You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

My mother recently got back from a trip to Korea and China. I believe there was a class reunion of sorts in there, somewhere around Beijing I think. I kinda wish I could have gone, seeing as how I probably won't be going much of anywhere abroad this year, but school did not allow. More than anything I'm feeling more than a bit jealous of the many people who are abroad or going abroad this year. I realize I went last year and all, but, yeah. I guess if I had it my way I'd want to travel somewhere pretty much every year, but the problem with this is that it costs a fair amount of cash, which I don't currently have, and probably won't have for quite a while.

In related news, I am entirely broke right now. Maybe I should begin looking into other forms of income besides tutoring; the pay is good but the hours aren't so many. This reminds me of an article I read about people who hire poor Chinese kids and adults to monitor Lineage II bots while they bot for gold and rare items. He pays them shit as compared to what he makes, but what he pays them is still pretty good considering what they would probably do otherwise. From there I found the IGE homepage which buys up the gold from whatever and resells it to people. I don't know exactly how I feel about the fact that people have turned it into a business, but I'm not really in a position to say much about it at all I guess.

I once sold zeny and other such items on Ragnarok Online for a period of a few months. That having been said, the profit from doing that kind of thing is kinda ridiculous so this progression to hiring people to monitor the bots is not too surprising. It kinda makes me want to pick up doing so again, but.., I think I'd feel bad about it.

I'm sure people have noticed, it is quite hot lately. It's been getting to 100+ these past few days and the AC in the house is currently dead. Needless to say, it's been a miserable few days. Supposedly, some guy is coming tomorrow to fix or replace our AC depending on whether it is worth fixing, so hopefully the AC will be operational before the day gets to be too unbearable. Oh how I hate the heat. The recent days have reminded me of my trip last year. Granted the lack of humidity here allows for the possibility of going outside and not coming back in totally drenched in sweat, but all the same it's still pretty damn miserable. At the very least there were typhoons going on while I was in Japan (they seemed to follow me around), so half the time it was fairly overcast and breezy. Here, the only respite from the heat is being in a building with the air conditioning turned so cold that plants around the building are actually DYING as the excessive power usage destroys the enviroment.

Which reminds me, my brother is currently living in some new dormitories that were recently built as part of a summer camp. In a conversation we had when he called me, he told me that the building was suffering a brownout in similar heat. I laughed at him.

Speaking of typhoons and such though, here's a random memory of Japan. I think it was the same day Sean and I went to a World War II memorial. We were having some trouble finding the second train station in Shinjuku that would take us to the subway that would take us to the next station that would blah blah blah. The typhoons had been acting up the past week, and it had actually rained pretty hard just that morning, and I had no umbrella. So.., while getting frustrated with the fact that we were having trouble finding a freaking TRAIN STATION, it was becoming more sprinkly outside. Sean broke down and bought a nice umbrella that looked classy in some shop for 1300yen earlier that morning, so he was having no issue with the rain. I still needed some protection, so we ducked under an overpass for a moment to figure out where we needed to go.

As it turned out, the wall of this underpass was lined with umbrellas and price tags taped to the wall. It also had a long-ish cardboard box which contained a bum who was sleeping at the time. Being that there was a perfectly adequate umbrella sitting there with a tag of 100yen, I really wanted to buy it, but the "proprietor" was sleeping. In the end I ended up dropping off a 100yen coin on his box and walked away with the umbrella: an umbrella which once was as white as snow, but after years of abuse ended up looking mostly white. Sean and I dubbed it my hobo-umbrella, and Sean forecasted I would contract venereal diseases from it.

The umbrella ended up serving me pretty well, and I used it all the way up until I finally left Japan. I had originally intended to take it with me to Taiwan, and eventually home, but I forgot it in my uncle's restaurant. Probably for the better, since an umbrella is a kind of bulky thing to pack. All the same, I kinda miss my hobo umbrella and I wonder whether my family has held on to it. Perhaps it has been passed on and now lies underneath an overpass next to a waiting hobo for another young gaijin like myself to come and pick it up.

The pic for today is one I took in the airport while waiting to get on a plane to..., Tokyo I think. I remember that Sean was not with me while I was taking the pictures, so it must have been the first flight I took to Tokyo before the final flight to San Jose.

# posted by Yann : 02:25