tomorrowboy

So after more than two years in Asia, and over a year of traveling, I'm back in Canada. It's weird.
Of course, I'm not really done traveling as I'm in a city I've never been to before (Vancouver) and don't have a place to live yet (I'm staying with a friend), but the end seems near.

Here are some photos I took while I was in Korea.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16895374@N06/
Weird statues, Jeju Island, Loveland (possibly not safe for work)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/18193479@N07/
Random Korean stuff, mask dances, African art, monsters!

Or Nippon or whatev.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14853997@N08/

Photos of New Zealand:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14166475@N07/


Photos of Japan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14588793@N04/

So the robot musuem in Nagoya (the entire reason I went there) is closed forever.
As of last monday.
argh.

so now I:m in kyoto. I seriously don:t care about temples anymore. and my guide book is laughable. It says that whne you imagine japan you imagine temples and mountains and shit. No I don:t! I imagine robots and crazy shit happening. blah

Oh, also a new, and entirely inpenetrable, version of my name. Makkew? Mak-que? something like that. Multiple Nipponese people were saying that today.
Like I know th is hard to say (hell, loads of english speaking people can:t say it that well), but I guess I got used to Matchu which I heard in korea and other parts of asia.
eh.

Today I hitched from Tokyo to Nagoya. The long way. It took a while, but I got there eventually.
Five rides total.
Two from elderly parents and they:re grown up children. Both bought me meals.
One from a bus full of penshioners returning from a weekend in the mountains. They gave me alcohol.
One from a local bus driver who brought me like two stops down the road to where I was supposed to catch a local bus, but then!
Three cute Japanese girls who brought me into the centre of the city. Hurray! I wish I:d ridden with them the whole way...

Tonight I sleep in a capsule hotel. I:m brutal tired.

So after about a billion years of travelling, I'm coming back to Canada soonish.

I fly from Seoul to Vancouver on Thursday, the 15th of November and arrive in Terminal M at 11:30am. Hurray!

Of course, it looks like I'm going back to NL for xmas, so it's not like those things are crucial important right now.

Anyway, what I want to know from you is who do I/we know in Vancouver? I'm pretty sure there are people there that I know who I'd like to meet up with again, but I have no way of contacting them. So let me know!

Maybe tomorrow, I'll find what I call home
Until tomorrow, you know I'm free to roam.

Here are some photos I took in australia.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11309861@N03

A big rock and stuff.

It has been:
~24 years since I was born
~16 years since my family moved to Canada
~10 years since I became a vegetarian
~2 years since I left Canada
~11 months since I started travelling

I spent saturday (my birthday) at an activist workshop thing. I helped cook for food not bombs, made myself a birthday strudel, played soccer and frisbee, and then went to a party/concert under a bridge that featured a folk punk band that had a guy playing the saw.

On sunday I went to more workshop stuff and screen printed. In the evening there was a soiree with mulled wine and lots of good bands and it was really fun. Hurray.

Yesterday I helped bottle beer, then flew to Brisbane where I slept on a bed for the first time in over a week (in Melbourne I'd been sleeping on top of a hallway), and received mail from the people I know who are super awesome. Everyone that didn't send me mail I now hate ;p

Here's some photos of me and my cousins. Caution: May be diabetically sweet. Also: blurry and out of focus.

( Read more... )

before my camera broke several months ago, I did manage to get some photos in indonesia.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11329979@N06/


volcanoes


punks


monkeys

and more!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11329979@N06/

So after ~23 months total and ten months travelling I've finally left Asia.

Perhaps fittingly, it was on my last day in Asia that I saw the weirdest fucking thing I saw anywhere. Sadly I have no photos.
But if you are ever in Singapore go to Haw Par Villa.
Haw Par Villa is the result of some brothers making too much money off tiger balm and building a ridiculous garden filled with statues and dioramas.

The main attraction here are the ten courts of hell, which are representations of the excruciating torture that happen to Buddhists when they have done evil in their lives. Very bloody. See what happens to people who murder someone or whatever. Personally I think that people who lie getting thrown onto the tree of knifes is a little extreme, but I guess I'm not a Buddhist.

Also present are representations of the Monkey King from Journey to the West (Monkey!) lots of weird statues of monkeys (including a monkey tourist taking photos of the other monkeys) and other animals, the virtues and vices ("I will climb this tree and leave my friend to be eaten by a lion. Oh no! Now the lion is eating me!") and things that don't make _any_ sense. Why does that crab have a women's head? A war between rabbits and...ferrets or something, including bloodthirsty rabbits biting and killing animals. A turtle and a frog riding kangaroos...
etc. etc.

Also, most of it is free, and the ten courts only costs a dollar, so it's totally one of the cheapest things you can do in Singapore.

Oh, also there's an awesome tigermobile

Here are some photos taken by someone sorta famous: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/sets/925506/

Since then I've flown to Australia, which is really kind of strange for me as this is the first time in like eight years that've I've seen more than one relative outside of my direct family at a time (and only like the fourth time that's happened in the last 16 years). I have lots of relatives here who will all be referred to as my cousins because I don't know how they're related to me.

Anyway, I impressed some of my little cousins with my knowledge of the Teen Titans cartoon (while at the same time making some of the slightly older ones thing I'm a huge geek, which I am), but the absolute best thing happened yesterday.

One of my cousins had been dropped off at her nan's house (which is where I'm staying), and was playing outside and I offered to go to the park and play with her.
Now she doesn't even really know my name at this point as she's met me once and I'm just some random stranger, but we reintroduce ourselves and we go to the park and play tennis and frisbee and tag (or tip as it appears to be called here) and have races, when we went in to eat she didn't want to stop playing and during dinner she told me she wanted me to live here forever (awwwww). Then she kissed my goodbye on the cheek when her dad came to pick her up. So cute!

So that's where I am now, just being lazy and not really being a tourist or anything, just being unemployed and fixing kids bicycles.

visited 22 countries (9%)

5/6 biggest countries in the world create a lot of red.

blah

A paraphrased version of a conversation I had with a friend over im yesterday.

him: The music festival I went to this weekend was awesome!
me: The music festival I went to this weekend was awesome!
him: Also I met a girl.
me: Also I met a girl.

The other day I woke up in the sketchy guest house I was staying in just before seven am. Why was I awake this early? Because an older English (I guess) man was talking to a Malay man. VERY LOUDLY. The Malay guy couldn't speak much english, and the old guy was basically talking to himself.

"Whatever," I think, "I guess I'll go shower."

Once in the shower I heart screeching. "YEAAAGRRGH! AARRGGADCHHHH!" It's the old guy. I'm freaked the fuck out. I wonder how long I should stay in the shower.

Okay, I decide that I'm getting out of sketchy guest house and I'll go to the more expensive, but less sketchy one.

I get out of the shower, quickly pack my bag, but before I can leave the guy comes out again. He starts talking to the person at the frong desk, then crying. Then screeching again. He is clearly insane. Insane.

He leaves, but I'm like "whatever, I'm leaving too."

So I scarper over to the other guest house, and it's locked. But no it's not! There's a padlock on the gate, but it's not actually closed, so I'm able to unhook it and go upstairs (many hotels and stuff here are on the upper stories of buildings) and check in.

Later that day:
I bring my laundry back to the guest house and the person at the front desk is having a conversation with a Malay guy. He wants to see his wife, who he claims is staying in one of the rooms. (She isn't.) His English is bad, and the Chinese person who works here apparently doesn't speak English. Anyway, she asks me to stay until she can call her boss/the police or something and they can get rid of this guy. And I do so. He rants at her. He rants at me. He threatens me. I can smell the alcohol off him (!). I guess his wife is sleeping with whitey or something. I don't know. Anyway, other people show up and I leave.

Later that evening I come back to sleep and he's there again. This time with the friends he threatened to have come with him. They're just leaving as I get there, but apparently they were also drunk, and all insane, because, well, why would we bother hiding his wife? Well I guess I would as he'd probably beat her or something, but still. Insane.

So moral of the story, Miri is crazy.
It also has multiple sex shops (which I didn't even know was legal in Malaysia) and too many Christians (which seems to be true through most of Sarawack).

Today I took a bus for like seven hours to get to Sibu, where I was going to stay in an entirely different type of sketchy guest house. One run by christians. But it's closed. So I wandered around trying to find a place that wasn't too expensive and wasn't filled with prostitutes.

Sarawack is pretty boring, but at least I can read books and stuff. Yay books!