The tempura has just been fried, they bring it to the table and I sprinkle the green salt on top of it.  The taste is amazing, the crunchiness of the tempura perfectly accentuated by the salt.

The meal is amazing, every aspect of it a search for perfection, the grilled fish, the sushi, the crab cocktail, the almond cream topped with honeydew,… it’s the pinnacle of someone’s search for the absolute.  This is in many ways the most perfect meal I have ever had.  I have eaten at more expensive restaurants but never have this many people paid this much attention to my meal.

We are at a ryokan in Nikko, it is my honeymoon.  I am wearing a yukata and was soaking in a hotspring an hour before this dinner.  I remember watching Anthony Bourdain having a similar meal in Japan, I remember thinking that was a meal I would never have. I am glad I was wrong.

Japan is a bit strange for a honeymoon destination, but it is perfect for us.  We considered a beach or a cruise and outside of a Greece where a good friend of mine lives beaches just weren’t that interesting for our honeymoon.  Many of my recently married friends have gone on to beaches for their honeymoon, the more they are willing to spend the more exotic the beach becomes, the whiter and softer the sand, the more attentive to your every wish the staff.  In Japan no on really cares that it’s our honeymoon, heck it’s a challenge to communicate what we want sometimes.  But with that price comes a reward, the amazingly diverse food, the fun toys, the wacky clothes.

This might not be the most luxurious honeymoon we could have planned but it is the funnest one.  Yesterday on our way to visit some ancient temples we got sidetracked by a 6 story building.  To call it a toy store would give  entirely wrong impression, it contained rack after rack, floor after floor of interesting and intricate little things.  Small robots designed to run away from sound and try to hide away from you, tiny puzzled that you put together with tweezers, shiny bouncing balls that do weird things when you bounce them,…. And of course we did make it to the temples eventually, we donated a few hundred yen to some deity and enjoyed a cup of iced green tea.

Nikko is a gorgeous destination, most people spend only a day here visit the temples and then head on to other more popular places.  We did the tourist thing today and visited the major temples, the next 3 days are unplanned and we probably will spend them walking around and trying the local restaurants and bakeries.

My cell phone doesn’t work in Japan, there is no internet in the hotel, I am really enjoying being cut off from work.  I can see work and life gathering up like a wave that’s going to come crashing down on me in September.  I am ignoring it much like a swimmer paddling in the surf.  I can’t do much to change the wave’s path so I am going to relax now and take it easy and order another batch of fresh tempura.

Bob waited, he could hear his heart beat, each beat loud as a drum stroke in the sudden silence of the room.  Finally the old penguin broke and spoke first.

“This is too much we can buy a cheaper model”

Bob didn’t blink an eye, this might have been the biggest deal of the quarter but you couldn’t have told anything by Bob’s demeanor.  Crystal smooth Bob rolled with the flow.

“Of course you could, there are always cheaper alternatives, you could build your own traps”

The news story lay silent between them, a polar bear had broken through the defenses of a small town further north by the time they had gotten the place under control again they had lost 34 penguins.  Bob didn’t need to say this, cheaper alternatives spelled it out easily enough at the same time implying that the old penguin’s town couldn’t afford the latest technology which they both knew wasn’t true.

“What about the smaller model, couldn’t one of the smaller models do as good a job ? “

A smile twitched behind Bob’s face yearning to break into his face, Bob locked it down.  The deal was done they were simply arguing about price now.

Bob nodded towards his engineer who started to speak a bit too rapidly for Bob’s taste but that was engineers for you.  All tech and no polish.

“Well based on the population and ice composition here we could go with the JR423 but that will leave you open to air assault and heat seekers.  With those vectors open you can expect a loss of 23% per year,  we could tweak the command module but even that’s not going to get you more than 1-2%, the last upgrade optimized the circuits pretty well, to get 99.995% coverage you the XW2000, it has the flack counter strike built in…”

Bob cut in smoothly, it was Joes first week on the job and he still had a lot to learn, the deal was done and Bob was going to cut him some slack but there was no need to spend more time than they had to.

“That’s 4 winters for 4500 bars of compressed shrimp, plus whatever amo and tranining you’ll need”

“You’ll include the training for free ?”

Bob nodded reluctantly, let the old penguin think he had gotten something for free, the training didn’t matter that much most of the system was automated, the profit on the amo would more than cover the cost of sending Joe out for a few days to shoot at decoy polar bears.

The belt buckle clipped in with a solid metal click and Bob relaxed into the plush first class seat on the hypersled, it would be another 8 hours before they got back home.  The warm kiss of high quality whisky bit through his throat.  He didn’t realize how stressed he had been throughout the call, sales conditioning had locked the stress and worry away during the call and now that they were done it was time to pay the price.

“Do you think it was fair to charge them that much ?”

Bob looked back towards Joe uncomprehendingly.  Then his brain replayed the words back.

“Do I  Think It’s Fair ?”  Bob repeated the question softly but Joe flinched back from the look in Bob’s eyes.

“Do you want to be right or rich Joe ?”  Bob stared straight into Joe’s eyes until the other looked away.

“It’s a simple question Joe, which one do you want more ?”

“sorry man, just making conversation”  Joe looked at his feet and stayed silent.

Bob finished his whisky in one gulp and looked back at Joe.

“ You can give him 200 rounds free, when you are up there training them if it makes you feel better.  But lock it down, you are in sales now.”

The rest of the flight was devoid of conversation.

I am probably too old and that’s why I remember Conan the Barbarian, now there is a new movie coming out about Genghis Khan and it’s exactly the same as Conan.  A young boy loses his family, trains hard and goes on to conquer the world as was proclaimed by the high priests.  How does a movie like this get made ?  Are you doomed to see repetitive movies once you are past 30 ?

Everyone is going nuts about twitter which I still think is absolutely useless unless you are in college or have a ton of time on your hands to play with the facebook apps and read multiple peoples twitter feeds.

PA says it best.

I getup an hour later, shower and head out to town.  Besides a few lone runners and a large group of people decked out in expensive biking gear there is no one around.  I find a coffee shop with 2 penguins as their logo and order a hot chocolate.  There is nothing better than drinking or eating something while exploring a new town.  The sky is overcast and there is a chill wind, Auckland looks nothing like the Shire.  I wonder if people would get offended if I ask for directions to the Shire but not wanting to be a jackass tourist I don’t ask anyone.  All the gift shops are run by mainlanders from China.  I speak to a few and they are surprised at my Mandarin, they don’t give any discount for our shared language.

Auckland is a nice city, nice is a word that you can apply to a lot of things in New Zealand.  They have nice sheep, nice views, nice people, nice food…. It’s just all very nice.  Can’t complain.

It’s lunch time and I look for the dirtiest kebab shop I can find.  Whenever I am on the road I look for the dirtiest, grimiest food vendor I can find.  That’s how I keep it real with my homies.

The kebab sucks, I try to wash it down with an equally dirty pearl drink and the pearl drink sucks as well.  It’s probably the worst pearl drink I have ever had, I make a mental note not to buy a pearl drink from someone who speaks Cantonese ever again.  Or rather I should avoid places that don’t mind cockroaches freely walking around.

I walk by Starbucks, Wendy’s, Dunkin Doughnuts and Burger King.  If there is a Shire anywhere around here I am sure it has a McDonalds in it.

Gambling is legal here and there’s a large casino next to my hotel.  I walk in and I could be anywhere in the world.  Vegas, Atlantic City, … The sounds are the same and the people have the same blank looks as they drop quarter after quarter into the machines.  There’s a poker room, I know I’ll be back.

I walk around town and don’t take any pictures.  I’ve stopped taking pictures on my trips.  There is no point, if you want to see any of the locations just do a Google image search or go on Flicker.  Earlier this year I was looking at a friends picture, he had recently been to Japan, he had also gone to Kyoto, he had incidentally also gone to the same temple in Kyoto that I had been to.  His picture of the fountain in the temple could have been a copy of the picture I had taken at the same location 3 years earlier.

So I am on strike from picture taking until I figure out a way to make the pictures unique or interesting.

It’s become instinct, something you don’t even have to think about anymore, you just do it.  The extra laptop battery, the DVI-VGA cable along with the USB charger.  Then you have to look up the region and see what type of power plug they use.  Next money, have I been there before ?  If so I probably have change left over from the last time.

Next comes the bags, it’s a one week trip, 6 pair of socks, change of underwear, 3 dress shirts, 2 khaki pants, 2 going out shirts and a pair of jeans.  Can’t forge the contact lens solution, last time I had to pay $18 for a small bottle of contact lens solution.  Taxes are a bitch in Brazil.

Finally the haggling with the airline, this isn’t a real United flight so I don’t get any upgrades, it’s a 13 hour flight I need an upgrade it’s going to kill me sitting in economy but the stewardess is unrelenting.

At least the plane is new, I have a row of 3 seats to myself, normally that would be more than enough but some genius has decided that you can’t move the arm rests all the way up, and I am too tall for 3 seats anyways.  Around hour 4 I wake up with a seat buckle digging into my back.  That’s going to leave a mark.  I switch over to the neck pillow and spend another hour drifting in and out of sleep.

The stewardess shows up with my special meal, it’s Hindi this time, I’ve tried Jewish, Halal and Vegetarian.  So far my favorite is Halal, although I am willing to give the Hindi meal another try.  I was hoping for curry but it’s just some type of spiced chick peas.  I want to order Asian next time but I am worried they will just give me a box of Ramen noodles.

We land at 4:30 AM, 15 minutes early.  I change some money and head over to the cabs.  It turns out my cabby went to UC Davis  and lived in Sacramento it’s a small world and I have stopped being surprised at running into people who used to share a particular geographic location with me.  Last time my cabby in Sydeny had spent time in Belgium and had taken the same bus line as me on his way to school.

The cabby drops me off at the Heritage Hotel, he asks me to double check as sometimes people are booked into the Heritage Tower and instead they go to the Hotel.  I check, I am booked into the Hotel according to the American Express travel agent.  I go to the check in desk where I am informed that no, my reservations are for the Heritage Tower.  I go outside and walk to the Tower, it’s a 5 min walk.  I check into the Tower where the clerk seems to take it personally that I am checking in this early.  It’s the strangest hotel room I have been to in a while.  There is a washer in the bathroom.  I can do my own laundry.  I just look at it for a few minutes and then try to get a few hours of sleep.

Before falling asleep I message Tina.  “Auckland is great, we should think about moving to New Zealand”.

So the blog is finally looking like a finished product, the archives are working the way I want them, the Pandora Radio is embedded properly even though I just want it to display only chill music.  Blog software has developed a lot in the past few years but it’s still free if your time is free I have spent hours fixing the theme, the widgets and the various plugins that go into it.  But hey it feels like home now

What is it about the French ? Why do they insist on going out of their
way to annoy people ? Steve has always disliked the French. When I ask why he shrugs his shoulders and says well they are French. I used to stick up for the French, I lived in Belgium for a few years and it’s right next door to France, I speak French. Sure I don’t have a deep love of cheese and wine and that’s probably just a cliche but when I see French movies or an article in English and French I feel a bit smug, oh yeah I speak French it’s cool no biggie.

Well the French suck. There I said it, sure for years I’ve defended them but it’s time to come clean, the French are lazy in addition to being overbearing. I was reading this article which reminded me how annoying the French can be.

A minute later we gave the game over to the French: “Who wins, Coca-Cola or Uma Thurman?”

The French didn’t answer and remained staring out the windows—it might have been Battersea, or Shepherd’s Bush. Then the French director said, “That is not a game.” He started coughing. “It is so Anglo, this game. It is not a game. How do you judge this? It is a soda and a woman. Then how do you decide?”

“One wins, one loses. Just pick,” I said. But he refused: “It is nothing a French person would think is a game. It is so stupid.”

The traffic wasn’t moving. I asked him to suggest a French game instead that we could play. “OK, OK, here is a French game,” he said. “We will talk about something for a little while. It will be about nothing. We will talk and talk and talk about it. Sometimes I will take the other side of the conversation, just to say you are wrong. And then we will stop.”

He resumed his brooding silence. The composer turned to say he agreed, this was a classic French game.

See that’s why people don’t like the French and until yesterday I didn’t care. See yesterday I finally decided that I had enough of carrying around books with me when I traveled. I am one of those people who can’t sleep much on planes and I am a fast reader so I tend to take at least two books with me on every trip and most times that’s not enough. The other problem is that in most destinations and airports you can’t buy any decent English books or if you can they are prohibitively expensive. For example an English book in the Rio airport costs about $22, that’s a soft cover book.

So I decided to invest in an ebook reader. The Amazon Kindle looks like crap, the Sony reader is only compatible with Windows so that left the Booken Cybook. I ordered one 2 days ago and got an email that said they got my order and charged my credit card. Their website explicitly states that the Cybook is in stock and they will ship asap.

Like a kid waiting for Santa Clause I waited and waited for the shipment order. Ok so I waited a day but in our wired age I expected to see the shipment order right away. Except for one thing, Booken is a French company. It is Easter weekend right now and there is no way you could pay anyone in France to work over a holiday. So they have charged my credit card and I will be lucky if they ship the damn thing in the next 2 weeks. After all I am just a customer and it’s easter weekend. This is classic French customer service. I’d complain but then I am worried they’d cancel the damn order.

Update: Ok the cybook arrived today, I take back everything I said about the French, even though they never responded to my email to customer support. 

So I am back in Rio, that’s Rio de Janiro in Brazil for those people who are not cool enough to know where Rio is, or so I imagine I would tell people I met in fancy cocktail parties. Except I don’t go to fancy cocktail parties and so I never get to casually mention that I am in Rio again, you know no big deal it’s just a work thing.

A few things about Rio that you probably don’t know, it’s been raining ever since I got here. Another thing everyone speaks Portuguese and there aren’t that many tourists around. Finally it’s dangerous, not in the 007 sexy women want to kill me with their toned thighs dangerous but rather in they hey that geek that has a laptop and is a gringo we should rob him right now way. Which is not as cool.

You might say to yourself, Asad is a pussy I bet Rio is not that dangerous, I bet me and my Lonely Planet guide would have a blast in Rio. You’d be wrong, feeling a bit confined with having our Brazil team drive me everywhere a few nights ago I decided to walk back to my hotel after dinner. Now it took at most about two minutes to walk back to the hotel. I was by the beach on one of the biggest roads in Rio, it was well lit, toned hot girls were running on a path by the ocean and police cars were parked nearby with the lights on. By the way Policia sounds a lot cooler than Police is there any word that doesn’t sound cooler by adding a to the end of it, says Asada.

So I felt very safe and walked back to the hotel thinking that hey maybe I’ll take the bus next time or try taxies on my own. The next day I hear that someone was kidnapped on that same road and taken to an ATM so that he could withdraw money for the robbers. *sigh* with my luck I would be kidnaped by robbers who would not speak any English at all and so it would end badly for all involved.

Business travel is more about tolerance and enjoyment. You tolerate the wait at the security line, you tolerate the old ethnic lady with 4 bags and a crying baby, you tolerate the custom official who makes you wait even more. Then you tolerate the hotel who has lost your reservation, for some reason has no clock and the room that smell of cigarettes even though there’s a big sign on the door that says no smoking.

Most of all you start to hate everyone else who is not a frequent flyer. You hate that they didn’t realize they had to take their laptop out, you hate that they brought too many carry ons and now they are arguing with the stewardess and delaying the take off. You hate that they want to take over the arm rest which is clearly yours.

That’s not to say that it’s all bad, the girls in Brazil live up to their reputation and the steak is amazing even though they serve it for lunch and dinner on most days. You also get to build up your miles for when you go on a personal trip somewhere although I haven’t had the time to do any of that this year.

So now I am back in Frisco, San Francisco for the people who don’t travel in my imaginary cocktail party. I’ll let you guys know how it goes, so far I am still waiting for a spontaneous game of baccarat to break out. Apparently even in imaginary cocktail parties I am disappointed.

Wow, it’s been a while, I could tell you that nothing has been going on but it would be a lie. Life in general has been very busy, part of the reason I have put off posting. Every time I sat down to write something it seemed like it would take forever and so I Put it off again until another time feeling a bit more guilty each time someone reminded me to post.

As you guys know I got married in 2007 (by the way is it just me or does it still feel like it’s 2007 and not 2008). Our wedding ceremony was very simple, just me, my wife, my sister and a friend of my wife. Two of my friends were going to attend but one forgot about the wedding and the other didn’t think of buying his airline ticket until he was on his way to the airport at which point he decided to call me and see what time the wedding was. My friends rock!

So we had planned on having another wedding or weddings this year. We were going to have a wedding in Taiwan so that our families could meet, then have another one in California where my friends co-workers could come as well as the rest of my family in the US who didn’t make the trip to Taiwan. Talking to my dad and cousins in Iran I decided to have yet another one in Iran.

If you are keeping track at home that’s 3 weddings, I kept asking my wife why was spending so much time on the food, flowers,… She reminded me that she was taking care of the Taiwan wedding and that I was responsible for the US one. Here was my plan for doing all the work. Have a super simple wedding at the beach, everyone can come in jeans and flip flops. Hire a wedding planner for 5k, and a Persian bad from Santa Barbara. The Iran wedding my dad would take care of.

Sounds great in theory until the actual wedding in Taiwan happened. It turns out that weddings have a lot more drama/work than you would expect. The Taiwan wedding went well and everyone who has seen the pictures keeps telling us we look very happy, I suppose that is in contrast with other peoples weddings who seem pissed off and unhappy ?

So here is my solution for CA wedding, I am canceling it. Nice and easy, if you were planning on coming to my wedding sorry guys it’s just too much work. I’ll be happy to come to yours or you can organize mine for me and let me know how it goes :). A much better idea in my opinion is to just meet and have some good food. So I will owe you guys a meal, let me know when you are in the bay area and we’ll go out.

As for the Iran wedding well our honeymoon was planned for Greece. It’s a hop away from Iran and instead of a wedding I think we’ll just meet more family members and eat.

More wedding pictures

Professional pictures

Wedding day pictures