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this past week has been a bit debaucherous, as i'm saying farewell to the stinky city (hong kong in mandarin is xiang gong = fragrant port). that was a new bit of information for me. i still dont understand how the words and naming system works, oh well.

here are some photos from team taiwan's trip to macau of last week....



this is a view of the grand lisboa ("the lez"). the good news is that when i go to tokyo i'll have a camera phone that can take a decent picture. 2 megapixels megasucks. the lez is a bit on the older side with regards to its casino but its still pretty sweet. the lady with her little friend is just kickin it like it's tuesday. nothing to see here. like when 2 guys sit at a restaurant on the same side of the table. nothing to see.



the content of these here photos have a lot of history to them, none of which i can remember or give a shit about. the short version is that this was a huge temple from a long time ago and then these people tried to burn it down, but since the facade was built like this, only the rest of the temple burned. that side view pretty much tells the whole story. so now there's just this wall up at the top of a staircase. it's probably cooler in person.

a few days later i went for chinese shabu shabu -- "hot pot" -- with 4 other people and this was our first round of food.....



really? me + 2 chinese guys + 2 chinese girls and this is the first of three rounds of food? I ate a couple handfuls of peanuts and a piece of chicken with 2 beers and that was it for my contribution. what isn't pictured above is the gelatinized pig blood which, of course, they enjoyed very much. pig blood + jello = my nightmares for the following 3 days. who the fuck would want to eat the semi-solidified blood of a pig? i guess my tolerance for food has improved as much as I thought.

thursday was our last day of class, so akiko and i took out our teacher joyce to thank her. we went to california pizza kitchen (she'd never been and really liked it, thank you very much.) I wasn't sure if they would rally but I convinced them to go karaoke afterwards. we sang pretty hard and each got pretty drunk. there were english, spanish, and chinese songs sung. pretty awesome! afterwards, i decided i'd go to my friend's bar which i've been to dozens of times to say goodbye to those idiots. theres also karaoke there. this chinese guy was singing some classic american song and butchering it real bad. i was drunk and laughing pretty hard. no worries. a couple minutes later i got up to see someone when the singer stopped me. oh, he speaks english, great.

guy: hey man, whats up im from atlanta, where are you from?
dk: oh im from new york.
guy: im a real american man.
dk: me too!
guy: that's awesome. im like a real american you know, i was a military man.
[he takes out his georgia drivers license and some sort of military id]
dk: well this seems unneccessary.
guy: yea man im a real american you gotta believe me. what else do u want to see?
dk: nothing man i've seen enough.
guy: then heres the thing. atlanta is a much better city than new york. why would you live in new york? just think about the rappers now. atlanta rappers are so much better than new york rappers.
dk: let me get this straight. after trying to prove to me youre a real american, you want to tell me that atlanta is a better city than new york because of the rappers?
guy: yea man, have you ever heard of ludacris?
dk: yes
guy: yea his rapping is the best! oh hey you know what, i think this place has karaoke. why dont we sing a song together.
dk: dude you just destroyed some song, you know they have karaoke.
guy: yea they do! ok cool, lets sing a song together. do you know any n'sync?
dk: sorry, what?
guy: n'sync, you know who they are of course you do.
dk: ok man lets sing n'sync.

in the end, there was no n'sync. so instead i suggested we sing ray charles' version of "georgia" to insult this a-hole. mr american from atlanta the best city in the world. and he didn't know it! so i did it, looking at this shmuck the entire time.

get excited for a conclusion style post. im still accepting names for what will be my new blog in tokyo.