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England vs. Sweden

After I showed off my superior 筷子 skills everyone began trying
to figure out the proper way to hold the chopsticks. I even had a
Taiwanese person comment me on my chopstick skills.

My first time watching a proper football match, yes football not soccer, was just the other night. If you're saying "You're first proper football match!?" look it's not my fault the US doesn't breed football tradition like most of Europe does and with an English roommate it is inevitable that I would be pulled into the culture. The games are being aired in Poland and Moscow which are both 7 hours behind Taiwan, meaning we are watching most of these games at 2:45am. The bars are open for the specific purpose of airing these football games and they draw quite a large crowd. The bars are priced at an average "western" price for a bar. A beer costing around 150-200NT ~4.50-6USD, but there is a way around that!
Another beautiful thing about Taiwan is that every corner is adorned with either a 7-11 or a Family Mart (basically another 7-11) and you can purchase food for 50NT and 4 large beers for about 200NT.
There are many more England supporters in Taiwan than I would have expected and they knew most of the England football songs as well. It began to rub off on me and next thing I knew I'm singing "England, England, ENGLAND!" England pulled out an awesome victory against Sweden that night and might be secured for playoffs....GO ENGLAND!

10 Cities on Standby USA Cont.

(May 24th) I arrived in Detroit around 9am and my next flight to Narita airport was going to be at 2pm so I had plenty of time to kill. The airport is quite large so I took my time traveling around the airport. The airport has a train that rains on a rail above all the stores and restaurants. I burnt some time traveling on that train a few times. When I had enough of feeling like a kid in an elevator I walked to my terminal and proceeded to listen to music and read Peter Hessler's "River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze." My lack of sleep would eventually catch up with me.

I woke up before they began boarding the plane and again the terminal was completely packed with Japanese people waiting to go home. I nervously went up and asked the Delta employee if there was going to be any room on the plane. "We have a weight distribution issue so it's going to be highly unlikely that we will be able to take any extra passengers." .....weight distribution issue. Not again. I still stood there hopeful that the dedicated employees of Delta would work as diligently as their fellow employees at JFK. My hope couldn't have been more displaced. They boarded all of the regular passengers and made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to board the standbys and what made it worse was that it seemed completely normal to them. Without a second thought they closed the doors and left the lot of us rejects expectantly sitting in our chairs...bastards. I guess that's the level of dedication at the Detroit airport. Of course I wouldn't have put all my trust into this flight so I prepared ahead of time.

There was another flight leaving at 7pm for Haneda, but since I would be arriving in Tokyo past 10pm there would be no more flights departing for Taipei meaning I would need to find overnight accommodation somewhere in Tokyo and take the train to Narita in the morning...oh boy. Before I did anything else I needed a beer. "If I don't get on this flight to Narita again I'm getting a drink," I told myself before I was unable to board the 2pm flight and since I am a man of my word I went to the nearby Chili's and ordered a couple tall Blue Moons and a charred burger. Once I quenched my thirst and filled my belly it was time to start looking for a place to stay in Tokyo. I google accommodation in Tokyo and it comes up with a few results. As I search through the various areas to stay I come upon a Capsule Inn and figure when am I ever going to get the chance to stay in a capsule and booked myself in for one night. Done. I'm all set.

I head back to the terminal and wait for my next flight. When 7pm rolls around I am able to board the flight with ease, finally! I'm seated in the middle column of seats with one other Japanese man sitting at the other end of the four seat row. I start the flight off by watching The Immortals, a cheap knock off of 300 that seemed like it didn't have a large enough budget to afford even decent SFX. Although, interesting in its concept it was so poorly delivered it could hardly keep my attention...perfect! Just like watching golf on TV the movie had one purpose, throw me into such a deep sleep that I wouldn't even feel the food and drink carts bumping into my head that was poking out in the aisle. Promptly after the film I fell asleep for 10 hours of the 13 hour flight. Since I couldn't get comfortable laying back in my seat I decided it would be alright to stretch my legs out along the two seats next to me. "The Japanese guy won't mind right? I mean he's got to have kids he knows we need our sleep. Ah whatever as long as I don't poke him with my smelly toes he won't care," I thought to myself. When I woke up we were about an hour away from the airport. As we were landing it hit me that I was in another country when I saw the huge bright lit up neon sign written in Kanji through the plane window, but I still couldn't take even a second to really contemplate about it. I had one mode at that time and it was Go. Get off the plane, get my luggage, find out how to get to the Capsule Inn, find out where the Capsule Inn, and then breathe. I get off the plane and and my first Asian adventure began....

10 Cities on Standby USA cont.

So I've just been unable to catch my flight to Tokyo Narita airport and I'm walking around the terminal for a few minutes. I ask a few people when the next possible flight out is and the employees tell me they have another flight leaving at the same time for Narita airport, but the situation will likely be the same situation as t  today (May 23). I call my friend, whom I will name Bob, who works for Delta and he is able to ensure my seat on a different flight for me; however, this flight leaves Detroit and there are no flights out of JFK to Detroit available at the time. So what does this mean? It means I have to travel to the best state in America, New Jersey.... and fly out of Newark. Dun dun dun Ilya to the rescue! After he had dropped me back off at the airport he had left for an interview in the city and wouldn't be able to be back until about 6pm so it was me, myself, and I waiting at the airport until then.

You quickly realize how valuable traveling with another person is when you're trying to doze off in the airport and somehow guard your luggage at the same time. About ten ten minute naps later I find out that all my luggage has been stolen and I am sitting at the airport with my pack and only the clothes on my back....just kidding. When I awoke I found this footless pigeon who had made a home out of baggage pickup 5. I sat and stared at a small Latino girl who, against her mothers wishes, fed this pigeon more Doritos than its tiny stomach could possibly handle. It seems that after the 3rd chip the pigeon didn't mercilessly devour she would have stopped throwing Doritos in its vicinity, maybe not. Twelve wasted Doritos chips and 3 1/2 hours later Ilya picks me up from the airport and we drive back to his parent's house in Staten Island.

Since it's never a dull moment when you're hanging out with Ilya the plan for the night was to go out in the city and get shamelessly drunk to celebrate his girlfriend-but-not-girlfriend's new job. After getting some Mexican food at the local restaurant we all lazily approached the car and quickly rejected that idea for a much more relaxed "green" night. We met up with his girlfriend-not-girlfriend friend's place where the 5 person party had already begun without its most important members. After some time we took a walk to the local ice cream shop in an area that apparently had a very high robbery rate, which, of course, set my mind at ease... We manage to make it back to the girls house unscathed. Her boyfriend, Dave, and myself quickly began to geek out over the new video games exhibition in the American Art Museum at the Smithsonian. Somehow the conversation moved towards him and his buddies taking acid and at one point in the story one of his friends had walked out of the house unnoticed and was walking aimlessly along a ten mile highway. Luckily everything turned out alright with his friend and their night didn't end in some sort of freak accident; although, apparently Dave had woke up in a tub half filled with water, with a dryer cord wrapped around his neck. "I don't know I can't remember what I was thinking at the time. I probably thought I was in the Bahamas or something." Uh huh likely story Dave. Two words, Erotic Asphyxiation.

We left the girls house around 3am and headed for Ilya's girlfriend-not-girlfriends house. I needed to be at the Newark airport at 6am and we arrived at his friends house around 3:30am. I was really hoping this wouldn't be one of those days where my alarm refused to work or I unconsciously turn it off. I went to sleep and woke up promptly at 5:30am ready to continue my adventure. We arrived at the airport with no issues and I said my actual final goodbye to Ilya as I entered the airport. Domestic flights are typically no problem on standby and my flight from Newark to Detroit connected without an issue. I was completely knocked out for the two hour flight and woke up in Detroit where more international standby flights awaited me....

Foreign Parenting

I woke up this morning to yelling outside my window. I look outside my second story room window, scanning the metal open gable style roofs of multiple one story houses. My eyes look down at the small alleyway beneath my window littered with bicycles, motor scooters, and clothes lines, but I can't see anything out of the ordinary. I saw and listened for a while. It seems like a father in one of the households had been yelling at his kids for quite some time. It brought me somewhat of a sense of reality. I may be thousands of miles from home, studying on scholarship, enjoying my time in a foreign country, but what was going on directly below me was so grounded, so real. This is what many foreign children go through growing up and it brought me a sense of nostalgia for what I have come from. So large is the amount of pressure put on these children from such a young age and I can only imagine what he had been yelling at them about. Judging from the lower class status of the family, the school year winding down, and the pressure of achieving the highest marks in school my guess would be it had something to do with academia, but again my lack of language skills prevents me from really understanding what the punishment had been about.

10 Cities on Standby

First and foremost, I think the reason why I am here in Taiwan would be an appropriate beginning to this post. This past year I returned to school for my second bachelors degree in Asian Studies, a topic that I have always been interested in, but have never actually pursued (and no it's not because I have an Asian girlfiriend that caused me to major in Asian Studes, at which point I would respond "I actually want to study Asian anatomy" *laughter ensues*). For years I have found myself close with Asian culture and have some sort of magnetism towards peoples of Asian descent, but this is neither here nor there, well possibly there, but not here.  During the first semester of my new major I caught wind about a new scholarship opportunity to study in Taiwan and determined to get as much experience out of this new major as possible I applied and long story short, with a little bit (probably a lot) of luck I received it and was due to leave for Taiwan at the end of May. This is where today's post will begin.

As the title suggests all my flights to Taoyuan, Taiwan were, you guessed it, on standby. For those of you that don't quite understand what that means it is when you book a ticket for a certain flight, but are not guaranteed a seat until all of the rest of the passengers have boarded the plane. I know that sounds pretty crazy, "Vadim, why the hell would you book a standby ticket when you aren't guaranteed a seat on the plane!?" The answer is pretty simple, they're cheap as hell. A round trip ticket to Taiwan was going for 1,800, I got it for 850. Sounds pretty awesome now doesn't it? Well it's a double edged sword and you need to be quite flexible with your schedule.

My trip began at BWI Airport in Baltimore, MD where my father dropped me off for my 7am flight that arrived in JFK airport in New York, NY at 8am. My next proposed flight didn't fly out until 2pm so I asked my cousin Ilya if he wanted to grab some lunch at whatever local restaurant was convenient. I suppose one could classify Ilya as a "guido" of sorts and I would be lying if I said nobody every had, but the deep relationship I have with my cousin prevents me from placing this derogatory label on an otherwise much more diverse, intelligent, intricate, and eclectic person. Of course, he agreed to meeting me one last time before I left the country for three months, but obviously, no sane person would pick me up at 8am on a Wednesday to get food so I waited around the airport until about 11 where he picked me up and we proceeded to drive to the ever so prestigious Burger King. That's how high rollers like to spend their lunch hours. Ilya dropped me back off at the airport around 1pm and I walked to my gate to get ready for my 13 hour flight.

Coincidentally, this gate was directly across from the gate I departed from when I traveled to Italy with my parents, also on standby. I turn the corner to get to the gate and it is completely packed with people, but then again so was the Italy flight and we boarded with no problem; however, the blog wouldn't be called 10 cities if I boarded this flight now would it? Apparently, the plane had a "weight distribution problem," this phrase would haunt my peregrination. Not only was there a weight distribution problem and hundreds of passengers there were at least 12 other standby passengers, all with higher seating priority than myself. All the passengers board around 1:47pm and they Delta employees begin rattling off names and frantically typing on their computers desperately trying to fit as many people onto the plane as possible. It was like a scene out  of a movie, the employees were speedily typing on their computers, more employees were arriving to help decipher some complicated seating arrangements on the computer screen, long polygraph-looking papers are spouting out of a printer behind them, all the while I am nervously tapping my passport and boarding pass on my sweaty palm.
"What am I going to do if I miss this flight? I need to register for classes on Friday and there is no way I am going to make it if I miss this flight," I say to myself. An engaged couple are talking next to me about how they want to take an engagement vacation (who does that anyway? wait for the honeymoon). The Delta employees begin rattling off standby names in a way that makes no apparent sense to me. It is approximately 1:57pm at this point.
"S3? Are there any S3s?" "We've got to close the doors! We're going to hear it from the boss, but we can let one more group on!" the attendants converse among themselves.
"Please be me, please be me, damn it I really need to get on this flight. I'm only one person!" I thought to myself.
"You, we can take you let's go!" the employees grab a group of three guys going on vacation. "Alright, that's it! Close it up, John!"
I'm standing there taken aback by the fact that now everything has been thrown into disorder.

To be continued....