Last weekend I went to Hong Kong. It was a great trip, but oddly I found myself missing Japan intensely. I wonder how I'll fare when I finally have to leave Japan for good.
Highlights of Hong Kong:
- It was warm
- I got a pretty cool fake watch
- You can haggle for almost anything
- Lots of green in the middle of a dense city
- Lots of green outside the city
Low(?)lights of Hong Kong:
- Cantonese food is horrific
- Loud, dirty
- It was hot
- The foreigners in Hong Kong are by and large a much more irritating presence than in Japan (even Roppongi)
- 90% of the "culture" in Hong Kong centers around shopping
It was a great city, but it was refreshing for me to know what I really feel about Japan, knowing how much I wanted to come back to it. I don't think I'd really want to live in Hong Kong.
My friend was a most excellent host, and thanks to him I got to see and do a lot of things I'm sure most visitors don't do. It was also very interesting to see the dualities of the city through him.
Click on the thumbnail below for the gallery.
Last night I survived another all-nighter down toward tokyo after DJing for a short spell.
All I can say is 24-hour manga cafes live up to every single sleazy expectation.
More appropriately, this post could be titled "Japanese things that should be but aren't the same as back home" but it didn't really have a very appealing ring to it.
There are many things here that by all practical purposes should be the same as they are back home. Naturally between countries things vary considerably but there are things that often I wonder why they're different at all. This post has actually been sitting in my "draft" folder for months now waiting for me to compile a good list, but I'm left with only one. So I might as well just talk about that.
Here, when you open a bottle of soda (pop, coke, carbonated beverage) it makes a different sound than back home. I figured things like Coke would be especially similar between countries, since its production is controlled at some level by the all-powerful Coca-Cola god.
I know this sounds stupid, but really, it makes a different sound. Back home you open a bottle and it makes something of a "fizz" sound. I'll approximate it by saying "fwssshhh" because that's the sound it makes. Here, you open the bottle and it literally goes "pop!" A single sudden popping sound, no fizzing, and that's the end of the opening experience. I can only assume it can be attributed to differences in carbonation tactics but still...
...weird eh?
NOTE: JLPT stands for "Japanese Language Proficiency Test"
Yesterday I somehow became immersed in a conversation revolving around the uvula. I explained that many English speakers don't even know what the uvula is called, and if they do it's only after a certain amount of memory-jogging. As a result, most people end up simply referring to it as "that thing that hangs in the back of your throat." Upon hearing this, every Japanese person thus far as replied "that's way too long."
As it turns out, Japanese is similar. Almost no one knows the medical term for it (the Japanese equivalent of "uvula"), so pretty much everyone simply refers to it by its much weirder but more common name: 喉ちんこ (nodochinko). Well, it's certainly shorter than the English version.
Regardless, I still can't get over how a vast amount of people can with a perfectly straight face refer to the thing in the back of your throat as "throat penis."