there's a conference room on the inside

Vice magazine’s blogger Alex Hoban ran an article the other day about exploring a Boeing 747 jumbo jet abandoned in the foreground of a Seoul suburb’s high-rise community.  There are only a few words that can explain this find–unbelievable comes to mind when I see these pictures, jealous is another word.

Someone should just pay me to do urban exploring like this because I would bank so hard on it.  (Wait–apparently Vice magazine does pay someone to do this).  You can come across some of the most perplexing things exploring cities… in Wuhan, China I found an entire quarter of the city where (presumably) the French had erected old colonial houses, embassies, banks, apartments, etc.   All of it was totally abandoned, it was like some creepy French ghost-town in the middle of China (more on that, in a future post).

supposedly this is the 2nd boeing 747 ever manufactured

In Beijing, there were closed-off construction sites everywhere, where people who had refused to move were living in houses with one whole side of the building missing.  In Cleveland, there are a myriad of abandoned warehouses to check out (and I’ve seen a good number of them), as in most other American cities, especially the ones that suffered from loss of industry post-WWII.

I’m sure there is no end to it when you take all the metropolises of the world, but I could imagine a few that would be a gold mine to check out: Rio de Janeiro, London, Moscow, Tokyo, and now Seoul.

But this–this trumps anything I have ever seen in real life.  I mean, seriously, could you imagine waking up for kimchi and mandoo breakfast, eating  to a view like this out your window???

Hopefully I can check it out someday if I ever make it to Korea.

Full article and more pics here.

What is it with the Asian obsession with noses?

I just found out that AT&T finally activated MMS messaging on the iPhone via a “carrier update” on iTunes.  I was looking for an image to christen my 3G’s MMS capability with, and  I can’t remember what the hell I typed into Google image search to get this picture, but this came up and seemed perfect to send as my first MMS.

lest we forget, big noses are comical here in the west, too

It reminded me of interacting with people in China… those moments when I would attempt to have a brief chat with a stranger.  The old ladies at the shop downstairs, street vendors, subway ticket clerks, girls at the bar, servers, etc.  When my Chinese started improving and becoming somewhat comprehensible, I noticed the people I talked to were just as excited to talk about my nose as to complement me on my speaking.  One time, when my friend came to visit me, we were in an elevator and two Chinese men walked in.  One said to the other, “Hey, check it out! What a good-looking nose.”  Of course they thought we couldn’t understand them.  What’s funny is that they were actually probably talking about my friend, whose nose is almost impossibly bigger than mine.  I think we must have just looked like two huge noses walking down the streets of Beijing to them.

I guess it is important to reveal here that I am, indeed, equipped with a nose of epic proportions.  My girlfriend and I found a small medical tape-measuring device in my room one day and proceeded to measure each others faces.  In the process I discovered that not only are my eyes very close together and incredibly deep-set, but my nose is an astonishing… wait for it… 2″ long from the face to its absolute highest peak.  Yep, a full 2″ length and skinny as hell to top it off.

My nose has an interesting history. It seemed to have grown to its fullest size in a matter of months. I guess this is what happens to Albanian men: they hit puberty, growth spurt, nose spurt. I’ve nearly broken mine a few times (how could you avoid it).  And although most people would be obsessively self-conscious about having such a disproportionate facial feature, one could say I have really “grown” into it.  Besides, the one thing all of my past girlfriends have unanimously told me is that they like my nose.  Who could argue with that?