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From http://www.coolestshop.com/puma-luda3.htmlIf any of you have been following the hype stream, you'll know that there has been some chatter regarding these here shoes. You wanted it, we got it- Puma paired up Ludacris and b-ball legend Clyde Frazier to come up with their own shoe, and here it is. Red, white and black as a nod to the Atlanta Falcons, these shoes are a tribute by the artist to his home turf. Other specs include leather that has been treated to look like ostrich, and an accompanying crown royal-style bag. Luda's face is printed in gold on the insole, and stitched into the bag. Limited to 300 worldwide, with only 150 of these hitting U.S. shores. Don't blink- buy!
I love this shit.
Meanwhile, I bought golf shoes (except my trim is red, not black):
I now can:
1)Bend over, keeping my legs straight, and touch my forehead to my shins
2)Do a shoulder stand
But I still can't stand on my head. I think it's just maybe not the right shape.
Thank you, yoga.
Happy Year of the [Golden] Pig. Why the Pig is such a good sign, and thus why a golden one should mark such an auspicious year, I am not sure. I asked my mother and she said she didn't know, maybe it was because pigs are fat, which, when translated to humans, is a sign of wealth. Nowadays fatness is not really a mark of wealth, especially not when there are so many poor obese people and Calista Flockharts in the world.
Anyway, I was really drunk and thankfully my shitty internet connection prevented me from making a drunk post. We had a big family bbq on Saturday night along with some laid-back prayer. I also got an assload of money. God I love being "young, poor, and Chinese." I did get to see relatives I hadn't seen since I was 12. That was nice.
The next day, I put on a new shirt (for a new year - that makes me look like a disciple of Chairman Mao doing Tai Chi in Tianamen Square before the student protests, more like circa the end of The Last Emperor), went to a restaurant to eat lunch according to my blood type (a sham because I am not sure I remember so I just chose what was most convenient), and my cousin had her baby.
The baby wasn't big enough to explain how horrifically huge she got during pregnancy, but it's cute nonetheless. She, I mean. Baby girl. She was overdue by a week, but they wanted to wait until the [Chinese] new year, if possible, for all those auspicious reasons. My mother says year is only a small part of it - time of day also matters. For example, my very peaceful Canadian uncle was born in the Year of the Dragon, but as he was born in the middle of the night, she calls him a sleepy dragon because he is not very mean nor angry.
I asked when I was born [in the Year of the Monkey] and she said, "4 o'clock in the morning." I replied, "That must be why I'm so intelligent, clever, and always getting into trouble but am lazy as hell. I think monkeys are asleep at 4AM."
A 10-year old grilled my dinner. I am still alive.
We ate grilled pork, steak, lambchops, and sausage with about 10 different dipping sauces, in addition to sukiyaki.
Little girls play.
The booze table is the social table.
Prego Nat, Hua, Meng, and a Kiang passing by.
I am drunk...
...Because Seng has a never-ending wine cellar.
Drunk baby daddy.
Prayer - the last round, drunk at 1AM.
Burning money from the "Hell Bank."
Su-Ping
Born February 18, 2007
Year of the Golden Pig
7:56PM
2,195 grams
My tits right now feel enormous.
Too bad there is nobody to rub them back to normal [size] for me.
I need to call the airline to see if I can extend my stay. According to my ticket, I have to leave by June 5, but I need to be here for a wedding on June 17... Hopefully I can do this for just a couple hundred more dollars.
Goddamn Chinese Lunar calendar and the hotel for being booked on May 6.
I just checked my SPAM folder in my "lesser" email account.
"I yugoslav as remote"??? Why am I supposed to want to open that?
"Cantonese buty!" is pretty funny too.
I gave myself a "facial." In my ghetto terms, that means going to Jusco (supermarket) and buying some cheap-ass facial treatment mask.
Two of my cousins are pregnant. One, out of wedlock, is about to explode - I've never seen anyone get so big and she's three days overdue. It looks very uncomfortable. The other is waiting to see if an implanted male embryo takes hold and passes time by wandering around the house in pajamas. They want a son in addition to their two other daughters. Ew, I just realized my cousin (her husband) had to jack off into a cup.
Cracking under what? I don't know. I have no pressure here. All I do is eat, speak Thai, sleep, and poop.
I'm ravenous and want to eat all the time. So much for my "healthier eating habits." I had two gigantic bowls of fried rice (with crab, shrimp, and chinese sausage), a gigantic roti boi (some sort of half-sphere pastry that is supposedly from Mexico as well as Malaysia and Singapore?), and two giant wedges of som'o, which is otherwise known as pomelo. Oh, and a cookie. And I just inhaled an entire box of strawberry pocky and now I feel heartburn coming on.
Tiya sent me her pictures from Paris and now I want to smoke up a storm. You know how bad I can get. And I've been doing so well here because my new drug is a combination of yoga and extremely polluted air.
But man, a Parliament light would be nice right now. Oops, gotta poop.
The hot Austrian at school is too gay-looking (I mean European) and as I haven't actually chased a piece of tail in nearly a decade, I'm not about to start now. You see, I am lazy and I just remembered the last Austrian dude I met looked like a nasty backpacking hippy who was into "psychedelic trance" - scary. Wait, I did accidentally spill his entire glass of ice water on his lap... Also, I read an excerpt from a book called Sextrology in AsiaBooks while I was waiting to tutor Jun after class. It's about astrology AND gender. It either hits the nail on the head about me as a female Aries or comes very close to what I'd like to think I am. I realize I am not a rarity, other chicks were born in April, but it did say I was somewhat of a tomboy, attractive, and not submissive as female Tauruses (Taurii?) are. Ha ha.
Today I had lunch with Peter, but I had to take an earlier yoga class as a result. It was either hot yoga in Thai (um, no) or multilevel Ashtanga. This means there are some advanced people in here. This means that I am incredibly sore right now from trying to sit while holding my foot somewhat behind my head, attempting to stand on my head, and discovering that my crotch is a mere four inches away from doing the splits while holding that position for a minute. Oh, I also had to hold a lunge position and a squat position for minuteS at a time. Ow. Anyway, lunch reminded me of how much more I like Thai food than Vietnamese food.
Today I also realized that I may have (at last) mastered the Thai transportation system. This day alone, I rode an air-conditioned bus, the skytrain, two motorcycle taxis, walked, took a sawngtaew (pickup truck with two benches), and a regular bus.
Julia, my Midwest Airlines flight (from KC to LA) buddy was on the local news promoting her roller derby team. She is hardcore. Too bad the dude interviewing her and a teammate was a total douchebag, but that's the local news for you.
Disclaimer - I can't tell how much of my trip was colored by that stupid Vietnam War-version of "The Joy Luck Club" book I read (actually called "When Heaven and Earth Changed Places" - essentially the same title, Asian). I just finished uploading my Vietnam pictures to Flickr and I guess it looked like I had fun. I mean, I did, but my most powerful memory is of how intense it was and how cultural differences prevented me from brooding and getting it out of my system. Shall we begin?
I arrived in Saigon on Thursday evening, where my uncle, my aunt, her sister, and her brother-in-law picked me up. The next morning, we went out for a breakfast of pho (technically pho bo tai - beef rib-eye) before going off to revisit the past. I love Vietnamese food, but sadly enough, other than the pho, I wasn't in heaven. More on that later.
We passed the bus stop where my mother used to catch the bus to school en route to the old home. What would pass for the average Manhattan closet of a studio used to house my grandparents and their nine children. Yes, nine children. The woman who lives in the condo now recognized my grandfather's name as it is still on the utility bills. In the condo, there are still the same tile and same windows, but a loft has been built and the sink in the "kitchen" has been moved. When the my mother, aunts, and uncles grew older, my grandfather purchased the condo next door as clearly they needed more room. My uncle pointed to a drain hole on the balcony and told me (and the current tenant, whom I'm sure was extremely pleased) that he used to have to sleep outside and often woke up in the middle of the night needing to "take a piss." Of course, he was too lazy to trudge back inside to the actual toilet, so he would just piss into the drain hole.
The next stop was my grandfather's old office - he used to own a stamp shop with an elderly gentleman. My grandfather immigrated to Vietnam from China alone when he was 14, which was how he met said elderly man. This man became his surrogate father and eventual business partner. Apparently my mother was his favorite, for when she would come to visit the shop, the gentleman would give her an "allowance" that was at least as much as what he paid her siblings for errands. The building still remains intact, across the street from the Rex Hotel and next to the Hotel DeVille, now the headquarter's of the local People's Committee. However it has since been renovated, but my uncle pointed to where my grandfather would sleep (on the floor) when he couldn't deal with going home to my psychotic grandmother (a colorful woman with colorful past, and we'll leave it at that).
Then we went to the banks of the Mekong River, more stream of sewage than freshwater river, and my uncle recounted the story of my family's escape from the Viet Cong in 1975. The first wave of refugees in my family included my mother, my uncle, and two other uncles. After missing the American evacuation (to which my family was entitled, as my mother was an employee of the U.S. government) for reasons too long to get into here, half of my family went looking for a way out. My uncle had navy connections (he was the equivalent of a Navy SEAL) and so was able to smuggle them onto a ship. The crew had to raise white flags in mock surrender, my family hiding underneath (any civilian presence would have alerted the VC to an escape attempt), while the ship navigated between hoards of VC armed and ready to sink any passing vessel. Obviously, there are more details, but I'm not writing another Vietnam War version of "The Joy Luck Club" here.
The last stop was my mother's middle school, a prestigious (and expensive) Chinese private school that my uncle also attended. He told of how the back entrance used to be engulfed in jungle where he would skip class, catch frogs, and roast them over a fire as a snack.
That was the taxicab portion of the trip - the rest of the time, I spent either napping (Saigon really is not that eventful) or on the back of my aunt's nephew's motorcycle - I guess a distant second cousin by second marriage. The trip would have been more enjoyable except that he was overly reverant and I'm sure some of you know how I feel about that. Literally, I was his sun and moon and earth. I hate that shit. When he wasn't panting over me (in a non-sexual way, I hope - he is only about 20), he was grilling me about everything. Furthermore, my aunt (whom I adore) has a bad habit of repeating herself and is not the most tactful, so she kept encouraging him to harass me. Clearly, she didn't see that I was on vacation, not a lecture tour, and that I might need some quiet time to myself to process everything I had seen. Literally, if I sat quietly on a chair, reading, the kid would be asking me if I was bored and if I said no, I liked the quiet time so that I could think, he would demand "WHY???" He pinched my cheeks really hard after I got sunburned (had fallen asleep with my gigantic Jackie O. frames on so you can imagine how I must still look) and I screamed "Ow! Don't do that!" He had the gall to ask, "why?" I said "Because it hurt and I don't need to tell you why you shouldn't touch me if I don't like it." I know, language barriers, but I believe that uncouth behavior can be avoided, regardless of economic status, etc. Of course, I couldn't be too mean as his parents were putting me up in his house. He liked to ask me a lot of (irritating, unending questions) while he was driving the motorcycle and didn't really seem to understand that in the midst of massive, constant Saigon traffic was not the best time for a Q&A session.
Sorry, I sound like an "American snob." But I'm not. I loved his parents and one of his cousins, a little older dude who was 24, was much, much cooler. But anyway, I did try to be nice because he's just an innocent boy who is still stupid (as all boys and most men are - admit it) and is still very much sheltered. He gave me a pretty cool tour of Saigon.
Anyway, we also went to Vung Tau, to the beach, for a weekend. Vung Tau was ravaged three years ago by a major hurricane and is still recovering. Unfortunately, the veil of Communism has not yet yeilded enough to capitalism, so that area has not recovered as well as post-tsunami Phuket. It was a little unnerving to see VC stars and Soviet hammers and sickles on flags everywhere, in Vung Tau and Saigon. We rented a couple of motorcycles and my uncle, aunt, and this kid went cruising. My uncle is hilarious and insisted on sleeping on the rooftop terrace onto which our suite opened because he wanted to be in the open air under the stars. We had to haul a mattress outside for him, but he ended up scurring back indoors around 4:00AM after the wind died down and the mosquitoes began to attack his face. The water in Vung Tau is not impressive and knowing that in Vietnam, river water, ocean water, and sewage are one and the same, I avoided swimming. We did ride up one of the smaller mountains to a lighthouse for a view. My uncle, of course, asked the lighthouse keeper if he could sleep out there sometime when he came back. He also inquired about foreign boats at the port, as he is an avid sailor and wants to go all over the world. Retirement must be nice. He naps about three times a day (usually after a meal) and then drinks beer with me at night.
So that pretty much sums up Vietnam. Other than the pho and a few bun (rice vermicelli) dishes, I wasn't too impressed. We did see some really fat children with rattailes that my uncle nicknamed "sumo wrestlers in training). The problem is, while I know some of the food I eat in Thailand is unclean (and I'm not being a snob -I know it's not up to American standards, but I don't give a shit and between the rampant hypochondria in the U.S. not to mention the Fast Food Nation type of crap that goes on, we really can't be too high on our horses), at least it looks appetizing. I don't know - whereas the fruit in Thailand beckons to me in vibrant colors, most of the same fruit in Vietnam just looked pale and worn. In fact, my hypochondriac uncle refused to consume any ice (the old contradiction of terms where people only drink bottled water but don't question the ice) until the cafe sua da (Vietnamese iced coffee) tempted him out of it and even longer still (until he cracked on the fresh herbs), refused to eat any produce unless it had been boiled. We ordered some garden rolls which he wouldn't touch, and I teased him by asking if he wanted to ask the waitress to boil them for him. I can't tell you how many people - pedestrians, street vendors, etc., I saw pissing within arm's reach of street food.
I have heard that Halong Bay is beautiful, so maybe I would like to go there one day, but if Saigon is supposed to be cooler than Hanoi, I'm not sure where the hell I want to go again. Is it wrong to not be completely bowled over by the motherland? I can't even stand the sound of Vietnamese anymore, which normally aggravates me moderately, but now just drives me up the wall. Thai is like music to my ears in comparison. I can't believe that all I wanted to do was go back to Thailand. Not even the U.S., but Thailand. Too bad there is a lack of intellectual stimulation and good-looking men here.
Oh, well I did notice a dude today, when I started the new session of my Thai language classes. All I know so far is he is Austrian and his classroom is next door to mine. At least the eyeing of each other was mutual, but I'm not sure how much of his could be attributed to my sunglass tan/burn versus my magnificent looks... How do I just magically start speaking German within earshot without seeming like a freak? Or English for that matter? His is pretty good. I heard him talking to a Korean dude.
My uncle whom I met up with in Vietnam has a very dirty sense of humor. He and I get along very well.
He was reading a sailing magazine one day on his vacation in Saigon and came across an article that was supposed to eulogize a great sailor and his wife.
The wife took her husband's unfortunate last name and became "Susan Hiscock."
"'Susan His-cock' - can you believe that someone would really have that name? Hey, what's your name? 'Susan His-cock.' Excuse me? 'Susan His-cock.' His what??? What if you got arrested for prostitution with that name?" asked my uncle.
Then he promptly produced the article to prove that he was telling the truth.
I'll cheer up and regale you with stories and pictures - some funny, some beautiful, some neither, but for now I am too depressed.
I shouldn't be reading this book about this woman's escape from Vietnam after she'd been raped and tortured by the Viet Cong... especially after I visited the site of my mother's family's escape from the VC.
So I called up mommy and she comforted me.
