure that I paid the remaining balance of my hotel bill (there had been an unresolved billing miscommunication between our hotel and our tour guide that was never brought to my attention). The Cambodian police hunted me down in the check-in line with my hotel’s photocopy of my passport, walking up to me and asking me if I’d seen the guy in the picture. I was 19 years old, clean-shaven and spiky-haired when I took my passport picture six years ago, so the cop didn’t recognize me at all with my shaggy hair and beard; I should have just said “Nope, haven’t seen the guy,” and I probably would have made it out of there scot-free (or, alternatively, beaten with reeds, so I coughed up thirty bucks, cut a deal with the hit squad in the parking lot, and got the hell out of there before anymore Cambodian shenanigans ensued).

Bangkok, Thailand

Luckily, our accommodations in Bangkok were a huge step up from the City Angkor Mosquito Hotel in Siem Reap; we stayed in the guest house of the American ambassador to Thailand in the heart of Bangkok, where we enjoyed EDIBLE fresh fruit for breakfast every morning and a chauffeured car to take us anywhere we wanted to go. We got to Bangkok around lunchtime on Thursday and passed out for the rest of the afternoon, waking up in time for dinner and some shopping at the Suan Lum Night Bazaar, a huge outdoor market/restaurant area close to the American embassy in a neighborhood called Sukhumvit. Sarah and I were both still ailing from the Cambodian food, so we took it relatively easy and caught up on sleep while we were in Bangkok; the only thing I accomplished on Friday was a trip to a tailor called Rajawongse for a fitting for two new suits I picked up while I was in town. Rajawongse is run by two Sikh gentlemen named Jesse and Victor Gulati, and they outfit all kinds of high-ranking U.S. and international government officials, including the Bush family, with hand-made suits and shirts. They also provide free Heinekens during the fitting sessions, so I was sold as soon as I walked in the place.
On Saturday, Sarah and I did as much sightseeing as our stomachs would allow us, which included the Thai Grand Palace, Wat Phra Keow (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Po. Wat Po is a temple which houses an impressive 150-foot long gold-plated reclining Buddha. That evening, we met up with Jackie Woo, a Thai attorney and friend of a law school buddy of mine. We ate dinner in an upscale, cafeteria-style restaurant (it sounds weird, but it was awesome), and afterwards Jackie and I ventured out to “Backpacker’s Paradise” at Khao San Road, which is a strip of outdoor bars, cheap guest houses, and hostels where every language imaginable can be heard in the crowded street. Jackie and I upheld Bangkok tradition and ate scorpions, which were extremely crunchy, but disappointingly bland.

Koh Samui, Thailand

Sarah and I woke up early on Sunday morning to catch our flight to Koh Samui, a gorgeous island in the Gulf of Thailand where my cousin Will is living and working as a food and beverage consultant/English teacher for a handful of resorts. My online hotel booking fell through for some reason, but fortunately we were sent to a place nearby called L’Hacienda, a beautiful, Mediterranean-style place on Big Buddha Beach run by a French couple. We had a spectacular view of our beach and another island called Koh Phangan across the narrow strait separating Ko Samui from Phangan. That afternoon, we met up with Will at the island’s main tourist attraction, the Big Buddha, which is, in fact, a giant, gold-plated Buddha on top of a hill on the island’s north shore. The three of us piled on to Will’s motor scooter and went back to his house, where we met Yay, his Thai girlfriend, and Punky, his couch-crashing college buddy from Denmark. My previous impression was that Will was living in a small shack on the side of the road, sleeping in the dirt, etc., but his house is a really nice one-bedroom bungalow with a kitchen, a bathroom and a real-life Western-style toilet, which I used to take for granted before our trek through Asia. We all hopped on motor scooters and went out to dinner at a small, open-air restaurant where we ate amazing Thai food, and then we all went for a traditional Thai massage at a parlor on Chaweng Beach. As we pulled up to the massage parlor on the scooters, we heard a chorus of about 15 tiny uniformed Thai ladies yelling “Wiiiiiiiirrrrrr!!!” (Will is kind of a local celebrity because he is an American who speaks Thai and works with lots of locals at resorts all over the island.) The ladies took us inside, put us in pajamas, laid the five of us down on a row of beds and proceeded to masterfully tie us in knots for an hour, which only set us back around 5 bucks each. We then went to an outdoor lounge out on Chaweng Beach, where we sat on pillows and had a table literally 15 feet from the Gulf of Thailand On our way to the bar, I made a new friend and had trouble giving him back to his owner, who likely stole him from the jungle.
We spent the next day on a great tour of Koh Samui, which is about 100 square kilometers in size, very mountainous, and blanketed in coconut trees (they send around three million coconuts to the mainland each year). Our tour guide picked us up in a songthaew, a converted pick-up truck with an awning and bench seats in the bed, and we started the tour with a short ride through the jungle on an elephant. We then headed to a zoo where, if we wanted to, we could get into a cage with a tiger for a picture for about $12. The guide told us upon arrival that “if you want your picture in the cage with the tiger, you must do it soon because the tiger will eat dinner in 30 minutes, and he will be angry afterwards.” I don’t know what’s worse – getting in a cage with a hungry tiger or an angry tiger, but either way, Sarah managed to convincingly talk me out of it. Apparently, however, lots of families do this; there were samples of professional-style pictures outside the cage with kids climbing all over the tiger, asking for trouble. After wimping out of the would-be tiger wrestling match, we saw the weirdest bird ever created and found out that otters are disgustingly cute. After the zoo, our guide took us to a monkey farm, where monkeys are trained to climb into trees and harvest coconuts, “because the humans are too lazy to do it,” the guide said. Next, we checked out Grandfather and Grandmother Rock, which are natural rock formations shaped like male and female genitalia within about a hundred yards of each other on Lamai Beach.
Finally, we ended the tour at Phra Khru Samathakittikhun, or the Temple of the Mummified Monk. Apparently, an 80-year old monk predicted his own death thirty years ago and wished for his remains to be propped up in a meditating position “as a symbol to aspire the future generations to follow generations to follow Buddhist teachings and be saved from suffering.” He’s been at the temple in a glass case ever since, and our tour guide told us that they had to put sunglasses on him because “his eyes fall out, that’s a problem.”
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we spent most of our time walking around the island and relaxing in the rooftop pool at the hotel, unfortunately continuing the ferocious battle against the Wrath of Delicious Cambodian food. We found out that Koh Samui has a dark underbelly of allegedly mafia-controlled taxicabs (I believe it – cabs were actually expensive even by American standards) and a Danish criminal gang called the Banditos. Because we were tired and not feeling well for most of our time there, we missed a lot of Samui and the surrounding area, so that’s our excuse to go back – it’s a beautiful place, and I’m now insanely jealous of my cousin for being able to make his living there.

The Loooooong Trip Home

We got back to the ambassador’s house in Bangkok on Wednesday night, where I picked up my freshly-tailored suits and took Sarah to the Patpong Night Bazaar, Bangkok’s outdoor shopping mall/central red light district. We grabbed dinner and a second suitcase to lug all of our stuff home for the trip the following morning, and spent the rest of the night packing.
Our driver took us to the airport at 6 am on Thursday, and we dragged ourselves onto the plane for the 6-hour flight back to Tokyo, the 12-hour haul to Chicago, and the 2-hour hop to DC, where we finally showed up, frazzled and exhausted, on Thursday night, August 24th. We figured out that we’d spent over 51 hours in the air over the course of the entire trip, and taken just about every type of transportation imaginable: planes, subways, cabs, buses, vans, chauffeured cars, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, boats, motor scooters, songthaews, and a Magnetic Elevated train.

Vienna, Virginia

We’ve spent the past couple of weeks at the Burns’s house recovering from jet lag and the mysterious Cambodian Guerilla Bowel Attacks (CGBA: look it up in the medical dictionary, it’s there). I managed to shave, get a haircut and secure a job working as a temporary contract attorney in DC, and Sarah will be continuing her job on Capitol Hill with Congressman Tom Lantos next week. We took a short trip to Florida last weekend to visit my mom’s family, and then we drove all the way back up to DC with all of my stuff from home. Sarah and I found a great little apartment on Capitol Hill, and we’ll be spending the next few weeks getting ourselves settled in and returning to normalcy, which I’m actually looking forward to for the first time in a while.
Thanks so much for reading – since I arrived back in the States, I’ve given a lot of thought to the unbelievable year that I’ve been so privileged to experience, particularly as I watched FSU squeak out another win against Miami in last weekend’s game, creating two great bookends to what has been one of the best years of my life. Keeping track of my adventures in this journal was at times a distraction, but it was a source of great amusement for me as I relived my memories of seeing 10 foreign countries, scaling Mount Fuji, tasting French pig intestines, etc., and I hope it’s been an entertaining read for my friends and family both in the States and overseas. I eagerly look forward to my next chance to do something so enjoyable, as well as the opportunity to write about it all.

Globetrotting

I’m back! After finishing school in Tokyo and traveling through China, Thailand and India, I’m taking my first opportunity to sit in front of a computer and write for more than a few minutes. Sarah and I have been extremely busy ever since she arrived in Tokyo on July 20th.

Kyoto/Kobe

The next morning we hopped on the Shinkansen for a trip to see Sarah’s friend Mai Murata and her family in Kobe. We met up with Mai in Kyoto and spent a day and a night there, checking out Kinkaku-ji, a 600-year old gold-plated pavilion/temple, and we ate at an insane theme restaurant called Locked Up. As soon as we walked in the place, the entrance was pitch black, and we walked down a hallway until a bright light popped on and a haunted house-style dummy jumped up out of a trash can with a blaring chainsaw. I walked into this place a few steps ahead of Sarah and Mai, so by the time I had finished my awkward, instinctive yelp of panic, they had run back out the door and around the corner. After we all calmed down (Mai was trying to call the restaurant to make sure there would be no more nonsense before we returned, to no avail), we walked back in, tripped the chainsaw-guy alarm and headed to the seating area. The hostess greeted us in a skimpy blue plastic cop outfit and knee-high platform boots, and asked which of the three of us had committed the worst crime, in Japanese. Sarah and I remained clueless about what was said and Mai pointed to Sarah, so the hostess slapped handcuffs on Sarah and dragged us all into a cell, complete with iron bar windows, fake brick walls and a wooden table. The drinks we ordered were served in beakers, test tubes and eye-droppers, and we were served a jellyfish snack and a "Russian roulette" appetizer: a revolver-shaped dish with six octopus balls, one of which was extremely spicy, and it was impossible to tell which one was "lucky" until you ate it (I got it, of course, but it was really good). Just when it couldn't get any weirder, alarms began sounding, and over the speaker system, the hostess announced that "monkeys" were attacking the city of Kyoto; within a few minutes, busboys and cooks dressed up as horror movie characters were jumping from cell to cell with fake machetes, scaring everyone to death. Soon after came the cops/hostesses, who shot the "monkeys" with cap guns, cuffed them and took them back to the kitchen. This was definitely the strangest restaurant I've ever visited, but we had a great time, and the food was excellent. Who could have thought up a jail/mad chemist/haunted house/horror flick/crazy monkey-themed restaurant?
The next day we saw Kiyomizudera, a beautiful, elaborate group of temples in the hills overlooking Kyoto, and then walked down a small, winding road and stopped at a pottery shop, where Sarah, Mai and I sculpted our own rice bowls, which Mai is going to ship back to us in the States when we return. I wish we had been able to spend more time in Kyoto, which was very well-preserved and had a lot of historical buildings and landmarks mixed in with its modern downtown area (similar to Boston); it's a lot better than Tokyo, in my opinion. Afterwards, we all took another train to Kobe and went to an amazing tempura restaurant with Mai and her family, where the chef fried seafood and vegetables right in front of us and served it all to us piece by piece. That Sunday we visited a 17th-century feudal castle called Himeji, where "The Last Samurai" was filmed, and had another great meal with Mai's family, this time at a sushi restaurant, where we ate several courses of eel, octopus, egg, and fatty tuna nigiri. We spent Monday exploring Kobe's underground malls and the seaport, and then I had to head back to Tokyo for school, while Sarah stayed back in Kobe with Mai and her family for another day.

Tokyo

I was holed up in the computer lab for the rest of the week finishing my final papers and preparing for my last final exam (unless I go back for the Ph.D. – HIGHLY unlikely, considering how schooled-out I am at this point). Sarah checked out Tokyo on her own, and she enjoyed being pampered as a guest of the American ambassador to Japan at his complex in central Tokyo; she stayed in the suite where Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur hung out for a few years following the surrender of Japan after World War II, which is slightly awesome. I got a chance to go see her place when the embassy invited us to a party that Friday evening for the release of “Superman Returns;” the ambassador set up a makeshift movie theater inside a ballroom at the house, where lots of embassy employees and their kids came to see the movie and eat hot dogs and popcorn. After the movie, Sarah and I met up with my class for a final embarrass-yourself-one-more-time karaoke night at an Italian restaurant, and on Saturday night Temple University Japan threw us a nice open-bar going-away party in Omote-sando.

Shanghai

About three hours later, Sarah and I were awake along with most of my class, reluctantly catching the 7:30 a.m. bus to Narita Airport to head to China for a week of sightseeing and corporate tours. When we arrived in Shanghai, we were greeted by our tour guide for the next few days, a crazy Chinese guy named Rainy who talked about Shanghai’s history as well as his drinking escapades to pass the time on our tour bus. We were pleasantly surprised with our hotel, which was directly across the Huangpu River from downtown Shanghai and the Bund, giving us amazing views of both areas from the 30th-floor lounge and breakfast restaurant. The Bund is a strip of buildings stretched along the western bank of the Huangpu directly across from downtown Shanghai; the old European-style architecture is a stark contrast to the futuristic, dramatic skyscrapers downtown. That night, the class set out in cabs to an area of downtown Shanghai called Xixiandi, with lots of western-style bars and restaurants, and Sarah and I ate Turkish food, which is probably the last thing we thought we’d be eating in China. Cabs starts at about 90 cents in Shanghai, and don’t go up much further from there, which was a nice break from Tokyo’s $6 starting price.
The next day, we all took a bus trip with Rainy to Yuyuan, an ancient temple garden in Shanghai’s old center, surrounded by shops and restaurants filled with people trying to get us to buy stuff. Each restaurant/shop had a guy standing outside talking to the passersby yelling “Hello! Delicious!” or “Hey pretty lady, look like you need handbag.” We picked up a cool Chairman Mao alarm clock from a souvenir shop, where I was introduced to Sarah’s cutthroat shopping bargaining strategy: name a price that is about a quarter of the vendor’s, and don’t budge. Eventually they always reluctantly gave in; we would be walking away from a store empty-handed and the storekeeper would often physically drag us back in, lowering their price until it matched Sarah’s. For lunch, we all ate a huge meal at a traditional Chinese restaurant, and my German buddy Dominik and I had the honor of eating the eyeballs out of our fish for good luck (Dominik later went on to eat an entire turtle in Beijing – he’s even worse than I am about eating weird stuff for kicks). Later on, after a corporate tour with my class, Sarah and I spent some time on Nanjing Road, a beautiful, brightly-lit, ultramodern pedestrian shopping district, where we were approached every few seconds by shady characters selling knock-off designer goods. We finally got curious and followed one of them off of Nanjing Road to a side street around the corner. At that point, we were able to see the huge difference between the faces put on Shanghai’s touristy public areas as opposed to the slums behind the scenes; we walked into a beat-up, dirty building and into a tiny apartment which was stuffed from floor to ceiling with designer handbags and wallets, Rolex watches, and even a set of Callaway golf clubs.
The whole class took a trip out to the suburbs for a corporate tour that Tuesday, and afterwards Sarah and I headed to a 4-story shopping mall filled to the brim with almost nothing but more famous Chinese knock-off designer stuff, including Samsonite luggage, Gucci shoes and North Face skiwear. Almost all of the inflated prices the shopkeepers threw at us could be whittled down to nothing, and they all had backrooms with the “real” stuff, which was nothing more than piles of better versions of the knock-offs in the stores outside. We left the mall with some classmates and headed to the Ritz-Carlton that night for a performance by the Shanghai Acrobats, a Chinese version of Cirque du Soleil. The next day, Sarah and I ate at the Pizza Hut on Nanjing Road (tastes exactly the same as it does in the States), did some last-minute shopping, and then caught our flight to Beijing.

Beijing

I’m pretty sure that the food on China Eastern Airlines (cuttlefish with beef and intestines in a brown sauce over rice) gave me the mild case of “Chairman Mao’s Revenge” that I’ve been dealing with ever since I set foot in Beijing a week ago. The class went out for dinner and drinks in an area called Ho Hai, a string of dimly-lit bars and restaurants on the shore of a small, willow-lined lake in central Beijing. At the entrance, there were about 50 couples waltzing to Chinese music on a dark dancefloor right next to the lake, which we all got a kick out of. We ate great Thai food and had some creative drinks, and then Sarah and I rented a swan-shaped paddleboat and took a short spin around the lake before heading back to the hotel.
On Thursday, my “ailment” prevented me from taking the corporate tour of a consulting firm’s offices in Beijing, so Sarah and I went to the Silk Market, which is essentially an even bigger, better version of the knock-off mall in Shanghai. The place was absolutely overwhelming – six stories tall and full of anything you could ever think about buying, whether knock-off or otherwise, with pushy vendors literally dragging us into each of the mall’s thousands of stalls. It was the Disneyland of shopping, and, ironically, capitalism; everything could be bought for a fraction of the asking price, so Sarah and I went to town for a couple of hours and then met up for dinner at a coffeeshop with my classmates and some Temple Law students who were studying in Beijing.
Early on Friday morning, we all hopped on the tour bus with our Beijing guide, Jessica, to check out Tiananmen Square, which was huge and creepy, and the Forbidden City, which Sarah and I found to be kind of disappointing for an imperial palace – it was very big, very red, and very repetitive. We found out that the Forbidden City was forbidden to everyone except for the emperor, his concubines, and his servants, who were “not real men,” according to Jessica (translation: Eunuchs). Also, to start the day, Sarah’s brand new sandal was broken by a haggler trying to sell us baseball caps for the Beijing Olympics. Luckily, there was a convenience store right next to us, so we hobbled her in there and got her set up with a brand new pair of Pumas for about 9 bucks. Next, we all climbed back into the bus to for the ride out to a part of the Great Wall of China at a town called Badaling. I found the wall to be very beautiful and impressive, but it was kind of cheapened by all of the tourist crap being shoved in our faces every step of the way, as well as by the gigantic ad splashed across the mountain for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. On the way home, Jessica took us for a peek at the construction site for the new Olympic stadium, which she repeatedly called a “nasshole.” It took us a while, but we finally figured out that Jessica was telling us that the new stadium is roughly shaped like a “nest.” After the tour, we all had a huge final farewell dinner at an elaborately-decorated Chinese restaurant; although this meal was particularly good, the rest of the food in China didn’t really knock our socks off.

Bangkok

We flew back to Shanghai early on Saturday, and used our three-hour layover to ride the Maglev train into town and back. The Maglev (Magnetic Elevated train) reaches 431 kilometers per hour (267 mph) and hovers above a track on a cushion of air – it felt a lot more like flying than being in a train. Afterwards, Sarah and I, along with our buddies Tericke and Tony, caught our flight to Bangkok, where we stayed for one night on our way to Mumbai (Bombay), India. I showed the guys around Bangkok’s famous red light district, where we witnessed lots of great advertising and I snacked on some bugs. We all went to Chatuchak the next morning, a football-field-sized weekend market with thousands of vendors selling everything imaginable, and then Sarah and I headed back to the airport to catch our flight to Mumbai, where we are staying as guests of the American Consulate in a gorgeous vacant apartment right in the middle of town.

Mumbai

When we touched down in Mumbai, it was pouring down rain (it’s the monsoon season, so it’s been raining most of the time that we’ve been here), and neither of our ATM cards worked; luckily, I had one dollar crammed inside my wallet, which I exchanged for some rupees and called my buddy Ashish, who set us straight on how to get to our place. The cab ride was nothing short of insane: a soaked, pothole-filled, narrow, laneless road took us through miles of slums before reaching central Mumbai. The cab driver and the drivers around him seemed to have their hands glued to their horns, which Sarah and I noticed especially when we woke up to a chorus of incessant car and bus horns surrounding our building early the next morning during rush hour - Ashish calls it the “Soundtrack of Mumbai.” The terrible traffic and road infrastructure are unfortunately the first things we noticed about Mumbai, and they’ve left a lasting impression. It is a relentless, chaotic place where you have to battle to get anywhere, even just to cross the street – it’s vastly different from any place I’ve ever been. The low standards of living in the surrounding area and the extremely low value put on human life here (hundreds of people die each year on the railways alone) make even just visiting Mumbai a raw, nerve-racking experience. However, the Mumbaikers, as they are called, don’t really seem to mind any of this; I haven’t heard anyone yell at each other or lose their temper over things that would easily create riots in the States. Additionally, despite the poverty, dirt, traffic and general pandemonium, Sarah and I really have had a great time in Mumbai – it’s a beautiful place, the people have treated us well, we’ve had a wonderful time hanging out with my classmates Ashish, Divesh, Mukesh and Raunaq (all native Mumbaikers themselves) and the food is unbelievably good everywhere we go.
Our apartment is in a neighborhood called Kemps Corner, and it has spectacular views of the Arabian Sea to the west, as well as downtown Mumbai, Chowpatty Beach and the Queen’s Necklace to the southeast. We spent most of our first day in Mumbai catching up on all of the sleep we’d missed over the course of hopping between Japan, China and Thailand for the past week. It poured all day long, so we weren’t going to get much done anyway. I ventured out once for a spin around the neighborhood to find an ATM machine and to get some breakfast – I found a small bakery that sells chicken tikka masala and Indian veggie croissants, which has become the new breakfast of choice for Sarah and I this week. That afternoon, we met up with Ashish, who picked us up in his chauffeured car (it’s much more common than in the States, but still pretty awesome – all of my classmates here have drivers), and went to Café Mondegar in the Colaba area of south Mumbai for more delicious Indian food and Kingfisher beer, my new favorite beverage. Afterwards, we strolled through the shops along Colaba Causeway, using their awnings as protection from some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever witnessed. We got completely drenched as we darted through the rain from Colaba to the Taj Mahal, Mumbai’s most luxurious hotel, where we dried off in the lounge and drank masala chai tea, my other new favorite beverage. From there, the night took us to a shisha bar called Mocha and a pizzeria overlooking Back Bay and the Queen’s Necklace, which is a perfect half-circle of beach lined with high rise condos and hotels.
On Tuesday morning, Sarah and I met up with Tony and Tericke again and we went directly back to the Taj for more tea after checking out the Gateway of India and the Colaba Causeway again. We took a cab to Cream Centre for more great Indian food, and that night we took a cab up to Bandra for dinner and drinks with Ashish, his wife Neha, Divesh, and Raunaq at yet another outstanding Indian restaurant called Moti Mahal. Similar to Shanghai, we keep finding ourselves inside luxurious places which are a complete contrast to what’s happening outside; in Mumbai, however, reality is one step away, as opposed to around a shady street corner in Shanghai, as we are face-to-face with Mumbai’s problems the second we walk outside wherever we go.

Goa

Sarah, Tericke, Tony and I took another crazy cab ride the next morning to the Mumbai Domestic Airport for a two-night trip down to Goa, a city-state on the Arabian Sea in southwest India. Goa was settled by the Portuguese about 500 years ago and wasn’t ceded to India until 1961, so the area has a lot of European influence. Portuguese is still spoken by the older people in the state, and there are several historical Portuguese cathedrals and archaeological ruins near the capital, Panjim. The whole place reminds me a lot of the Caribbean, with shanties, bars and shops dotting the narrow, winding roads through the jungle, which is thick with palm trees and very green as a result of the monsoon season. We stayed at the Taj Holiday Village, a string of small, brightly colored cottages along a palm-covered green, overlooking the Arabian Sea and an ancient Portuguese fort called Aguada to the south. On Thursday we hired a car and driver to explore more of the area, and had lunch at an outstanding Mughul restaurant in Panjim (a gigantic meal for 4 cost us about $11). We toured some cathedrals and ruins and did some $2-T-shirt shopping back in Panjim, then went to Calangute Beach, just north of our hotel; it’s the monsoon season, so the beach was kind of depressing. Every place we visited in Goa, especially our resort, was very quiet as a result of the monsoons – I’d love to come back and visit during the tourist season, which we heard is pretty crazy. Thursday night we went out for another outstanding meal at a Goan restaurant on Calangute Beach and then had drinks at a bar on Baga Beach called Mambo’s. Goan food is a ridiculously delicious mix of Portuguese and Indian food, with lots of seafood and spicy sauces. Sarah and I feel like we’re eating ourselves stupid in this country, so it’s a good thing we’re leaving soon (unfortunately, we’re headed to Thailand, where the food is probably going to be equally outstanding).

Mumbai

After returning to Mumbai on Friday afternoon, we met up with Temple U’s next class of the IMBA program’s Mumbai cohort, where the guys and I shelled out advice about the program over more awesome Indian food and more Kingfisher beers. Sarah and I found out that night that there is a terror threat in Mumbai between now and when we leave on Monday, so we’ve unfortunately had to cancel our plans to see Elephanta Island and some of the more touristy parts of Mumbai, which is frustrating, but it will give us time to relax a little bit. Yesterday we checked out some more of Bandra and hung out with the guys at the J.W. Marriott, a lavish hotel on Juhu Beach, and today we’re at my friend Mukesh’s house for lunch with his family after seeing a Bollywood romance/comedy/action/sci-fi movie called “Krrish,” about an Indian superhero battling an evil genius and his computer, in a nutshell.
We’ll be in Cambodia on Tuesday through Thursday, Bangkok for a few more days, and then on Ko Samui with my cousin Chris next week, which should be a lot of fun, but I have no idea when I’ll be in front of a computer again. I’m going to add a ton of pictures to this posting asap (I’ve taken over 2,300 as of now), and hopefully I’ll be able to write one more entry before Sarah and I return home on August 25th.

Conquering Fuji-san

"...Mt. Fuji, which we've heard is no cakewalk..."

We found out the hard way that Fuji-san deals in neither "cake" nor "walks" - it was an all-out battle on Friday night/Saturday morning to get to the top by sunrise. I guess this is why it's called CLIMBING a mountain, as opposed to anything else...

Seven of us left directly from our afternoon class for the bus ride out to Kawaguchi-ko (at the base of Fuji) on Friday evening, armed with backpacks full of warm clothes, disgusting Japanese energy bars, dried mystery meats, rain gear and lots of water. Within the first hour of the climb, before the real climb even began, we were already down to our core of five remaining group members. To shorten a long, punishing story, which I don't particularly wish to relive unless the topic comes up in a job interview, we spent just under 6 hours climbing Fuji, reaching the summit's literally freezing temperatures about 20 minutes before sunrise at 4:30am. Despite the cold, we were extremely lucky with the weather, which was crystal clear with a brightly moonlit sky, negating the need for headlamps; the mountain tends to "create" its own weather, making predictions almost impossible, and since it is the rainy season, many climbers this time of year have to scale the mountain through pouring rain and hail, as some of my other classmates found out on Sunday night. Hitting the summit, guarded by a traditional torii, was quite emotional (lots of shivering, awkward fist-pumping and uncomfortable dude-hugs), and the sunrise was one of the most beautiful and rewarding things I've ever experienced. After spending a couple of hours hanging out in the hut at the summit and briefly exploring Fuji's volcanic crater, we began the 4-hour trudge to the bottom, which is the last thing you feel like doing after you climb a mountain all night long.

I bought a hiking stick at the beginning of the journey, and as we climbed the mountain, I got it branded at each of the huts along the way to the summit. Here it is, just before I got the final two brands at the summit hut; this thing is probably by far the most worthwhile souvenir purchase I will ever make.

So, that's my weekend/week so far in a nutshell - here are the rest of the pictures. Within a span of one 23 hour journey, I began and ended a successful mountain climbing career - I swore to Fuji-san himself that I'd never climb another mountain, and I plan on keeping that promise. I figure that I 'm better off retiring now, while I'm still batting 1.000.

I've spent the last couple of days writing papers, resting (I slept for over 14 hours on Sunday), and destroying my vocal chords at the karaoke bar with my classmates. Sarah's FINALLY coming in this afternoon, and we're taking the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe for a few days to visit one of Sarah's college buddies, which should be lots of fun.

Sensory Overload

I finally accomplished my aimless wandering mission last week – I spent 14 hours straight walking around the city on Saturday, which allowed me to take in most of the big neighborhoods in Tokyo, but I still have lots more to see. Here's a map of Tokyo, if you'd like to keep track - the green square in the middle is Akasaka, my neighborhood. I shot out of bed at around 5:30 on Saturday and headed straight out to Asakusa in the northeast corner of town to see Sensoji Kannon, a gigantic temple founded by fishermen in the 7th century. The compound housed a handful of smaller temples, buddhas, gardens and a five-storied pagoda which was pretty impressive. After that I took the subway down to Ginza, a famous shopping district in central Tokyo, but it was totally dead around 8:30am, so I walked from there through downtown Tokyo to the Imperial Gardens and Palace, where the imperial family of Japan is housed. The gardens make up Tokyo’s version of Central Park, with the entire city built around the circular moat surrounding the gardens. From there, I walked over to the National Diet Building, which houses Japan’s legislature, and then I went next door to see the Japanese Supreme Court building.

Walking around all morning made me thirsty, so I grabbed the first drink I could find in a 7-11 down the street: the enigmatic Pocari Sweat. “Pokkari” means “cloudlike” in Japanese, and “sweat” is not a Japanese word; it’s said that Coca-Cola used this name for its branding campaign in Japan because sweat signifies “diligence, effort and refreshingness” here (I don’t quite get the third point, but they’re Coke, and I’m unemployed). I tried it, and to my amazement, it was spectacular, kind of like eating sweet, overripe watermelon sprinkled with a tiny bit of salt, and I ended up drinking at least 2 liters of it by the end of the day.

After my Pocari Sweat break, I took another subway ride out to Shinjuku, a giant commercial and financial district on the northwest side of Tokyo, and stopped at the Taisoji Temple and the Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens on my way in from the east. The Taisoji Temple, founded in 1668, is famous for housing the city’s largest statue of Yama, the King of Hell, who was surprisingly intimidating for a big wooden guy. I then spent a couple of hours weaving my way through Shinjuku, which was another sensory-overload experience: tens of thousands of people and cars sharing the streets, 30-foot televisions on the sides of buildings at intersections barking about this shampoo or that car, thousands of 10-story buildings crammed to the top with lights and shops, and countless smells like fresh cantaloupe, car exhaust, grilled meats and fish, perfume stores and sewage hitting you from all sides. I wandered into the western side of Shinjuku to the skyscraper district and saw the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, which puts any city hall in the world to shame, and then worked my way southward to the Meiji Shrine Inner Gardens. Saturday was extremely hot and sunny, so I was overheated by the time I arrived at the entrance to the Meiji gardens, but upon setting foot through the massive gate, the temperature must have dropped at least 10 degrees, as the entire pathway through the garden was covered by a canopy forest. I could have easily spent the rest of the day there because it was so cool, dark and relaxing; I’m definitely going back as soon as I get a chance. The shrine to Emperor Meiji (of the Meiji Restoration of the late 1800’s, which began the process of Westernization in Japan) was relatively simple and quiet, consisting only of a walled-in square with a large entrance gate and one main building.

Next, I headed back to Harajuku, which could not be a more stark contrast to the serenity of the Meiji shrine and gardens. It was packed body-to-body with crazy teenagers, cross-dressers and girls running around in Little Bo Peep outfits – I’m not really sure what that was all about, but who am I to ask questions? I walked through Harajuku down to Omote-Sando, a district with lots of restaurants and high-end shopping similar to the Champs-Elysee in Paris, and then ended up in Shibuya, in the southwestern corner of Tokyo. Shibuya is similar to Shinjuku in that so much is hitting you at once from all directions; three giant TVs blaring super-fast music videos in Japanese and broken English, colorful lights from advertisements covering the exteriors of the buildings, and the craziest intersection I’ve ever seen in my life – it was made famous by a scene in the movie “Lost in Translation” in which Scarlett Johansson tries to cross an insanely crowded street in Tokyo. I stopped at this intersection and stood on a bench there for at least 30 minutes, marveling at the thousands of people crossing the intersection each time the stoplight changed. An estimated 1 million people cross the intersection every day; I think that this number easily must be tripled on weekends. My pictures and video don’t do the mob scene any justice, but they can hopefully give you an idea of the countless number of “heads” bobbing their way across the intersection.

After I grabbed some dinner and walked the rest of Shibuya, I met up with my classmates back in Akasaka, and around 20 of us traveled as a group back to Shinjuku to go bar hopping; unfortunately, because of the crowds in the subway and on the street, most of us were separated from the group, so I ended up coming home early and going to bed, which was a nice treat after my all-day walk through Tokyo.

On Sunday, I met up at Omote-Sando with my old high school friend and we walked through Harajuku and Shibuya again, until she had to leave to go climb Mt. Fuji, which I’ll be doing tomorrow night. Afterwards, I found some of my classmates and we had some great sashimi at a little hole in the wall on a hill in Shibuya. That night, we caught most of the Wimbledon final, and then stayed up for the World Cup final at 3am, which unfortunately did not end too well for our French classmates. At about 6am, running on almost no sleep, a group of eight of us took an early morning trek out to Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market, which is a tourist destination in itself. We had to fight our way through the place, as it was packed with vendors, trucks, carts and shoppers buzzing throughout the tiny walkways and driveways carved into the market’s 56 acres of space. We saw vendors slicing through 1000-pound tuna with band saws and sword-length knives, along with thousands of containers filled with anything that anyone ever thought of pulling out of the water and eating, including eel, octopus, crabs, snails, sea urchins, and mussels the size of my head – again, it was absolute sensory overload, and you can only imagine the smell... My friends and I enjoyed big bowls of raw tuna and salmon for breakfast after surviving the chaos of the market, easily our best meal of the trip so far.

Tuesday, after a trip to the Indian embassy to pick up visas for the Mumbai/Goa leg of the trek, my friends Tericke and Anthony and I visited the Yasukuni Shrine, which is dedicated to peace in Japan, along with the Yushukan Japanese War History Museum, which is housed on the same piece of land, ironically. The whole place was being outfitted with yellow lanterns in preparation for a holiday this weekend, but I haven’t been able to figure out exactly which holiday it is (we don’t have school on Monday or Tuesday, that’s all I know). That night, our teacher took the whole class to a baseball game at the Tokyo Dome to see the visiting Chiba Marines take on the Nippon-Ham Fighters. The dome was eerily silent between innings, and the stands were divided into cheering and non-cheering sections for each team, with the cheering sections only performing organized cheers and songs when their team was at bat (here's a good article explaining it). The fans of the team playing defense would all sit quietly, and only cheer if a big defensive play was made. It was really bizarre. They had what seemed like an army of beer girls with small kegs strapped to their backs, bowing to the crowd each time they hit the end of a row to serve the fans, and I was lucky enough to get on the jumbotron along with some rowdy teachers from Boston Public, although the crowd mostly just saw me shaking my American rear end like crazy.

A few of us left the game early to take a ride on Dome City’s Thunder Dolphin roller coaster, which was a lot more violent than any of us had bargained for, but it was a great ride. Afterwards, we snuck into the Tokyo Dome Hotel for a drink in the swanky lounge on the 43rd floor, and got an amazing view of the city at night; we then pulled a total about-face and ate disgustingly delicious fried shrimpburgers at an underground McDonalds for dinner (I can’t believe I’ve been to McDonalds TWICE since I’ve been here - I’m a horrible person).

Tokyo is surprisingly different from any other metropolitan city I’ve ever visited; even though there’s a lot of Western influence here, hardly anyone speaks English at all, credit cards are only accepted in a handful of the places that I’ve visited, and only two banks in the city, Citibank and HSBC, accept American ATM cards. I’ll never make fun of trigger-happy Japanese tourists with their cameras in the States again - I’ve taken over 700 pictures since I’ve been here.

I’ve been trying to knock out school work for the last two days, preparing for Sarah’s arrival on the 20th, and making the final bookings for the India-Thailand-Cambodia trip. Here are some the better pictures that I’ve taken around Tokyo, and I’m going to try to find a better way to post the rest of them soon. For now, though, I need to finalize the details of tomorrow night’s trip with about 10 classmates to Mt. Fuji, which we’ve heard is no cakewalk – I’ll have lots more to post around this time next week!

KONNICHIWA!!! (Good-Bye Cheesesteaks, Hello Rice Balls)

After the insanity that was the month of June, I’ve finally made it to Tokyo and recovered from jet lag enough to paint the town red, which is exactly what my buddies and I did last night until around 7 this morning. That’s another story, though…

My last month in Philly was kind of a nightmare with finals and preparing for the big trip. However, my whole family drove up from Florida to help me move out of the ‘hood after meeting Sarah’s family in Virginia, which Sarah and I think was a lot of fun for both the Corbins and the Burnses, and hopefully it can happen again soon. My Mom, Dad and Claire went whitewater rafting on the Nantahala River in North Carolina on their way home, but I have yet to see photographic proof of Therese Corbin on this alleged “raft,” navigating said “river.”

I got to relax with Sarah and her family in DC/VA for a few days, which is always nice (I sleep like a rock in their cold, quiet basement, it’s the best), and then stayed up all night, too excited for sleep, before I left at 4:30 a.m. to catch my plane from DC to Chicago to Tokyo on July 2. In order to burn off my adrenaline and pass the time that night before the trip, I blew through Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” which is all about the Latin Quarter in Paris where I lived and went nuts (and so did Hemingway, apparently); it only fired me up even more about getting the chance to go nuts all over Asia.

The 24-hour door-to-door trip was pretty much standard; bad airplane food and even worse movies, but I got a kick out of my neighbor on the flight from Chicago to Japan. He was an 18-year old Japanese kid named Elijah who had just finished his first year at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, so we swapped college stories for a few hours on the flight, with him telling me about southern food, dress codes, curfews, uniforms, and music listening options (classical only, NO jazz – I asked him 'What about the weather channel?' He looked confused...), while I merely skimmed the surface of my illustrious college career – I think his head might have exploded if I’d gone into too much detail. One of the very few things we could both relate to, however, is the universal truism that cornbread is delicious, regardless of one's national origin, race, color or creed.

When I arrived in Tokyo with five of my classmates who had joined me on the Chicago-Tokyo flight, we figured out how to find the bus into town and finally touched down in the Akasaka neighborhood of Minato-Ku, our new ward/borough, and trekked up the hill to our hotel, the “Weekly Mansion.” My roommate Will and I share one small room with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a nice little balcony that overlooks a construction site for what will eventually be another gigantic high-rise condominium. One interesting thing about the Weekly Mansion is that it is being occupied by a troupe of 6-foot Eastern European models, ranging in age from about 14 to 20 (of course they all look like they’re 25), so the guys in my MBA program are constantly picking their jaws up off the floor of the lobby, which has all of a sudden become the hot spot to hang out and have pre-game drinks, for some reason…

On my first night in Tokyo, I met up with most of my classmates and went out for sushi in our neighborhood, which easily has at least 500 restaurants, bars, karaoke clubs and 7-11s within a quarter-mile radius. I dined on octopus and raw scallop nigiri sushi - sorry Mom - which was amazing, and drank Asahi Super Dry beer, which is kind of a Japanese version of Heineken (and it’s very good). On our way home, I stopped into a giant, brightly and colorfully lit building with crazy music blaring inside and out – it was a pachinko parlor, and it was my first real taste of the sensory overload that is a huge part of just existing in Japan. Pachinko, from what I understand, is a game similar to playing a slot machine, but apparently it’s necessary to have hyper-fast music blasting in your ears and lights flashing in your face in order to concentrate on it. The place was jam-packed on a Monday night around 11 p.m., with a suited-up Japanese businessman glued to each of the hundreds of pachinko screens in the building.

So far, I’ve immensely enjoyed the food in Tokyo, and it’s relatively easy to find cheap food, despite the nightmare stories you read about the cost of living here. While there are plenty of places to eat very expensive meals, there are equally as many places to find good, inexpensive ones, and the 7-11 is where I eat around 75% of these surprisingly good meals. The 7-11 (pronounced “sey-boon-ee-ley-boon”) is an institution here, where you can find everything from packaged dress shirts to hundreds of DVD “films” (ahem) to Sake-in-a-Jar (Japanese Moonshine!!!) to complete Japanese-style lunches and dinners. I’ve been surviving mostly on buckwheat soba noodle sandwiches and rice balls, which are tennis ball-sized pyramids or discs of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed with some kind of fish salad, vegetable or fruit filling. I could, and I do, eat these things for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it’s always a crapshoot as to what you’re going to get in the middle, because the packages are neither written in English nor Romanji (the Roman alphabet), so sometimes you get stuck with something nasty like kelp or okaka, which is dried, smoked fish that I think has already been chewed as a courtesy. Canned iced coffee is also really big here, and it can be found about every 10 steps on any street in one of Tokyo’s estimated 5.6 million vending machines (one for every 20 people); they also spit out sodas, hot or cold green tea, beers, sake, miso soup, cigarettes, batteries, “Pocari Sweat” (I’m going to man up and try it one of these days), DVD “films,” and certified pre-worn, um, unmentionables. I absolutely love it here, but I can’t say it’s not a weird place with things that can make even Florida State grads like me blush from time to time. Vending machines also play a big role in lots of restaurants and noodle bars - instead of ordering from a waitress, you just pick out a picture of what you want to eat or drink on the machine, insert your money, push a button, and the machine will either spit out your beer or give you a ticket, which you give to the waitress who then serves you your food.

One of the funniest things about Tokyo is the terrible English that you find attached to products like food, booze and clothes (check out www.engrish.com). I’m starting to collect pictures of products with these weird quasi-English sayings attached to them, like this ice cream vending machine at school – I see this stuff all over the place. Another cool thing about Tokyo is that it is extremely clean and safe. There are hundreds of bicycles lining the sidewalks on the way to school, and I've only seen a handful with locks on them. You could practically eat off of the floor of the subway, and public toilets are always spotless.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Harajuku neighborhood on Wednesday, which is packed with thousands of weirdly-dressed teenagers, and ended up in a four-story 100-yen store (think of an American Dollar Store on steroids); the 7-11 has almost everything you could ever need, but the 100-yen store has anything that you could ever imagine anyone buying, whether needed or not. Wednesday night, some of the guys and I went out for sake and karaoke, which is always fun, especially with my German classmate Dominik screaming "Roxanne" and "Kung-Fu Fighting" at the top of his lungs.

So that brings me to last night. I headed out with seven of my classmates to a happy hour at a bar called Gas Panic in Roppongi, Tokyo’s red light district, and eight hours later, Will and I prevailed as the only survivors, eventually ending up at McDonalds well after sunrise scarfing down Egg McMuffins. In case you’re curious, they’re just as gross over here as they are in the States, maybe even more so, but they saved our lives from what would have been much more devastating futsukayoi (hangovers). After school today, a couple of us hit up a noodle bar near school and finished off the rest of our futsukayoi - in Japan, the rule about making loud slurping noises when eating noodles is that it's very polite, which I am going to miss very much when I return to the States.

I’m going to try to spend as much of this weekend as possible just wandering around some of the big tourist areas like Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza or Asakusa; our school schedule during the week is ridiculous, so I have to get in my obligatory aimless wandering time on the weekends. I’ll try to post some good stories for next week's entry; I have a high school friend coming into town from the Air Force base in Okinawa, so we’ll probably hang out Saturday night, and I’m trying to get my class together to climb Mt. Fuji sometime very soon, so please stay tuned. Sayonara!

P.S. - Due to computer issues, I'm going to have to wait until sometime next week to post all of my pictures - I'll get them up asap.

Pre-Tokyo Angst...

Well, I’m back after a long, tough spring semester in Philadelphia, and I CAN’T WAIT to get over to Tokyo for the summer. Here’s a summary of what’s happened this semester:

• First and foremost, Sarah and I are doing great – she has been working on Capitol Hill for a congressman and living with her family in Vienna, Virginia, and we’ve been taking turns traveling back and forth between Virginia and Philly almost every weekend this spring via the Chinatown Bus. She will be meeting me in Tokyo at the end of July and we’ll be traveling together for about a month through parts of China, India, Thailand and Cambodia. Yes, we are absolutely freaking out with excitement about this trip. Also, my family is coming to meet Sarah’s family in about a month, setting the stage for a possible “Meet the Fockers”-style debacle, but I’m sure it’s going to go really well.
• Afterwards, we’ve decided to move to Asia together as soon as we’ve found jobs over there, which is proving to be a huge, discouraging challenge so far, but we’re both working diligently to try to make it happen. Hong Kong is our first choice for location right now, but Shanghai, Bangkok and some other large Asian cities are on our collective radar as well. We’re also simultaneously looking for jobs in the States, just in case we can’t find anything overseas by the time we get back from the big trip.
• The flight home from Europe in December was a complete disaster, and as I now read my last blog entry, I should have realized that flying through five airports on my way home was a monumentally brainless idea. I ended up losing a suitcase for about 3 weeks (hello, new underwear!!!) and having to sleep at JFK for a night with 4,000ish Saudi Arabians who happened to be hanging out in the same terminal waiting for their early morning flight. Upon arrival in Florida, I had to borrow clothes to wear to my buddy’s wedding from three different people, none of whom are built remotely like me. However, I had a great time at the wedding, and I went on a cruise to Mexico with the entire Corbin clan shortly afterwards, which was an absolute blast.
• My roommates and I found a giant old house in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia, and we moved in just after classes began in January. The neighborhood is rough, but we’ve had a good time in our house, which is well over a century old, 3 stories tall and built over a barbershop; we threw a big Super Bowl party/barbecue (it was a first-time experience for lots of my classmates), and we have a rooftop terrace with a great view of the Philadelphia skyline and the Ben Franklin Bridge. Although we couldn’t get the Frenchmen to develop a taste for cheesesteaks or lite beer, they’ve become addicted to such American gourmet specialties as ramen noodles, Zatarain’s Cajun rice mixes, and 3-liter bottles of Big Fizz orange soda.
• This semester, we were joined by eight new classmates, all of whom spent last fall studying in Mumbai, India in a parallel “leg” of the IMBA program, and we’ve had a lot of fun getting to know them. However, our classes this semester have been awful – after getting used to the week-long, condensed semester system in Paris, a normal 4-month semester feels like an eternity, especially with lousy teachers, a tedious consulting practicum and repetitive presentations and projects.
• Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough to get away from Philly a lot since I’ve been here. On top of traveling to DC every week or two, Sarah and I went back to my hometown of Fort Walton Beach, Florida for another friend’s wedding in January, and I went on yet another cruise to Mexico with about 20 of my college buddies for Spring Break in March. While the details of that trip must remain entirely confidential, you can take a wild guess as to how much fun I had…
• On my way back to Philly after the cruise, I had a chance to stop into Tampa with my Aunt Veronica and Uncle Harry Costello for a night and see James Carville (“The Rajin’ Cajun”) and his wife Mary Matalin speak for a Hillsborough County Bar Association benefit dinner, which was one of the highlights of my spring semester, along with another trip I took down to Tampa in May for Aunt Roni’s 50th birthday party. More recently, Sarah and I rented a car and took a hellish drive through the rain and traffic from DC to Boston to meet her grandparents and some of her aunts, uncles and cousins, which (other than the disgusting weather) was a really nice time.
• After yet another destructive visit from my buddy Josh McCormill, Sarah and I flew out to Cincinnati for Memorial Day weekend to see my best friend Ryan Kirk (affectionately nicknamed after an expletive) and some of Sarah’s old friends, and had an awesome time singing karaoke, drinking liters of beer at the Hofbrauhaus, and blowing things up, as usual. I figure that if Sarah hasn’t dumped me yet after witnessing firsthand last weekend’s debauchery and chaos, then I’m doing pretty well.

At the moment, I’m finally finishing up last semester’s ridiculous consulting practicum, beginning a new summer semester, furiously hunting for jobs, and getting pumped up for the big trip to Japan on July 2nd. Here’s my itinerary:

• July 2: Depart Washington, DC and arrive in Tokyo; live and study in Tokyo for the month of July at Temple University Japan
• July 30: Fly out of Tokyo and arrive in Shanghai, China for corporate tours
• August 2: Leave Shanghai and arrive in Beijing, China for corporate tours and a possible trip to the Great Wall of China
• August 5: Fly out of Beijing and stop through Bangkok, Thailand for 24 hours on our way to India, where we’ll spend a few days on the beach in Goa and a few days in Mumbai partying with a couple of our Indian classmates
• August 14: Depart Mumbai and head back to Bangkok, Thailand; we’ll stay in Bangkok for a couple of days, then stop through Cambodia for a day or two before we trek down to hang out with my cousin Chris Corbin, who works at a beach resort on Ko Samui island
• August 24: Depart Bangkok and head back to DC and the REAL WORLD…

That’s all for now from Philadelphia – I’ll be in touch when I arrive in Tokyo!

Final Entry (until Tokyo...)

After a relaxing, guest-free week off from school, during which I pleasantly didn’t accomplish much at all, Sarah and I decided to take a weekend trip to Brussels, Belgium. We stayed at an awesome house outside the city where her family lived for four years while her father worked in Brussels for NATO, and took a tram into town the night that we got there to go sight-seeing and barhopping. Unfortunately, just before we walked into the center of Brussels, I was pickpocketed on the street (like father, like son!), and we ended up wasting an hour of our night at the police station while I furiously canceled my credit cards and banged my head against innocent walls. It could have been a lot worse, since the guy never accessed my cards and I didn’t have a whole lot of cash on me, but it was very frustrating - especially after I told one of the MasterCard telephone operators that I was pickpocketed in Belgium and she replied, “Belgium…that’s in Germany, right?” I was forced to say “No, Belgium is a country!” in front of the police officer who was helping me out with the problem, which drew some chuckles from the other cops in the room. Once we were done with the mess, we hightailed it to an ancient, three-story, debris-filled bar which served an unusual but delicious hazelnut-infused red wine cocktail; I downed several of them to forget about the wallet incident (it worked). Later, we moved on through the Grand Place, the old center of Brussels which is described in some travel guides as the “most beautiful place in Europe,” and hit some more crazy bars before we headed back toward the house at about 5 in the morning. The next day we got up and walked through Turvuren, your typical “sleepy” little Northern European town outside of Brussels and had a Kriek (cherry) beer and some French fries before we took the tram back into the city for the rest of the day. We checked out a bunch of interesting bars in Brussels, one of which had a “mortuary” theme – they served beers in mugs that looked like skulls on tables that were made of actual coffins. The walls were black, the lights were red neon, and it was extremely creepy, but fun. A famous statue called the Mannekin Pis was also nearby, along with Janneke Pis, Mannekin’s counterpart, and a statue of Charles-Everard de T’Serclaes, a scary-looking bronze guy that you have to rub in strategic places for good luck. Yes, Belgium is kind of weird, in case you were wondering. Brussels is a lively, rough place at night, but it’s a very old town with lots of beautiful medieval architecture, which creates a mixture of people and sights that are tough to describe, but very enjoyable (if you manage to hang on to your wallet). After eating some waffles – you can’t visit Belgium without eating at least one – Sarah and I headed back home to Paris on a night train through the countryside.
The next Monday when class started back up (a boring IT/e-Business class taught by the dean of our school), I finally made it to the Tennessee bar with my trumpet and got to play with the in-house band at a crowded basement jam session. I only got one tune in, “Killing Me Softly,” but it was really cool getting to play again. Later that week, my whole class got to go on a corporate tour of the Paris offices of Bloomberg Financial, which was pretty interesting. Afterwards, in accordance with the financial theme of the tour, we went back to Footsie, the stock market bar, and continued our usual destructive antics there…
The following weekend, I helped Sarah’s roommate throw her a surprise going-away/graduation party with a big group of her AUP friends at Vodka 31, the red velvet-covered Russian mafia bar, which was a great time, as always. Corporate Finance was on the course menu last week; the class was interesting, but the test (on a SATURDAY in January…) is going to be awful. I spent most of the week working on an interview/paper project for my Entrepreneurship class from a couple of weeks ago. We were instructed to interview an entrepreneur about his/her business ventures, mistakes, lifestyle, etc., and write a paper to sum it all up. As I was looking for someone to interview, Sarah put me in touch with a family friend of hers named Chuck Samiotes, who has run a few businesses in Boston and almost got to play for the Greek Olympic baseball team. I ended up interviewing him for the project and learning about his businesses, Greek/American heritage and its effect on the entrepreneurial spirit, and some of his new projects, and turned a potentially dull assignment into something I really enjoyed.
After attending an end-of-the-year party on Friday at school, I stumbled over to the Sarahs’ place to help them pack up their apartment and move all of their stuff out (always a pleasure…). Last night, a big group of my classmates and I headed to Nos Ancetres les Gaulois, a crazy restaurant on an island in the Seine where they serve you a five-course meal in what looks like a giant barn with walls covered in steel weapons and dead animals’ heads and skins. They first brought out a huge basket full of big, raw vegetables, most of which was played with and/or thrown to opposite ends of the table, then we all dug into a weird antipasto/sausage buffet, then some grilled meat kebabs for the main course. After that, along with all-you-can-drink wine served in barrels placed throughout the restaurant, we got a basket of fruit and a plate full of stinky cheese, some really good desserts, and a rambunctious serenade from a sketchy guy with a guitar. I’d definitely recommend this place to anyone traveling through Paris anytime soon.
Bright and early this morning (ouch!), Sarah and I hauled all of her luggage to the airport to get her on her flight back to the States, and I’ve been studying for a test for most of the rest of today. Unfortunately, the remainder of my time here probably isn’t going to be very enjoyable, exciting or newsworthy; I have a test Monday afternoon, a really tough information modeling class on Monday and Tuesday, and I still have to pack up and get out of here by early Wednesday morning. Wednesday is going to be ridiculous, as I’m traveling through FIVE AIRPORTS to get to Tampa in time for my buddy Nick’s wedding on Thursday afternoon. It’ll be a miracle if I’m still standing by the end of the reception (because of the jet lag, of course…).
After that, the whole family is taking a cruise to Mexico from Tampa, and then I’m getting sworn into the Florida Bar at a reception at the Tampa Yacht Club on the 29th. I regrettably shaved off my latest prized possession about a week ago, so I guess I’ll be forced to look decent for the ceremony…
When I get to Philadelphia, I’ll be living in a house with two of my French buddies from class, so that ought to be a lot of fun – I feel like an American cultural ambassador whose mission is to teach them significant, daily lessons about Busch Light’s delicate beauty, mastery of the Art of Kegstanding, and the societal importance of 24-hour Cheesesteak joints.
It’s been a lot of fun writing this blog, and I’m really glad to hear that so many people have enjoyed it – thanks for reading! I’ll be continuing when I get to Japan, so please stay tuned for more shenanigans in July…

The Visitors, Pt. II

Just as my family was on their way out of Paris, my buddy Josh McCormill was on his way in from Florida to hang out for the long Thanksgiving weekend. My liver is still not on speaking terms with me…
The night he came in, we met up with Sarah and her friends at AUP for Happy Hour at their on-campus bar (I’ve said it before, this school is ridiculous), then hung out at O’Briens, where Josh and I presided over the European Mensa Convention. (I’m only describing the night portions of Josh’s visit, because during the daytime I was always out of it/writing papers/studying for two disgusting tests that I had on Monday and Wednesday, so it’s likely that nothing interesting happened anyway). That said, the next night after we had dinner with my family, Josh, Sarah and I met up with some of her friends at a weird European/American house party, then after getting yelled at by the neighbors in the building, we all headed to a cool British joint down called the Long Hop. When that place got old, we headed up into the Latin Quarter to a place called Hurling Pub - a fitting name for a friend of a friend of Sarah’s who joined us.
After we were all kicked out at 2am, which is semi-standard bar closing time around Paris, I introduced Josh to the most immaculate of all the late-night cuisine Paris has to offer: the Greek Sandwich. You begin with a gigantic meat cone (I think it’s chicken, but I have utterly no clue what delicious animal it’s made of), shave off chunks of it into a greasy pan with a tool that looks like hair clippers, then throw it into a piece of bread with lettuce, tomatoes and sketchy yogurt sauce, cover it in salty French fries, and twist it into a paper cone. They are actually scientifically proven to save lives when eaten after a long night of drinking - Josh and I have Bachelors of Science degrees, therefore we are scientists. Hence, eating Greek Sandwiches and not being as hungover the next morning is scientific proof that they’re amazing. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
The next day, after our swift recovery, Josh and I made fun of awful French TV and checked out Montmartre hill (yeah, I’m getting tired of that place) then met up at Sarah’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, planned by her great roommate, who is also named Sarah, which makes life easier for me whenever I hang out over there. We had a big crowd and a ton of food, including Tofurkey (“turkey” patties for the vegetarians made of soybeans and a dash of sand, I guess – actually they weren’t half bad) and my rendition of Mom’s famous sweet potato casserole, which contains more butter, sugar and marshmallows by weight than it does actual sweet potatoes.
After dinner, we headed to a karaoke bar nearby and after drinking what’s called a “Giraffe” of beer, Josh and I belted out R. Kelly’s “Ignition” and “YMCA,” which was probably a mistake, as karaoke usually tends to be. I spent Sunday studying while Josh hit the town again, and I had an Accounting test on Monday, so I was forced to go out afterwards; we met up with my classmates Will and Ashish at the Frog and Princess for yet another European Mensa Convention. Somehow, despite a fruitless 2am search for Greek Sandwiches that night after closing down the bar, we managed to wake up and get Josh out to the train station in time for him to get to CDG to catch his plane.
I had an absolutely horrible Finance test yesterday, then Sarah and I joined most of my class on the Bateaux Mouches afterwards, which is a big, flat boat that cruises up and down the Seine River with obnoxious loudspeakers talking about the sights in 10 different languages. We then ate dinner at an awesome North African/Mediterranean place called Seventh Sud and spent the rest of the night hanging out with Ashish, Will and Anthony the Stripping Hippie from class.
So that’s about it – I can’t believe it’s December; I’m already starting to get depressed about leaving this place. I’ve been here for less than three months, but I feel very at home, despite the language barrier and some of the little cultural differences that I have to put up with every now and then. School has been incredibly busy for the last few weeks, although our MBA Happy Hours are still going strong – here we are teaching our Iraqi classmate Armand how to drink Irish Car Bombs. The Americans have challenged the rest of the class to a bowling match in the near future, so that should be interesting. Ok, I’ve been recycling clothes a little too much lately (hey, as long as it’s not underwear, who cares?), so I’m going to hit the laundromat.

The Visitors, Pt. I

(Please check out the new pictures I’ve posted on the right side of the page)

Here's Dad after only three hours in Paris.
I guess some things never change...

I’ve been freezing my butt off a lot lately, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as cold in my entire life as I was last Sunday. I waited outside at a metro stop all morning in the sub-freezing temperature for my parents and Claire to arrive after they flew in last week to visit for Thanksgiving (boo-hoo, I know, but I’m a FLORIDIAN and my weird Euro-shoes don’t handle the cold very well…). When I finally heard from them around lunchtime, I found out that they, too, had frozen their own butts off after walking across practically the entire left bank looking for their hotel because my Dad didn’t print out the obsessively detailed directions I sent him before they all left the States.
Anyway, once everyone was done crabbing at each other, we regrouped and went up to Montmartre hill to see the Sacre-Coeur and check out the view of Paris, fueled by frequent stops for Chocolat Chaud (hot chocolate) for Mom and Claire, of course. Claire and I got sketches of ourselves in the artists’ district on the way down the hill, then we all met up for dinner later that night. I had a crazy Entrepreneurship class last week and a ton of schoolwork to do, so I unfortunately didn’t get to hang out with the family very much, but I got to hear the stories of their antics at dinner every night, which they’re much better at describing than I am. From what I got out of it, though, my Dad and turnstiles don’t get along very well, and my Mom and Claire will from now on refer to him as "Barney Fife" whenever we all travel together…
That said, the next day I ditched school and we all took the Eurostar train through the Chunnel to London, after waiting for a strike to end which forced us to sit on the tracks in the Parisian railyards for about 3 hours before we even began moving. By the time we got there, we had to move quickly because we were coming back to Paris the same evening, so we took a hop-on, hop-off bus tour of the city and got a glimpse of some of the big tourist attractions like the Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, Picadilly Circus, Big Ben and Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace. True to form for Mom and Claire, we spent more time in Harrod’s (a gigantic department store) than anywhere else in the city, but we had a very good time, despite the rushed day. Claire and I chowed on Fish and Chips for lunch while Mom and Dad had Bangers and Mash – I don’t care what anyone says – British food is awesome if you put enough salt on it. Then, I taught Claire how to destroy Belgian beers on the trip back to Paris that night. Hey, she’s gotta learn sometime!!!
The next morning while I was in class, my Dad got pickpocketed on the metro, so the family spent most of the rest of that day cleaning up the mess with the police. My Dad broke his leg a while back, so he’s still in a cast, making him an easy target (all Barney Fife references aside). I wasn’t there, but I’m confident that he beat the living crap out of whoever touched him, but I guess they somehow got away…
For my parents’ last night in Paris, we all had a great dinner at a place called Tribeca with Sarah and my buddy Josh (see Pt. II), then hiked over to the Eiffel Tower to get some pictures. The next morning, as I miraculously got my parents to the airport on time, it began snowing heavily; they ended up sitting on the runway for 5 hours while the plane was de-iced and/or stuck in line, so they sat on the plane for a total of about 15 hours for the ride home. All in all, their trip home took something like 30 hours door-to-door, so as I was sad to see them go, I’m pretty happy I missed that particular family excursion across the Atlantic.

Procrastination...

I'm stuck inside studying tonight while the rest of Paris goes ballistic...

It's the third Thursday of November, which means it's time for the French to celebrate what I guess is their version of Thanksgiving, called Beaujolais Nouveau time. Tonight, the entire country consumes mass quantities of the newest harvest of Beaujolais wine, which is sold for practically nothing all over France because, according to my French classmates, "eet ees sheet, Briahn." Unfortunately, I have a nasty 2 1/2-hour Strategic Management exam tomorrow about Dell Computers that I can't blow off, so I'm trapped inside trying to prepare.

Not much has happened in the last couple of weeks, just a lot of school work, as usual. The rioting situation this month has stayed in the suburbs and never boiled over into central Paris, so I've lucked out so far with that. From what I read and hear on the news, it seems like guerrilla-style violence and vandalism, rather than massive groups of people taking over towns. I saw that 9000 cars have been burned and 3000 arrests have been made in total, and it's all still going on, despite the lack of coverage in the press.

The Saturday class last week was horrible; school on Saturday is generally bad enough, but swimming in financial statements all day long with a South African professor with a mathematics background is just unreasonable. He was a nice guy, but his test in two weeks is going to be disgusting. I didn't end up doing very much this past weekend, just hung around Paris with Sarah and Liz, and we had a going-away party for Liz on Monday night at the Tennessee bar. We watched "History of Violence" with Viggo Mortensen (I'm not sure if it ever came out in the States, but it was really good) and "Lost in Translation," which I absolutely loved. After seeing it, I have a feeling that the Japanese leg of the trip is going to be about 10 times as blog-worthy as the Parisian leg, so please stay tuned this summer. The karaoke bar stories alone will be enough to write a book...

My work group at school this week consists of an American guy, two Frenchmen, and a guy from Singapore, so it's been another interesting mix of accents, misunderstandings and annoyance, but I'm still really enjoying the program. The few grades I've received so far have been very good, so I'm hoping to keep them up, despite my absolute idiocy when it comes to anything number-related. I'm still working on job stuff, and the search is now starting to lead me down all kinds of paths I'd never even heard of before I came here, such as corporate sustainability management and the outsourcing of legal work to India, which may require American managers and is apparently becoming important these days for American law firms. As always, I'm still open for suggestions!

And that is about all I have until next time - on Sunday my Mom, Dad and sister Claire are coming over for a week, which I'm really excited about, and my old FSU buddy Josh McCormill will be visiting a couple of days later. Based on past experience, I'm confident that I'll absolutely regret inviting him to Paris, because we tend to act like a couple of real geniuses when we get together...

"AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!"

- Timothy W. Shaw

Following a tough couple of days recovering from near intestinal apocalypse, I bounced back and had a great time last weekend celebrating Halloween – please see the link to the new pictures on the right. I had been growing a beard for about 3 weeks prior (my girlfriend Sarah digs beards, which means that I get 10 extra minutes of sleep every morning – score!), so I needed a good costume to go with it. After considering dressing up as Paul Bunyan, a bearded lady, and an incarcerated Saddam Hussein, I rented a wonderfully crappy Pirate/Captain Hook costume that I found in a shop on the Right Bank. We had our school Halloween party on Thursday after class, which turned out to be surprisingly fun, even though it only consisted of our classmates and our program director going ballistic in the classroom where we spend all day every weekday. Everyone brought food or booze, and I cooked Jambalaya, although it didn’t turn out too well because I can’t figure out what anything is in the grocery store, especially spices (everything has curry in it, even the Cajun/Creole stuff). For the size of the group, we had a huge amount of alcohol, including some leftover cases of Sam Adams and Sam Adams Light which were donated along with some t-shirts by the Boston Brewing Company after they found out we were doing a case study on their marketing strategy. The French guys are all freaked out by light beer; you can’t find it over here, and they’re shocked that it’s so popular in America. “What eez zee point?!” they asked when we had an in-class taste test with Kronenbourg, Sam Adams and Sam Adams Light a couple of weeks ago. “Eet ees no good...I drink wine instead.” Anyway, we had music, decorations, and lots of hilarious costumes at the party that night; I unfortunately lost the costume/dance-off contest to a member of the Jackson 5 and a lap-dancing hippie. To add insult to injury, I split my rented pants right down the middle while dancing in a kickline to “New York, New York” on top of the desks at the end of the night. After there was nothing left to drink, everyone got out of their costumes, except for me, and we headed back to Birdland, where I learned that running around in a bar in a pirate costume when no one else is dressed up is pretty cool.

On Friday after our class full of collective groans, headaches and frequent trips to the restrooms, I did my best to sew up my rental trousers and headed out to the AUP Halloween party with Sarah and a bunch of her friends. It was a mess, of course, in the best possible way; apparently Halloween for most students at AUP equals a chance to dress up in very small, scandalous clothing, which I support whole-heartedly. Our group had some great costumes, including Sarah as a “sexy cop,” her friend Liz as a Playboy bunny, her roommate Sarah as a 1920’s flapper, and their friend Anna as Courtney Love, which we all got a huge kick out of, especially because she ended up incoherent at the end of the night, true to form. I lost yet another costume contest, though, this time to a sexy garden gnome (dammit!) but the party was a blast. I think I could have beaten her if I’d had some Bowlegs gear...

After recovering on Saturday and returning my costume, I went to the Champ de Mars (a huge park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower) and had a wine-and-extraordinarily-stinky-cheese picnic with Sarah and some friends on Sunday, which was fun until we got rained on. The weather here is tricky – since I’ve been here the temperature has been surprisingly nice, but rain seems to come out of nowhere all of the time. The same thing happened when I made the 45-minute, 3 a.m. walking trek home after I went out with some buddies from class on Monday night to Port d’Amsterdam, an insane Dutch bar where they compulsively feed you free Jaegermeister Bombs, which are only a good idea when free, and even when they’re free they’re a horrible idea.

We had this week off of class and Sarah was swamped with midterms, so I got some work done and had a chance to head out to the palace at Versailles for the day on Wednesday with Liz and Will and Anthony the “Stripping Hippie” from class. We toured the palace and made fun of all the creepy stuff that more than likely happened in each room of the joint, then rented a talking golf cart to tour the gardens, which was fun, and I ended up getting soaked yet again. Renting golf carts to Americans at a French national landmark is an awful idea, but the carts were extremely slow and actually stopped working and told us to turn around if we drove too far off course, so our hopes of getting airborne or putting our cart into a lake were dashed pretty early on. On Thursday night, Sarah and I went to the top of the Tour Montparnasse, or the Tower of Shadiness (no reason why, it was just a really weird place), and got some great views of Paris and its suburbs.

I’ve spent most of my week off working on a group project for Business Economics about a Brazilian beer conglomerate and a surprisingly tough assignment for Temple University’s graduate career services office. The career services office asked us to write a minimum 5-page paper about some personality test results, possible job options and a detailed roadmap of how we’re going to get into these careers. Since I still have no idea what I want to do, I’m having a very hard time getting this thing done, and it’s due on Sunday night. All I know right now is that I'd like to combine my law and business degrees as productively as possible, I’d like to work abroad (although it’s not a must), and I’m still terrible at math. In the past few days of digging, I’ve come up with a few possible job options, although the scope of my search is still far too broad: in-house counsel for a multinational corporation or international business-related non-governmental organization; management of a law firm with offices abroad and working with foreign attorneys on international transactions and mergers; Sarbanes-Oxley-related regulatory compliance for a US corporation or a foreign corporation doing business in the US; and working for the US, EU, or UN governing bodies on economic policy, free trade or international legal issues. The tough part is that most of these types of jobs require years of experience in some related work. Now comes my absolutely shameless plea for some help: I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life! If anyone who reads this blog has ANY suggestions or comments whatsoever related to some fields, jobs or organizations I should possibly look into, your advice would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure I’ll be freaking out more about this later, but this week's assignment is the big wake-up call to tell me that I won’t be back in school this time next year...

In the meantime, I have to get back to work, as I just found out that our school is having a mandatory Intro to Finance class all day on SATURDAY! Commies...