So it took me four days to start disliking this country.  All things considered, this is pretty good since the last time I visited, I started hating America on the ride home from the airport.  What did it this time was going shopping.  Yumi needed a bathing suit since she couldn't find hers amongst all the crap she packed (I will probably later ( Read more... )

Yumi and I have left Korea and right now I am in an internet cafe in Narita airport.  Due to the unbearable stress of having to live with Yumi's mother the past few weeks, I had thought that I would be thrilled to finally get out.  And I am, but still the relief from constant frustration isn't enough to overshadow the sadness about leaving Korea ( Read more... )

The list is late this month due to traveling.  Books I read in May ( Read more... )

Last week, I went to China for the fourth time. I went with Yumi and her mother to visit her grandparents and her aunt and uncle.  We were also thinking about going to Shanghai but in the end we didn't because we've been doing a lot of traveling and I just didn't want to spend more money.

This is the third time I've met Yumi's grandparents and aunt ( Read more... )

After Saigon we spent a night in Bangkok and then went to Chiang Mai.  Chiang Mai has all of the things that I liked about Bangkok and far less of the things that are awful.  It's small, cheaper than Bangkok and has a bunch of stuff to do just outside of the city.  On our first day we went on a tour to see a bunch of the stuff outside of the city. ( Read more... )

After Bangkok we went to Saigon, which is actually a pretty nice place.  It's poorer than Bangkok so things are cheaper.  It has a lot of really nice upscale shopping malls and hotels for foreigners.  It's full of communist propaganda and atrocity photos of the war to make people hate Americans.  Because of the French colonization there are a fair ( Read more... )

For all its reputation as the best  tourist destination in Asia, Bangkok is probably the worst place in Asia that I have visited.  Some of this is not Bangkok's fault, most of the places I have visited I have known someone there to show me around and it turns out that makes a huge difference.  Bangkok has does have some merits, but Bangkok has ( Read more... )

So the women and I went to Jeju Island last week.  Like every other city we've visited excluding Busan, Jeju Island is not a good place to visit if you do not have a car.  Since my US licence expired years ago and Yumi doesn't know how to drive, we couldn't rent one, so we got around by taking local buses and walking, hiring a taxi driver for one ( Read more... )

While beginning to pack up for moving I found a bunch of papers with financial information on them that I no longer need.  It wasn't really safe to just throw them out, but I don't have access to a paper shredder and there were too many for me to manually tear up into illegible pieces.  So I figured I could just put them in a big pile on the ( Read more... )

May 4th- 9th: Vacation in Jeju Island
May 11th-June 1st: Vacation in Thailand and Vietnam
June 2nd-4th:Move out of the apartment
June5th-15th:Vacation in China
June 25th:Go to America
July -September: Get married, find job, find place to live, go on a roadtrip across America
Early 2009: Murder-suicide