i miss having a tv in my room

"Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships for Twitter, said sites like Twitter let people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation. 

'In the future, I can't imagine a major event where the audience doesn't become part of the story itself,' Ms. Sladden said."

- "Water-Cooler Effect: Internet Can Be TV's Friend" (NYTimes)

But wait. Isn't that the whole idea behind shows like American Idol?

bucket list

1. Sri Lanka

2. Patagonia Wine Country

3. Seoul

4. Mysore

5. Copenhagen

6. Koh Kood

7. Damascus

8. Cesme

9. Antarctica

10. Leipzig

11. Los Angeles

12. Shanghai

13. Mumbai

14. Minorca

15. Costa Rica

16. Marrakesh

17. Las Vegas

18. Bahia

19. Istanbul

20. Shenzhen

21. Macedonia

22. South Africa

23. Breckenridge

24. Montenegro

25. Vancouver Island

26. Colombia

27. Kitzbühel

28. Norway

29. Gargano

30. Kuala Lumpur

31. Nepal

- "The 31 Places to Go in 2010" (NYTimes)

l'enfer, c'est les autres

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose."

- J. D. Salinger

je veux ton amour

My favorite from Google's "Search On" campaign.

creating sensation

"When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships."

- Andy Warhol

Frozen yogurt, headbands, and "spotted" texts -- is fine art the next trend to spread from Gossip Girl?

pseudo-intellectualism in a post-racial society

"I would rather have someone go through my medicine cabinet than my bookshelf. You can go to rehab for your Vicodin problem. You can't go to rehab for liking Dan Brown."

- Christian Lander, "Stuff White People Like" @ Duke

trigger happy

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

- "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay Close to Focus" (NYTimes)

My biggest pet peeve: loud tour groups that crowd museums. That, and people who stand on the left on escalators. Don't even get me started.

The great thing about living in DC is that I don't feel the pressure to go through a (free!) Smithsonian in one visit. Realistically, based on my museum-going habits, I know that I will probably never actually make it back for a second visit or spend more than two hours in one museum at a time, but it's a nice thing to tell myself.

Whenever I bring my camera somewhere, though, I'm always torn between wanting to "capture" a moment, that I'll be able to look back on forever, or "experience" a moment, that I'll hopefully be able to remember forever. To me, art is about emotions and photos about feelings; they serve to frame both a moment and a mindset. But so often I find myself becoming guilty of simply being trigger happy, of living life behind the lens rather than in front of it, of collecting frames rather than experiencing moments, and of taking photos whose only purpose is to prove that "I was there."

Even if I wasn't really "there."

i've never had an asian roommate

A study of students at Duke University, using lists of their close friends before college and at the end of freshman year, found that white students, the least likely to have had close friends of a different race, were the most likely to develop more diverse friendships as freshmen — while black students, who came in with more interracial friendships, had a decline in cross-race friendship freshman year. The study found little change freshman year in the diversity of Asian and Hispanic students’ friendships.

Freshmen with roommates of a different race — or those who lived alone in a dorm — were the most likely to diversify their friendships.

“Just having diversity in classrooms doesn’t do anything to increase interracial friendships,” said Claudia Buchmann, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State and an author of the Duke study. “But the intimacy of living together in residence halls, with no roommate, or a different-race roommate, does lead to more interracial friendships.”

- "Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice" (NYTimes)

i can't believe i left central europe for this

Mostly Cloudy and Windy 5°F
Feels Like -17°F

Updated: Dec 21 04:45 p.m. ET

WHY IS IT SO FUCKING COLD?!

hot chocolate, prosim

The sun officially sets now around 4 pm every day and it's really ridiculously, mind-numbingly cold outside, but that's all become magically okay because...

IT'S SNOWING!

To celebrate the first snow of the year, Casey, Becca, and I watched "Love Actually" after our mandatory first-snow snowball fight. The Christmas market at Namesti Miru has opened up, the tree is being lighted in Old Town Square on the 29th, NYU has a student-organized, catered Thanksgiving feast planned for this coming Thursday that has a guest list of 170 people, and it's all beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

I love the holidays.

bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

There is actually so much to say about my last weekend in Vienna that I have absolutely no idea where to start and can therefore only say this:

The entire three days and three nights of feeling too much at home at Inga's little restaurant, wandering around in the freezing wind and drizzling rain, being in total awe of the Hapsburg's, getting creeped out by seeing real skeletons for the first time in the cathedral's catacombs, dancing to American music, meeting Austrian people (who seemed much friendlier and goofier than Czech people), having endless amounts of pastries, ice cream, falafel, hummus, strum, coffee, strudel, chocolate, wine, and schnitzel, and getting driven around by our new Austrian friend Philipp on our last night made all four of us girls really realize how much we were missing in Prague. The bus ride back was pretty much exclusively NYU kids trying to make it back before class Monday, and the four of us just couldn't understand how they were all ready to go back to Prague and we still weren't. Why didn't we make as many Czech friends as we did Austrian friends from Vienna in those three days? How did we find such charming little places and not have "our place" in Prague yet? Why have we eaten so much good food in Vienna, but haven't treated ourselves in Prague? Walking back from the metro stop, we realized that our dorm was definitely "familiar," but it wasn't "home" yet.

I've made a resolution to really discover and fall in love with Prague and so far am proud to say that I've been sticking to that goal pretty well. My internship's office is in Lucerna, arguably the oldest working movie theater in Europe, and it's located in this great (though touristy) area with tons of shops and cafes. Granted, the down side of working in such an old, historical building is that on my very first day I got stuck in the elevator because the elevator is wooden and nonstop. Little rectangular boxes come down that you basically jump into and then jump out of, but I was texting on my way down and didn't realize that I had forgotten to jump off at the bottom floor until I heard a shout and saw some guys peering down as I disappeared deeper, deeper, deeper into the darkness... only to see giant wooden knobs turn my little elevator box around and swing me back up about five minutes later. I was seriously getting worried though.

Besides Stupid American moments like that (others include finding out the laundry detergent we had bought was actually fabric softener and not detergent and telling my professor in Czech class "Thank you, urine"), my newest hobby/obsession is walking around until I find a random cafe that I like and sitting down to a cup of tea or coffee to journal or read for hours and hours (...by which I mean at max probably two and a half hours because I feel like I rarely have a block of free time longer than that during which I don't have to meet up with someone or go run errands somewhere...). It's helping me feel more settled in a city that I've always liked but haven't fallen totally in love with yet or really felt completely a part of. Maybe it's because everyone talks about how the Czechs don't smile at strangers that much, or maybe it's the totally unrecognizable language, but I think a lot of it might just be in my head.

And that I can fix.

i can feel my tan fading away

I'M BACK IN THE STATES.

Times I've had to catch myself from saying "oh my god" or "thank you" or "excuse me, miss" in Vietnamese: 4.

First words uttered upon landing in LAX: "I'm cold."

Earlier today, I was also craving a sua chua (translation: yogurt drink) while at Target and had to settle for a Yoplait Light yogurt drink instead. I think it was strawberry flavored or something. It was not the same.

Speaking of food, here's a list of the insane amount of food I ate on my last day in Hanoi: Hello Panda, European chocolates, a baguette with jam for breakfast, a yogurt drink with shot of expresso, bun cha for lunch (translation: pork meat in a bowl of nuc mam sauce served with cold rice noodles and vegetables), hua gua dam (translation: mixed fruits -- lychee, avocado, watermelon, jack fruit, dragon fruit, etc. -- with condensed milk in a cup that you add ice to), a baguette with pate for dinner, and bubble tea.

The Vietnamese roommates surprised me with how sentimental they all were, but I've since decided that the world needs more sappiness. Everyone had little bookies that they had people sign (like yearbooks!), so I quickly grabbed a notebook I used to use for Vietnamese class back in June and had people sign that. Iris, Trung, and Sam all gave me cards; VT told me to never feel alone, gave me a little fat cat for good luck, and came to the airport with us to say good-bye; Hoang held my hand as we walked back from bubble tea, sang "She Will Be Loved" with me around the lake -- changing the lyrics every now and then to, "And you will be loved" -- and blew kisses at me through the bus window as we were heading to the airport; Thu, my roommate, cried when I said good-bye; and so did Ha, Johnny's roommate, who came with us to the airport too and chased after Johnny for one last hug as we headed towards customs. The roommates all talked about working hard to be successful so that they can come to America and reunite with us one day, but it's sad to think about how long that might take in reality. (It's also weird to think that if/when they do come to the States, their children will be... me, the first generation Asian-American. And in many ways, I do feel like spending this past summer in Asia has helped me understand my parents a lots more and how they grew up.)

The flight back home was quite an ordeal. I was majorly confused by the service from Hanoi to Incheon, which was both lax and annoyingly persistant. My check-in bags were 22.5 and 26 kg, but the lady didn't say anything to me, despite the 23 kg weight limit. Asiana air service is cool, right? Wrong. The flight attendants during the actual flight kept waking me up for food (at midnight?!? I don't even remember what I ate; I think it was beef and rice or something like that), wine (both white and red, the lady made sure I knew), coffee, and to tell me to put my seat up (or rather, I got woken up by her putting my seat up suddenly). Basically that mean that by the time we got to Incheon airport in Korea, we were all deliriously, hilariously exhausted. I passed out for about 2 minutes of bliss on the padded seats in a waiting area (seats without arm rests are a traveler's best friend), but then got hustled along by the others in search of an information desk. We had a 13-hour layover in Korea, so we were determined to go into the city, even though Alex pointed out that we'd probably either get raped or robbed in our state of exhaustion/sleepiness/incoherence. We ended up getting tickets for a 5-hour long city tour of Seoul (it's an hour bus ride from the airport to the city) that included seeing the palace, a museum (that even had a section on food in our exhibit on Korean life -- that's Asia for you; we take our food seriously), a tourist shopping street (I got a handmade necklace there for 6000 wong), and lunch (bibimbap for me, which came in a clay pot).

Honestly, I have no clear recollection of the flight from Seoul to LA. I slept for about 10 of the 11 hours, waking up only for food (I had some beef and rice dish again that you wrapped in lettuce and then kim chi with rice) and then for about 30 minutes of "What Happened in Vegas" right before we landed. Overall, I was pretty impressed by the Korean facilities. The Incheon airport is really nice -- incredibly clean and orderly with lots of things to do in the airport -- and the plane itself was pretty comfortable, with little side thingies on your headrest (that let you rest your head on the side so that you wouldn't get those awful neck cramps), good food, and individual TV screens that let you select which movies you wanted to play when.

American airlines seriously need to take some tips from Asian ones because flying domestic on Northwest after flying international on Asiana was 1) a total, unorganized mess (I didn't even get to say good-bye in person to Johnny, Rosie, and Caroline because the whole, confusing ordeal at baggage claim got me separated from them all!) and 2) not at all as comfortable. I was stuck sitting bitchseat in the middle of a 3-person row and I'm pretty sure I tried to put my head on the shoulder of the girl sitting next to me, thinking in my dreamy, sleepy state that she was Yushen. Awkward.

Things I've had to readjust to upon returning to America:
- how wonderfully clean and modern the bathrooms are
- how intense the water pressure in my bathroom is
- how large and thick toilet paper, kleenex, towels, etc. are
- how heavy metal utensils are
- how quiet the traffic is
- how inefficient NOT jaywalking is
- how large supermarkets are
- how refreshingly not invasive salespeople are
- how clean everything everywhere is
- how conversational strangers are
- how quickly everyone speaks English
- how many chocolate products there are
- how many cars there are
- how orderly traffic is
- how large personal space bubbles are
- how big and tall everyone is
- how few Asians there are in my town
- no longer having wet towelettes at every meal
- dry heat
- my cell phone's ring tone

You'll probably notice that the first few things on the above list were all bathroom-related. Let's just say I'm probably still psychologically recovering from our trip into the Central Region. (There were toilets in pure darkness, toilets that were just holes, toilets that were just holes and needed to be manually flush, toilets that were just holes on moving trains, toilets that weren't even holes in the ground but were actually changing rooms, meaning that you'd have to pee on the floor [...I didn't actually use those...], you get the idea.)

In other news, jet lag is a bitch. I woke up at around 6:45 am today, saw the school bus go by my window, wondered why summer school was going so late, and then realized first that it was still only Tuesday in this time zone and second that schools here have already started. Insanity. I spent my first day back home running errands and also picked up both a new, unlined, 240-page Moleskin journal (to replace my old journal that's now completely filled, thanks to this summer) and the Quick & Easy Vietnamese Home Cooking for Everyone cookbook, which -- after flipping through the pictures and the index -- I've decided has all my favorite dishes, except for hua gua dam.

My goal for this summer is officially to successfully make nem (translation: spring rolls). Asia Mart, here I come.

that's culturally insensitive

Shopping for gangsta clothing in Viet Nam is quite the trip. Not only is "hip hop" synonymous to "skater" here, but b-girls (the closest thing I've found so far to the image I was going for in my mind) generally either dress 1) exactly like boys, 2) super clubby (which I cannot appear on national television wearing), 3) super cutesy, 4) like Avril Lavigne, or 5) like a warped version of Euro gone 80's. Furthermore, the concept of baggy does not seem to exist for the majority of men.

Needless to say, my 3-hour long search to find something that'd make me look like I could bust a cap in your ass was a total failure.

But I did learn one great lesson: apparently, illegal parking in Viet Nam does exist. Who knew?

Dave and I sure didn't.

We were just coming back from wandering the Old Quarter (after purchasing a fabulous red doo-rag for him), when we realized that his motorbike was no longer where we had parked it. We walked down the street, thinking that maybe somebody had moved it, but soon came back to ask a shopkeeper if he had seen what had happened to the motorbike. The man spoke no English, and, after we had mimed "motorbike" to him, only said, "Police!" a bunch of times. We didn't know if he was trying to tell us to report the missing motorbike to the police or that the police had taken it.

We decided to walk down an adjacent street when we saw it: Dave's motorbike, parked in front of a yellow building. We figured we'd found the police station.

There was one desk inside with two men in green uniforms who, true to our luck, did not know any English except to say, "You sit. You wait." We didn't know what we were waiting for and our efforts to ask "Who?" and "Why?" were futile, so we got some water and then hung around as the two police officers laughed with each other, speaking rapid Vietnamese and grinning at us.

About five minutes later, a big van pulls up and about 5 more policemen came inside. They asked a few questions to the two sitting policemen and, after hearing whatever the answer was, started laughing and talking to themselves. Dave and I decided at this point that they had to be messing with us because they looked too happy not to be. The policemen all started asking us, "Where you from?" and, after hearing we were from America, one of them showed us a tattoo he had on his chest of the Statue of Liberty.

Then, all of a sudden, one of the policemen turned serious, said something in Vietnamese really quickly, reached over to Dave, lifted up his shirt, and then lifted up his pants, which had been sagging (though he was wearing a belt).

"Vietnam. Up! Good," he said, as he gave us the thumbs up sign and indicated that Dave should tighten his belt.

I can only imagine what they would have said to us if Dave had been wearing his doo-rag.

maybe that's why korean movies are so big here

"The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy."

- Yves Saint Laurent

In a conversation with some of the Vietnamese roommates a few days ago, we asked the boys to pick between dating an intelligent but ugly girl or a beautiful but stupid one. One of the Vietnamese guys responded very frankly, "The intelligent one."

"Why?" we asked.

"Because the intelligent girl can get plastic surgery. The stupid but beautiful girl can't do anything to make herself intelligent."

"But what if the intelligent girl doesn't want plastic surgery?"

"Then she's not actually intelligent."

The other day, my friend Yi linked me an article from the New York Times titled "Sans Makeup, S'il Vous Plaît," which praises the French, natural approach to make-up. It criticizes the overdone look that Americans tend to prefer, covering their faces with foundation, concealer, eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, eyebrow pencil, lipstick, lipliner, blush, bronzer, and more. Not one little detail on the all-American face is overlooked and the result is something not so much beautiful as fake and plastic.

Without going into the cliche rant about accepting and embracing your body's flaws and faults, the article does make a good point about different standards of beauty and how make-up trends are reflective of them. The American obsession with self-perfecting starts at an early age, with glittery, sugary lipgloss substitutes becoming popular even before kindergarten (hi, Bonne Bell), Bath & Body Works dominating (and suffocating) the junior high girls' locker rooms, and fake and bake tans becoming the must-have pre-Spring Break accessory (because nobody wants to be the one pale person on the beach in Cancun, obvi).

From living and working in Hanoi, I've noticed that the Asian approach to make-up here is a strange blend of American and French, almost an "all or nothing" type policy. Although my workplace dress code is "business casual" (which is also possibly the vaguest term ever invented), women here don't normally wear make-up in the office. Most women rarely wear make-up in daily life either, which makes sense since 1) make-up is still a luxury good and 2) it's so hot that any make-up worn during the day would probably be sweated or melted off the face by noon. The nighttime club scene is more half-and-half split between the natural and the made up, but the general trend I've noticed seems to be that when make-up is worn, a lot is put on.

In a country obsessed with beauty pageants, the attention Americans heap on make-up products is instead shifted onto skin products in Asia. Case in point: it took me about 20 minutes at Intimex (the local, international superstore) to find the one brand of body lotion that did not contain skin-whitening product. While I spent the daytime hours of Spring Break 2008 laying out on the beach, the Asian female population here hides under umbrellas during the daytime, covers their faces with masks to hide from the sunlight (and all the air pollution), and lathers on the sunblock. The same story is true in China, where essentially tan skin implies that you work outside, which implies that you're doing manual labor, which implies that you're part of the working class.

At any rate, there have been so many studies done that show that more attractive individuals get better jobs, higher pay, and better treatment in society in general, that it's hard to write off beauty trends as just a stupid superficiality, although plastic surgery, as our Vietnamese friend mentioned, might be a bit extreme.

someone needs an english phrase book

Every day when I go to work, the same (or I assume it's the same) middle-aged motorbike taxi driver always says to me:

"Hi! I love you!"

I'm fairly certain that this is the only English he knows.

It's weird being here for about two weeks and still feeling like I'm a fish in a bowl. I'm starting to recognize faces and places on the street, but everything from my mannerisms to my hair to my height screams that I don't belong. The attention ranges from overly tiring when it comes from rows of pestering vendors and motorbike and cyclo drivers endlessly hassling you to buy, buy, buy, to hilarious when it comes from locals wanting pictures or Vietnamese men hitting on your guy friends.

At any rate, I'm excited to meet up tonight with a group of kids here from Princeton. It'll be us plus possibly a Yale girl who attended one of our lectures yesterday evening, and we're all going to a bar together. Though I've learned so much from the Vietnamese roommates, I miss meeting new people that I can instantly communicate with without having to explain every cultural reference I make. I don't think I fully realized how unique the Greek system is until I came here.

even though a lot think i'm korean

I feel more Chinese here than I do American, which is weird because I've never felt particularly Chinese in my entire life.