food and travel (again)

I was booking a reservation this morning and realized that I'm currently holding OpenTable reservations in four cities over the next two weeks: 4/27 in San Francisco, 5/3 in New Orleans, 5/6 in Chicago, and 5/8 in New York. If there's anyone doing data analysis over there they must think I'm an awfully strange use case.

food and travel

I started my trip home on Saturday morning at noon, Argentina time. I finally arrived at my house around noon on Sunday morning, California time. Factoring in the four-hour time zone difference, I travelled for a total of nearly 28 hours, passed through 5 airports, took 3 flight segments, and ate 3 airplane meals, before getting home. Somehow when I plan trips I always manage to blank out the actual travelling part.

Anyway, somewhere on the third leg of the journey, while eating yet another blandly awful airplane meal, I had a discussion with my friends about what we wanted to eat when we got home. Among the suggestions: dim sum, pho, ramen, sushi, and burritos. It's funny what a bunch of Californians consider comfort food. I ended up at Hotaru, where I ate nigiri, wakame, soba, udon, and chicken karaage over rice. Yes, all of the above.

(Argentina travel notes to follow.)

language proficiency

I'm leaving Saturday for a trip to Argentina with some friends. We've been corresponding a bit with various hostel owners and tour operators, and have been a bit frustrated with the poor English that we've been encountering. It generally takes several back-and-forth emails to get any questions answered, and given that email response time is usually at least 24 hours (if not several days), it's been taking forever to get our plans finalized.

After spending a lot of time parsing a particularly cryptic email, in which the syntax barely resembled English, and several words were outright Spanish, I started to wonder what I'd sounded like when I was chatting with the French tourists in Vietnam last week. I've basically forgotten any tense except the present tense, and my vocabulary was never very good to begin with, so I describe lots of things in roundabout ways; I'll say "the meal we eat later" instead of "lunch" if I've forgotten "dejeuner", etc. I guess I should be grateful that they all humored me and continued to converse with me. In fact, several of them were quite pleased that I attempted any French at all.

Must remember to have patience with people's English next week.

sticky situation

Excerpt from a pretty heavy chat I had with a friend a couple of days ago (transcribing from memory, so exact wording is probably off):

him:	[SO] and I are expecting
me:	for real? holy crap
me:	um
him:	yes?
me:	am i supposed to console or congratulate you?
me:	need a hint here :)
him:	haha
him:	congratulate
him:	few months ago i would have said console
me:	congrats! super exciting!
him:	it was very unexpected
me:	i'm glad you're cool w/ it
him:	yeah i wasn't at first

After some discussion about why various attempts to explore termination options never panned out...

him:	i mean, i'm a big believer in the right to choose and all, but...
me:	well, believing that you shouldn't tell other people what to do is not the same thing as thinking that you should do something yourself

...which made me wonder what I would have done, myself.

I'm vaguely horrified by the idea of having a child, but am also kind of squeamish about the idea of actually terminating a pregnancy. I mean, I'm not afraid of doctors, and I'm perfectly fine being stuck full of needles, but it seems a much more invasive procedure than that.

On the other hand, I've heard some pretty bad things about being pregnant and about childbirth. No sushi and no alcohol aside, there's the possibility of debilitating morning sickness (worst I heard was someone who puked 2-3 times a day for 5 months), gestational diabetes (sometimes resulting in permanent diabetes), maybe having to be on bedrest for months, labor itself (my aunt was in labor for over 48 hours!), the possibility of a c-section, postpartum depression, other postnatal complications (surgical and otherwise)...you get the picture.

Disregarding pregnancy itself, there's the whole 18 or 21 or whatever number of years of taking care of the kid. I mean, is it acceptable to leave your child for a week because "Mommy wants to go to the Zurich office to work with the Swiss engineers for awhile"? What if my kid falls asleep in school and tells her teacher that she couldn't sleep because her parents were having a Starcraft LAN party last night? Am I guilty of neglect? Being a bad parent? What if I want to take a week-long trip to hike Machu Picchu? Learn to scuba dive in Belize? Ski the Alps again?

I think to be happy about having a child, I'd need to be convinced that his/her existence wouldn't significantly degrade my quality of life. When I send out an invite for a fabulous weekend bachelorette party in New Orleans, and someone responds, "Sorry, have to stay home with the baby", it makes me not want kids. I want to see more examples of parents who still do lots of interesting and exciting things.

I guess I can come up with a couple off the top of my head...

When I was in Vietnam last week, I met a girl my age who is a middle-school teacher in a suburb of Chicago. She was in Vietnam interviewing to teach at the American school, and was seriously considering the possibility of relocating to Vietnam. She is not of Vietnamese ethnicity, she doesn't speak Vietnamese; she just thinks it would be a great experience to teach for awhile in a foreign country with a totally different culture. And, she's single, with a five-year-old daughter.

One of my basketball teammates is an M.D./Ph.D. (I think in hematology or oncology?) who used to work at Stanford and recently joined a startup. She makes it to nearly every one of our basketball games and practices; she's our resident 3-point specialist. She also has two small children under five, and manages to get home to make them dinner every night. Awesome.

Unfortunately, two examples are not enough. Show me more, people!

Back to the question. What would I have done? I honestly have no idea.

(People like me are probably why most developed countries have declining birthrates.)

the caffeine bug

Speaking of unforeseen consequences...

A couple of weeks ago, while sitting on an airplane bound for Siem Reap, I started to feel lightheaded. I also discovered my hands were shaking, and began to worry that I was coming down with some crazy tropical disease. I had a bad fifteen minutes of it, until I realized it was probably from the three cups of delicious (and apparently very strong) coffee that I had had with breakfast.

As an aside, the coffee in both Cambodia and Vietnam was excellent. Must be from having been occupied by the French.

unforeseen consequences

I just had a really interesting lunchtime conversation with a friend. The topic du jour was the recent Olympic torch protests.

I've been mildly in favor of the protests, just because I think that it's good to get some visibility for the issues that are being raised (Tibet, human rights, Darfur). A Taiwanese friend even raised the possibility of going up there today with a "Taiwanese-Americans support Tibet" sign, and although I didn't go, it was mostly because of a busy work schedule, combined with laziness, rather than any objection to the idea.

However, my friend, who is from China, pointed out that one of the side effects of the protests has been to push the average Chinese person towards greater nationalism. She herself is definitely not a rabid nationalist (I'll vouch for that, having had multiple rational conversations with her about Taiwan) and she said that upon reading about the protests, she felt herself becoming defensive, wondering why the Western media was determined to make China look bad.

I think this is a really unfortunate consequence. The protesters' goal is to give the Chinese people greater human rights, but instead they are being perceived as attacking the Chinese people. One could argue that the protests are aimed at the Chinese government, not the people, but that's a pretty tricky distinction to make, especially through the media lens. If we're not careful, we could wind up with a billion nationalistic Chinese people who are angry at the West, and I'm pretty sure that's not what we (the global community) want.

When I travel, I hear lots of anti-American sentiment, and I don't typically react defensively (especially as I myself often criticize our government), but on occasion I'll be annoyed by some derogatory comment about how "America" has done yet another stupid thing. Chinese culture places a much greater emphasis on not "losing face" and the Chinese people have really been looking forward to hosting these Olympics, so I can understand why they would feel hurt, to some degree.

I guess the moral of the story is to think really hard about the consequences of your actions, because things may not turn out at all like you had expected or wanted.

taiwan election results

I'm bummed about the results, of course, but am also carefully observing new President-elect Ma's next steps.

I'm annoyed/worried about:
- his emotional tribute to Chiang Kai-shek on the anniversary of Chiang's death
- his plan to use the (ridiculous) name "Chinese Taipei" to apply to international organizations, and especially his statement that the DPP approach of using the name "Taiwan" is a "total embarrassment"

I'm psyched about:
- his mentioning the possibility of boycotting the Beijing Olympics (as an aside, props to protesters in Paris and London!)

I'm undecided about:
- his pledge to launch regular weekend charter flights to China by July

This is me being reasonable and practical. I also have bouts of cynicism when I just resign myself to concluding the country is going to go all to hell over the next four years. Sigh.

unpacking and packing

I spent the last two weeks on vacation in Southeast Asia (Cambodia & Vietnam) and got back into town Sunday in time to meet up with some friends for dinner. I'll be in town for six days and then am headed to Argentina for another week, so I'm basically packing and unpacking at the same time. Feels a little odd.

The trip was awesome; I found Angkor Wat lived up to the hype, had a great time in the Mekong Delta seeing the rural Vietnamese villages, took a billion photos of Halong Bay, and of course, ate lots and lots of yummy local food. I ended up taking almost 2000 photos, so I probably won't have time to sort through them for a couple of weeks yet. Many more details to come.