I’m popping in today to write about my trip home for Christmas. I go home every year to do what most people do during the holidays: eat far too much and do as little as possible whilst fighting with various family members. This year however, we shook things up a little: my lovely girlfriend Jen came over for a visit.

I think it’s safe to say that Jen came back to Texas safe in the knowledge that there are two things you really need to know about Ireland. It is a beautiful country, and it is unmercifully cold. I have some photographic evidence to back up both of these statements.

You can’t tell, but she’s having a great time. We took this picture on a trip to the Cliffs of Moher whilst travelling around my favourite part of Ireland, the west coast of Counties Clare and Galway. Ireland is suffering the same cold snap affecting the rest of Europe at the moment, so things were pretty rough. The main road to my uncle Brian’s was flooded, so we had to (very slowly) take an alternative route. More chance to check out cool scenery though.

This part of Ireland is called the Burren, which is famous for being a karst region in Ireland, made up mostly of limestone. This makes for fantastic scenery. Oliver Cromwell famously sent a scout into the Burren, only for the grim report to come back that “There isn’t tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man.” Yup, Oliver Cromwell. Not a nice guy.

It also means there are some interesting geographic features, as my old teacher Mr. O’Brien would describe them. My favourite are turloughs, or winter lakes. Due to the higher water table in the winter and  the limestone bedrock, the Burren has lots of small lakes that turn up in winter time when the water table rises and disappear during the summer. Thanks to the unbelievable weather these lakes had frozen over.

See the fence over the frozen lake?

Of course, my main reason to go to the Burren is to see family. I don’t always have American tourists with me, you know. Here’s a picture of my cousin Cliona.

You see? I can embarrass younger cousins from thousands of miles away. My dad is the oldest of nine and has dutifully taken on the responsibility of making fun of all his younger siblings and their offspring at every opportunity. I’m in training to take over. It all works in a hierarchy though; my dad’s younger siblings are free to torment me and by extension Jen. For my uncle Brian this mostly consisted of driving about ninety miles per hour down roads barely wide enough for his car while interrogating Jen about trivial matters instead of watching the road. It was great!

After a couple of days of Jen being terrorised by my uncle Brian and some more rather hairy country driving, we returned to Cork, where it seems things have gotten a little ghetto since the economy crashed.

We decided it might be prudent to get out of the city, and braved the icy roads to visit the lovely town of Kinsale.

Kinsale was the site of the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, when a combination of Irish and Spanish forces were defeated by the English, more or less settling what is now known as the Nine Years War and resulting in the “Flight of the Earls”, the end of the Irish political aristocracy. Today, Kinsale is noticeable for being picturesque, having a comedy festival, and sporting numerous oddly named retail establishments.

It’s never really struck me before how easy it is to recreate postcard-type photographs in Ireland. You’ve got the little village by the sea:

and the medieval tower in the middle of nowhere:

This was even before I took Jen to Blarney Castle.

Incidentally, the gift shop at Blarney had quite possibly the most cray tote bag ever.

Jen kissed the Blarney stone, and is now officially an eloquent person everyone! Yay! She needed it, because it was time to make merry and meet all the people I went to school and college with, and still talk to, all while drinking quite a lot of Guinness.

Ok, ok. We were having too much fun to take any decent photographs of the pub shenanigans. To make up for it, I decided to post a picture of the family dog in  a snuggie.

Rolo, our American Spaniel. As you can see, the members of my family enjoy both celebrating the Christmas spirit and making animals look ridiculous. He seemed okay with it! We even had little Santas holding our olives and sun dried tomatoes in place (we were trying to impress our visitor).

I tucked in to my favourite meal of the year. Yum.

All in all, I think it went ok! My family succeeded at not imploding or otherwise being embarrassing in front of our visitor, and I think Jen enjoyed meeting so many people in such a short space of time. You did very well Jen. Maybe you can show me up in the comments! Though I’m not lying everyone. Really.

Bye Ireland. See you in December.

I’ll give you the basic details: my lovely girlfriend Jen and I decided to get away for the long weekend, but it took us a while to figure out where to go.  I suggested New York, San Francisco and Memphis.  Jen politely reminded me it was better to think of somewhere a little closer to home, perhaps a place we could actually arrange to visit at such short notice.   It took us a little while, but after some thought and a quick read of a classic poshdeluxe post, we had our answer: we would visit Marfa, Texas!

When I first arrived in Texas, three years ago, I was regularly invited to go camping at a place called “Big Bend.”  Naturally, I assumed these people were either making fun of me or completely insane.  Not only did the idea of naming a location with a name so clearly in danger of juvenile mockery seem a little unbelievable, but my Irish soul had long been marked with the nightmarish experience of our own particular brand of camping.

In Ireland, you see, camping involves being wet, and cold.  If you’re camping it is because you are a teenager being effectively forced to sleep in a tent by some form of school authority, or because you are at a music festival.  I’m sure there are Irish people that choose to camp, but I can safely say they are in the minority.  That’s not to say that nobody in Ireland camps; to the contrary, our hills and vales are full of German and English people wearing socks and sandals.  It’s just that the natives know better.  I know there are several reasons these doubts don’t hold true for camping in Big Bend, not least the fact that it does not rain as much.  Three hours into our long weekend though, and I was being given food for thought.

I had been excited about Marfa since reading the posh post, and had become more excited upon seeing the rather excellent There Will Be Blood.   I liked the barren empty landscapes, possibly because they offer such a contrast to my own (beautiful) homeland.  However, here we are travelling on the highway and I’m getting more of a Twister vibe.  I was Bill Pullman, not Daniel Day-Lewis! (Note: not that it’s a bad thing.  Bill Pullman is a friend of the show.)

Thankfully, things got better.  A lot better.  We made it to Marfa alive!  Now Marfa, apart from being a destination for hipster safari tours, is a very nice small Texas town that’s quite famous for some unexplained lights.  It being Labor (sic) Day weekend, Marfa people were celebrating in full force!  And of course, celebrating in full force, Texas style, involves lots of awesome food!

Come on.  You KNOW that looks good.

Most interestingly, the fact that everyone who was ANYONE was hanging out at the centre of town left us free to wander around town in splendid isolation.  Jen particularly liked this pretty cool looking building.

It’s the Judd Foundation, which I have since learned is must-see for people interested in Marfa’s vibrant art scene.  I am one of those people, but I didn’t get to have a look first hand because it was closed!  In fact, we were paying for our privacy by not being able to get in anywhere!

How could you, Leo?  I wanted to browse through your store and not buy anything! I would have said hello and thank you!!!

JM Dry Goods WAS open.  I bought a cool shirt.  Doesn’t this store look nice?  The people who worked there were nice.  As a cultural experience for me, this trip was working out really well.  It felt a lot like rural communities at home in Ireland.  Everyone is nice, they all seem to know each other, and everything is safe.  The difference is the scale.  Ireland is not densely populated, but it’s not anywhere near as BIG as Texas.  In that regard, the Marfa area felt like a different planet.

The sky is so big.  It’s really amazing.  We did more stuff in the area; we went to Fort Davis and Alpine.  We also went to the McDonald Observatory for a “star party.”  This was really cool: a very pleasant and geeky man points out constellations with a crazy enormous evil genius size laser pointer, and then we all stand in line to look at Jupiter through telescopes.  No really, it was great.  We also did a lot of window shopping in the very cool shops around the area.

We rounded off our trip with a quick visit to El Paso to see Jen’s mum.  I’ll give you a summary of the most important points: I ate way too much Korean food and took a photograph of a Cookie Monster pinata.

It was a great day.

So, I survived my trip to West Texas.  It was really fantastic.  There was a lot of driving involved, but who can complain when you have so much beautiful scenery to look at?  I’ll never get sick of that enormous sky.

LINKS

To celebrate my unabashed love of America, here are some links.

A lot of posh readers know, but Hugh Laurie is a very, very funny man.

Living in Austin has taught me to love college football.  Not just because of the Longhorns, but because of ridiculous things like this (stick with it through the first thirty seconds).

Some people aren’t the biggest fans of America.  Alan Partridge doesn’t know how to cope with an Englishman who really likes “American things.” I think I’ve said this here before, but Steve Coogan is a genius.

John here, reporting from the wastelands of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.  I recently went on an adventure; it’s a pilgrimage to some.  I was excited, I won’t lie, though perhaps not excited as this lady:

Yes, I went to Blizzcon.

Alright, for the uninitiated among you, I should probably expand on what Blizzcon is.  Way, way back, in the 1990s, when boy bands roamed the earth, there was a company called Blizzard Entertainment.  They made a game called Diablo, which turned out to be intensely addictive, and many young people who liked to play games on their PCs when their parents thought they were doing homework found happiness.  They also made a game called Starcraft, which was a lot of fun and also extremely addictive for the 5% of the human population that could survive more than three minutes in an online game.  The reason for the difficulty of this task was that the people who wanted to get good at Starcraft got REALLY GOOD AT STARCRAFT.  So much so that it spawned a professional gaming scene in South Korea.  Also, rip-roaring comedy.

Well, while Blizzard was busy making the fanboys of the earth discover and fall in love with them, it also made a game called Orcs & Humans, which evolved into the Warcraft series, which eventually evolved into World of Warcraft, a cultural phenomenon of which you have probably heard.  Almost twelve million people play WOW, as those in the know call it; the majority of these people pay $15 a month for the privilege.  So, these days, Blizzard is pretty big.

Now, the sheer bigness of Blizzard has had an interesting result.  Conventions celebrating video games and the like normally feature a surfeit of white men in their 20s and 30s who very clearly eat way too much junk food.  My natural habitat, if you will.  WOW, however, has acquired something which most game developers can only dream of: a genuinely widespread and broadly based appeal.  This has two major effects. Firstly, there are a lot of women at Blizzcon.  The convention’s population comes pretty close to representing, you know, the world’s population.  Secondly, the cosplaying is a little out of control.

In addition to all of this, things have gotten a little surreal.  The costume contest, which the lady at the top of this post won, was hosted by Jay Mohr.  The closing ceremony had two rock bands performing: Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain and Ozzie Osbourne.  Which of those acts sounds familiar?  Geoff Keighley was hosting the whole thing for a DirectTV television cast available to purchase online for those at home.  Did I mention the tickets sold out in less than a minute?

My favourite thing about Blizzcon by far, however, was the fact that despite the odd celebrity appearances and the open commercialism of the whole thing (lines for the official store took at least two hours to work through) the convention remains a chance for people who are into video games to meet up with each other.  In a way, it feels like Blizzard knows this deep down, hence their decision to include plenty of landmarks in the building to serve as meeting stations for people who might not necessarily know what the other person looks like.

I myself had a meeting like this!  Not with anyone I play video games with, though.  I met the very nice gentlemen of Idle Thumbs.  It’s a very cool podcast, and I urge you to go and have a listen if you like video games.  If you don’t like video games… well, they’re very nice people.  So, I’m standing there with three or four complete strangers talking about video games and my dissertation topic and the weirdness of Jay Mohr hosting a costume contest.  It was really nice.

I’m not going to lie.  I nerded it up.  I attended numerous panels discussing everything from the artwork involved in Diablo III to the alterations being made to statistical values of magical items to affect game balance and improve the user experience.  They’re removing spell power as an item stat and assigning total spell power and mana to your character’s intellect. I know.  It’s awesome.

I also told everyone I met that this guy had the coolest costume.  Firebats rule.

Note the bystanders in the shot.  It turns out, when 20,000 people want to get into one building, queueing is a big part of the equation.  This hadn’t dawned on me.  So, Friday comes around, and rather than join the queue like a normal person I took photographs of complete strangers who had decided to dress as fictional characters.

It was fun.  The whole thing was fantastic, wonderful fun.  On both nights of the convention, a few hundred of us descended on the nearby Hilton, and hung out by the bar as family groups returned from Disneyland to get some sleep.  I approached Russell Brower, the man behind the music of these games that I love and told him he was doing a great job. He wasn’t scared or anything! I met strangers who had nothing in common with me except a video game, and we had a great time.  It was the most fun I had in ages, because we were all there to hang out and basically celebrate the fact that video games, Blizzard video games in particular, are brilliant.

How about you guys?  Is there some kind of mass meet-up for anything you’re really into?  Is there one you wish existed? I know you’re out there!

POSH NOTE: The lighting in the Anaheim Convention Centre was not conducive to my amateurish photography skills.  The photographs of the cosplayers on stage in this post came from Joystiq, and you can find them here.  Nevertheless, I can’t resist the urge to post this last shot.

Isn’t Blizzcon awesome?

Well, while Miss Posh D is on posh leave doing posh things, I’m back to say hello to everyone and write a blog post of my own. I’m following in Randy’s footsteps here, a man who self-deprecatingly claimed that he was bringing down the cool factor of this most poshest of blogs. He then wrote a very cool post about his trip to Nashville. Well Randy, today I want to write about Dungeons & Dragons. In the competition to be lame, I win Randy. I win.

Actually, I’m writing about D&D (it’s just easier to abbreviate this way, okay?) because it has been a wonderful and unexpected surprise for me. Sure, the game features both dungeons and dragons, but it also features zombies, which I also think are quite cool. You see, growing up in Ireland, I didn’t encounter Dungeons & Dragons as a cultural phenomenon in the way that Americans my age did. I liked the cartoon, because it involved swords and dragons and things whilst following the 1980s cartoon staple of combining semi-aryan heroic archetypes with weird dudes, like a winged devil riding a flying horse, or a cartoon approximation of Mickey Rooney playing Yoda.

edfa

But I had no idea there was a whole phenomenon behind the cartoon, or that there was any connection to a tabletop game being played by thousands of people across America using little more than pencils, paper, and some dice. I also didn’t know that other Americans considered a game about elves and orcs a vehicle of Satan’s grand plan to destroy humanity. I just thought the cartoon was cool. In the years since, I’ve heard more and more about the game. Like many people, I formed an image in my mind of a bunch of sad sack socially inept white guys sitting around a table using words like “doth”, “thou”, and “hast”. I also assumed that capes were involved. I pictured an evening approximate to the one described here by the thespian Vin Diesel, in a weird knock-off of Inside The Actors’ Studio.

These assumptions were not alleviated by the terrible live action movie Dungeons & Dragons featuring Jeremy Irons, doing… something.

So, with all this evidence weighing against any involvement whatsoever with the game, how did I end up spending about a night a week sitting in a room with four other people rolling dice and scribbling numbers down on a piece of paper for about four hours? Well, the answer is a mixture of an affection for video games and Wil Wheaton.

I don’t have an affection for the actor that once played Wesley Crusher. I just meant… Never mind. ANYWAY, I was recently in Asia. Some of you might have heard about it, or observed the development of my growing food obsession. The thing is, when you work for a certain amount of hours a day and eat for a few more, you’re still left with a couple of hours to spend. This, combined with the occasional drudgery of dissertation research, resulted in a huge increase in the number of blogs I pay attention to, and the number of podcasts to which I listen. As a result, I became aware of Mr. Wheaton’s “Internet presence” and his occasional crusading for/gushing about D&D, a game he has been playing for a rather long time. Now, a few months ago Mr. Wheaton joined the gentlemen of Penny Arcade for a spot of D&D, and they made a podcast about it.

These guys were having fun. They were making fun of each other, and even SWEARING, using real curse words and not made up “progeny of peasant livestock owner” comments or something. The podcast is an aural medium, but I’m pretty sure there were no capes involved. Suddenly, this seemed something that I was interested in. That was the first step. Since then, there have been several more steps, and they have mostly involved availing of the openness and friendly nature of the people I have encountered who like playing this game. It’s a little daunting as a 28 year old to try and take up a hobby that most started enjoying in their teens. I was ready to run at the first sign of nerd elitism.

However, everyone was really nice and welcoming, and I now join a gaming group on the weekends (when I have the time) to drink beer, listen to metal, and play D&D. Seventh Heaven. Some people who like to play D&D like to get more into the role-playing aspects of it. Some, like me, don’t. But everyone is cool to each other. I have to say, it’s a nice thing. All in all, I’m happy I gave it a shot. My girlfriend is concerned about me, Henri found it particularly amusing, and everyone else I’ve spoken to about it has responded with some kind of bewilderment. But I have fun with it! I’m not even remotely embarrassed, and I have no reason to be.

But what about you, Posh readers? Do you have any hobbies that are sometimes seen as a bit odd, or mocked in the general media? It’s ok if you like stamp collecting, train spotting, or even watching cricket. Go on, SHARE.

I shouldn’t complain, though! It’s been a wonderful trip. Jen coming over last week really helped get me closer to the end of what’s been quite a long stint on my own. We left you last week with food and cute kittens. I can’t promise more kittens unfortunately, but there will be food, and THE TALLEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD.

When they built the 101, they initially planned for more floors; I think it was around one hundred and twenty-five. I’m not sure “Taipei 125” has as nice a ring to it. In any case, it dawned on somebody just in time that such a tall building would interfere with air traffic. They promptly altered the building plans, but did nothing to prevent the construction of one of the ugliest buildings in the Eastern Hemisphere. Thankfully, you can’t see just how awful the building looks when you’re ninety floors above ground on the viewing deck.

Not a bad view, eh? It was quite windy up there but my heart was warmed by the Taipei 101’s consideration for my safety or perhaps assumption of my complete stupidity.

No jumping. Really. We mean it.
Jen and I also took this chance to pose for the requested cheesy couple holiday photograph.

We returned to the earth’s surface to walk around the posh shopping area that surrounds the 101. Here we found a giant panda taking it easy:

A possibly perfect shirt for a certain poshdeluxe reader:
An iced tea promotion involving a dancing penguin and people on rollerskates throwing giant fake lemon slices at each other:

And whatever this is:

For our travels the next day, I decided to contrast the urban aggression and disregard for the lessons we supposedly learned from the Tower of Babel that Taipei 101 engenders with the rather more traditional town of Jiufen. Jiufen is not far from Taipei, and it’s a great destination for day trips, featuring what the Taiwanese call, literally, an “old street.”

The keys to Jiufen are food (almost everything is available in taro form, and they have giant fish ball soup), tea, and apparently, lanterns.

There is also a wonderful view.

Unfortunately, getting up to see the view left Jen in a bit of a tender state. Jen doesn’t get travel sick very often, but then again, Jen doesn’t get in a bus driven by a Taiwanese lunatic up a very bendy and narrow mountain road very often. So, no photographs of us tucking into taro here. Actually, taro isn’t the most photogenic foodstuff, so trust me, you guys will live through it. I got her back to Taipei as soon as I could, and we grabbed my favourite variety of Japanese food, namely, bowls of rice and stuff.
Jen got my usual favourite, the katsudon.

And I got a bunch of fish with plenty of wasabe.

Yes, the wasabe was hot.
Finally, it was time for Jen to go home, but we squeezed a couple more dishes in. I went for some nice basic pork and rice.

And Jen went for one of my dad’s favourites, and one of Taiwan’s specialties, beef noodle soup.

I didn’t warn her how utterly massive it would be.
And then, Jen was gone. Off home, where I am happy to say that she has arrived, a little bit worse for wear from jet lag. Next Monday, it’s my turn. I’ve had so much fun. Thanks Sarah, for letting me write on this every week. It’s been nice to write about it, especially as I’ve allowed work to produce excuses for me to let my own blog fall into disgraceful disrepair. Thanks to all you guys for reading and leaving comments! I’ll be back, but it’s never easy to leave. Just ask the guy on the left.

This is from an advertisement for a vitamin drink on the MRT. Obama drinks it, because he is a winner. Taiwan, you drive me crazy, and I will miss you.

Well, I’m still reeling from my mauling at the hands of baseball apologist Josh yesterday, but it’s only fair to admit that I was well beaten.  Under your biased American standards.  Only joking!  Josh won easily, and I bow to you, Josh, the better man.

In between sending Josh e-mails arguing for my favourite sport, I was showing my lovely girlfriend Jen around Taipei.  We have had a great week, so much so that I can’t cover it all in this post!  This works rather well as I will spend most of next week in a library to squeeze in some final bits and pieces of work before I come back to America.  This is my second last post from Asia!

Well, we had to start Jen off with some tasty Asian food.  The day after she arrived, we met my friends Ana and Wei-Da for lunch near Taiwan National University.  We were also joined by my old friend Maialen from my Masters days in Sheffield.  She was making a short research trip to Taiwan as well.  So everyone was really happy, especially me!  So happy were we that we got some rather awesome fish:

And a super cool Taiwanese style doughnut.  From Mr. Donut, of course.

Mid-bite.  Because it looked that good.

I then took Jen on a wee tour of the student area, so she could take in some of Taipei’s own mad hipsterishness.  To understand the hipster, you must go to the source.  I showed Jen some of the clothing stores, where we discovered that even sportswear can’t escape the ridiculousness.

We took it easy Jen’s first full day because jet lag sucks.  The zoo was next on our agenda for the week.  We took a lot of photos but animals will not just sit still and be nice for some reason, so we didn’t end up with photos we felt were truly poshworthy.  I will always remember two things about Taipei Zoo however.

There are children everywhere.

The zoo has ridiculous signs.

After the student area and the zoo, it was time to get some culture!  We went to see Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.  Chiang Kai-Shek was the ruler of Taiwan from the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 until his death.  Essentially, Chiang responded to a crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communists by continually insisting that a) Taipei, and not Beijing, was the legitimate seat of Chinese government and b) despite losing a big war in very comprehensive fashion he is actually really, really awesome.  His political party, the Kuomintang, agreed with him and built a big hall and square to celebrate his memory.  Recently, for reasons not completely clear to me, the subway passage from the MRT to the hall entrance is decorated with awesome pictures of cats.

Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall is quite cool though.  It’s an unwritten rule that all visitors to Taipei have to go and see it.

Now that we had a little culture out of the way, it was time to start hanging out in cool trendy areas again! Like Ximen Ding!  Ximen Ding is a famous shopping area in Taipei.  I used to go there all the time to grab t-shirts and video games.  On a Saturday, when you come up the escalator out of the MRT, there are gaggles of teenagers waiting for their respective dates.  They then walk around together and maybe grab a bite to eat, perhaps in a restaurant like this one:

Yes, that is a real restaurant.  Awesome, no?  No, we didn’t eat in there.  And no, I’m not going to, either.

Ximen is also a pretty rad place to pimp up your cellphone.

Or try your luck at winning a blatant Snoopy rip-off plushy.

After Ximen, the Shilin Night Market seemed like a logical next step.  Night markets are fantastic, and essentially an excuse to eat lots of snack food.  It’s a big attraction all through the week, and I had to bring Jen to check it out.  I had plans in mind for what we would eat as soon as we got there.  Before I could spring my plans into action however, Jen pointed something out that I perhaps had become desensitized to: the sheer wow factor of commercials for pension savings plans in Taipei MRT stations.

Anyway, we got to Shilin Night Market and I put my plan into action.  We ate an enormous piece of Taiwan style fried chicken.

It gave us just enough strength to brave the craziness that is a Taiwanese night market.

Shilin Night Market had two more things that I really wasn’t expecting.  Since the last time I visited, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of petshops.  There are small cages full of puppies, kittens, and hamsters everywhere!! In the kitten section, there was a little tension.

But some of these little guys are just too tired to show off.

Finally, Shilin confirmed something I had always suspected.  It is secretly really posh.

Well.  We got through a lot this week!!!  There’s nothing left to say….. although I can still post a couple more photos of food.

After the zoo, Jen and I went to Kiki’s, a restaurant in Taipei famous because it’s owned by a celebrity.  Fortunately the food is rather good, too.  We got a couple of classics.

Kung Pao Chicken!

Pork stir fry, which looks a lot like Kung Pao Chicken but is completely different!

It is! Really!
And my favourite: pineapple shrimp balls.

Yes.  Yummy.  Must be washed down with some beer in a small glass, Taiwan style.

And that was our week!  We are having a lot of fun.  Jen is still here, so I’ll have some more next week, for my final post!

Well, it’s been a busy week, I won’t lie. Before the week started, though, I had a chance to relax for the weekend. My dad was in town for our friend Nina’s wedding (more on that in just a bit) and a fellow academic had offered to take me to a baseball game to sample the Taiwanese atmosphere.

Despite picking a baseball-related topic for my dissertation, my interest in the game is really a work in progress. I’m more of a football guy. Yes, yes. Soccer to you. Still, I’m getting more and more interested in baseball all the time, and although present day professional Taiwanese baseball probably has little in common with elementary school baseball in the 1930s, it seemed like a good idea.

As you can see, space is a bit of a premium in Taipei. The stadium is in Tianmu, which is known for being a wee bit fancy, and also known for being full of foreigners. Despite my clear association with both of these things, it was my second time ever being to Tianmu. My first visit was instigated by a friend from Hong Kong, who wanted to go shopping in the famous shopping mall across the street from the stadium and then stand in line for an hour to order something at Mr. Donut. Mr. Donut was a big deal at the time.

The game was great, and as you can see (in this REALLY short video), the crowd gets into it slightly more than is common at a Rangers game. They were doing that because one of their better players was getting ready to bat. Nothing had actually happened yet!! The teams playing were the Brother Elephants and the LA New Bears (from Kaohsiung). I really wanted an Elephants jersey but they somehow cost US$200. I guess they don’t want anybody to own one.

I had to leave early and grab plenty of sleep because the following day was really important. My friend Nina was getting married!!

Nina is an old family friend. I first met her when I was fourteen years old. She started working for my dad when she was around twenty-one or so, and they have worked together on and off since. She is now the country manager for an international telecoms company. In addition to being very good at her job, Nina is awesome, and regularly takes care of me. I’m not sure how many of you know, but I can’t manage it on my own.

Along the way, Nina met George, and they had finally decided to get married. They went for a Western-style ceremony for a few friends before the main banquet, at which they expected around three hundred guests. The western theme was very heavy on flowers…

… and children.

And here are Nina and George! Don’t they look great?

George proceeded to tell Nina how much she meant to him, and recited for all the guests the story of their relationship, how they met, fell in love, and decided to get married. Nina, who was a fantastic mix of tears and giggling, showed George up completely by singing him a love song!

Still, the ring bearer looked a little nervous.

George and Nina have been together a long time, and a lot of people had been waiting for this. The ceremony finished, and that was it. Nina is married now! Don’t they look relieved?

In a good way.

So, baseball and a wedding. It’s one way to spend a weekend. I could go on and discuss my ten hour days in the library, but I’m not sure Sarah’s blog can handle the imminent Internet traffic drawn by such exciting tales. I’m not entirely sure what’s coming in the next week, but I pledge this to you now: there will be more pictures of food.

On my first day, a teacher grabbed me by the collar and threw me in line for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance beside Jon Mallari, a Filipino the same teacher informed me had just moved back from New Mexico. I was an eleven year old Irish boy; I had absolutely no idea what that meant. I’d only heard of the original Mexico at that point. I soon discovered that Jon had grown up in the US, so he didn’t speak Tagalog either. This coincidence gave birth to a strong friendship that continues despite my disgraceful lack of attention. Jon and I became close throughout my next three years at La Salle, and I also met his sister, Patti. Despite my stunning inability to interact with girls in any kind of an acceptable manner, Patti and I also became close, so that a couple of years after I moved back to Ireland I was only too happy to head back to Manila to accompany her to her graduation dance.

Nowadays I try and make up for never e-mailing Jon and Patti by traveling back to Manila as often as I can. Unfortunately this tends to be once a year at best. On this occasion, I hadn’t been over in around two years. What do old friends do after such a long time of so little contact? The answer is simple. We eat as much as humanly possible!!!

I normally stay in Makati, at the centre of modern Metro Manila. It’s a great area to sample a whole bunch of different foods. Patti and Jon chose the restaurants impeccably, beginning with the incredibly awesome John & Yoko. First of all, you have the name: tasteless and epic fail all in one. Secondly, the waiters and waitresses all have super cool, cosmopolitan name tags featuring international cities such as Milan or Tokyo rather than, you know, their names. Thirdly, the service is astonishingly bad. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I think these people were doing their best to make me feel I’d made a huge mistake walking into the restaurant. Also, the food was pretty good.

The whole experience was kind of hilarious. The next day, we met Jon and Patti’s parents at Kitchen, which offered a much nicer experience. On top of the company present, the food was really nice, and rather stylish. Observe this tasty salad.

At this point, I was beginning to feel rather spoiled, but as Filipinos are some of the nicest people on the planet, and anyone I am friends with clearly qualifies as being particularly awesome, Patti and Jon refused to let up. Next, we had dinner at Pepper Lunch, a fairly unassuming restaurant with a fast food style ordering process and awesome food that cooks itself on the plate in front of you!

I went to bed on my second evening in Manila well and truly stuffed. It’s a nice feeling. However, I still hadn’t eaten any Filipino cuisine. We corrected that the next day at Café Bola, where I got to have Adobong Pusit. This is a typical Filipino adobo made with baby squid and covered in squid ink. It is fantastic.

We had one more trick up our sleeve. It’s a little known fact outside the Philippines that Filipinos can confidently claim dessert as one of the many things at which the nation excels. In previous trips to Manila, I had sat with Jon and Patti in defeat, with various types of chocolate dessert taunting our inability to finish them off. We resolved that on this occasion, we could not let that happen. There was only one answer: we would skip dinner completely on my last day and eat only chocolate!!!!

Mint macaroons with chocolate. Wow.

We bravely refused to act with anything even remotely approaching caution of prudence.

Bravery is a dish best served with chocolate.

It was so good. Oh wow, it was SO GOOD. However, I must point to one, single, caveat. All-chocolate dinners result in weird all-chocolate hangovers.

These days, Jon and Patti are doing really well. Jon is working on his artwork and finishing up a comic book.  He has an online gallery of some of his work here.

Patti is a Communications Specialist with Saatchi and Saatchi, and is tremendously successful. On top of everything else on her plate, she’s starting a food blog soon. You might have noticed the (slightly… *cough*, *cough*) higher quality of the photos in this post. It’s really cool to see people you care about doing so well in life. We also got around to an updated picture.

Thanks for indulging me everyone!

EXCEPT FOR WHEN I WENT TO TOKYO!!!

Okay, the horrendous use of all caps must be explained. I have talked about going to Tokyo for years, and it was always blocked by one thing or another. The one thing usually being money and the other being time. This trip finally gave me an excuse to go. I HAVE to go. I have to look at Japanese primary sources.

Well, the work went alright. It was mostly beneficial to get to Tokyo and see the Baseball Hall of Fame and museum. The people there were really friendly, and only to happy to photocopy books for me. It’s a weird sensation as a graduate student for others to do the crappy work for you, but I won’t complain too much! I even got over the expense, as everything in Tokyo is crazy expensive anyway. More importantly, it gave me a chance to look around the special room set up to honour Sadaharu Oh, Japanese baseball legend and part-time Derek Zoolander enthusiast.

Go on, guess which one he is.

The rest of my trip was consumed with shopping! I need to come to Tokyo about a year after I graduate, when in theory I’ll have a decent amount of disposable income. I still had a bit of money to spend, just not enough to blow around a hundred dollars on some utterly ridiculous stuff.

Sorry about the profanity in the image, but I had to post that. I just don’t know what Mickey Mouse would think if he saw it. To be fair, it’s a classic example of people from a different culture just completely failing to get it. I’m still allowed to find it funny.

Unfortunately, I also had to pass on less offensive and much more awesome stuff, like this guy:

He was sitting there in Super Potato, a famous retro game store in Akihabara. This store pretty much summed up my regret at not abandoning education in favour of a steady salary earlier: if possible, I would have walked out of there with this guy, another cushion, a Sega Saturn and possibly, just possibly, a Wonderswan Color. The Wonderswan Color, a handheld console so awesome and rubbish at the same time it overrides my natural instincts to spell things correctly in order to pay it due reverence. Next time, Super Potato. Next time.

I was mostly confined to window shopping therefore, including with the food.

Ok, I mostly went in and ate food. I’m not sure if you guys know, but it’s very common for Japanese restaurants in Japan and the rest of East Asia to display fake versions of available dishes in the window. A true godsend for foreign visitors, and the complete opposite of China, where you’re left to guess what Seven Emperor Treasure might be. I still got into trouble though, at one place in particular where it took the young lady working there five minutes to make me realize I had to place my order at a vending machine at the front of the restaurant. Then she brought me my pork and rice.

Yup, my Japanese needs some work, it turns out. Here’s another example, taken from my attempts to ask a lady at an information desk in a shopping mall for directions to an ATM:

Lady: Hello sir, how can we help you today?
John: Hello, I am sorry, I don’t speak Japanese very well. Is there a bank/ATM in this building?
Lady: Which bank would be acceptable to you sir? (Using the Japanese word for ‘good’)
John: Yes, banks are good.
Lady: Yes, sir…. There are four banks available in this building. Which bank would be acceptable to you?
John (recognizes there are four ATMs, just wants directions to one): Yes, banks are good!
Lady (takes out chart listing all the ATMs in that building): Which bank would be acceptable to you sir?
John (notes the list): Yes, banks are good!

The lady repeated herself one more time, and I finally got it. The core problem, apart from my woeful Japanese, was that she was being extremely helpful and making sure I got precise directions to the exact ATM I wanted. I just wanted directions to the nearest ATM. It all worked out. She and I laugh about it now.

So, mostly I wandered in and out of stores, checking out ranks of Doraemon figures…

… or perusing famous types’ tributes to stores that apparently only sold overpriced videos of live music concerts…

… or taking pictures of advertisements that were being cute just for the sake of it:

That last image was taken from my sole trip on the Oedo Line. I think that myself and the three Japanese people there were the only ones who didn’t realize the Oedo Line charges three times the amount of anybody else to get you across short distances. I relied on the Japanese subway system very heavily during my trip, particularly on my last full day, when I wisely decided to go strolling around Shibuya, Japan’s most famous shopping district, on a national holiday.

There were people EVERYWHERE. That photograph represents my view everywhere I went in Shibuya. I miserably failed to find Loft, a store that apparently features awesome stickers (thanks anyway Meredith!). Although I did find a really cool place that I thought might be one of the many arcades I had passed by in Tokyo…

… but it was just a pachinko hall. Pachinko is enormously popular in Japan. Think of it as pinball, but with money. Also, it’s excruciatingly boring. I mean, REALLY boring. The cultural gap, man. Sometimes there is no crossing it.

I considered buying some Japanese pop, but the asking price of thirty dollars for a CD deterred me, as did my lack of knowledge of who was good and who was just ridiculous.

I’m going to go ahead and put this guy in the ridiculous category. At least he’s proud to be glay.

That was Tokyo! I’ll see you all soon!

I actually met Ana in Manchester, not in Taiwan. She was studying her Masters at fashion school there. Now she works in design and manufacturing for a firm in Taipei. Her boyfriend Wei-Da is a teacher and fitness instructor. When I first met Wei-Da, his name was Feng-Hua. However, he and Ana want to get married, and he changed his name on the advice of a suanming (kind of like a fortune teller) so that they would have better luck as a couple and a better chance of a happy marriage. True story. Here we are in our group photo, looking tough! Kinda.

So, on the day of the trip to Danshui, we agreed to meet at Ximen Ding, home to the famous Exit 6 and teenagers that cover the spectrum from cute and innocent to cool and moody.

Loafing seems so awesome when you’re sixteen.

Anyway, Danshui is just north of Taipei, and a fairly common location for a quick day trip. This is mainly because it’s right on the sea. Little did I realize that a day to the seaside on the weekend regardless of how depressing the weather is a mainstay in both Irish and Taiwanese culture.

Then, we went for to sample some of the famous local delicacies. Or, erm, pizza.

I did not suspect pizza with sweet potato on it would taste good, but as you can see, we were snapping it up quicker than I could get a photograph. This could have been due in part to the rather cool looking but not particularly tasty cornflake salad on offer.

So what to do with a belly full of pizza? Clearly it was time to roam around a secondary school with a hundred or so other people while kids sat there listening to their teacher on a Saturday.

Unimpressed, to say the least. The school was kinda nice, though. To be fair.

Really, it was all a prelude to more eating. Danshui is particularly famous for a food called agei, which is a ball of tofu wrapped around rice noodles, served in a thick sauce. I went for the ‘medium spicy’; I like spicy food but I’m not that good at handling the rougher stuff, and agei’s reputation preceded it.

I should have gone for the light spicy, for sure.

Luckily there were plenty of opportunities nearby to cool off with a drink, including these awesome people who have a coffee shop on their motorbike! They pull up on the street and convert a little box on the back of the bike to a full-on coffee dispensing emporium!! That’s probably a very bad use of the word emporium, but I really wanted to write emporium. Emporium.

It’s great. They brew the coffee for you right there! Finally, none of us realized that we had visited Danshui on the same day as a festival celebrating the Baosheng Da Di, the god responsible for the bounty of children and safe pregnancies. We drove past an incredibly long parade, but I didn’t manage to get a photograph! I did, however, get a great shot on the street of this guy.

There’s a man in there underneath that big costume, walking VERY SLOWLY so he doesn’t fall over and cause absolute mayhem. These guys are awesome.

That’s it for another blog post! I’m actually writing from Japan, where I am deathly sick and spending my first day or two inside an apartment. Wonderful, I know. More on that next week, perhaps!!