| ue week 14
its not easy being an asian guy. sure i am good in math and science and i play
video games really well, but life's not perfect. i suffer from a disease known
as thick hair! when my hair grows, it grows out like a chia pet. everytime i
get my haircut, barbers always have to comment on how thick it is. yea whatever
just cut my hair. so one random thursday i headed into chinatown philly to get a
haircut. shower thursday, shower friday, shower saturday. after my shower saturday i find this
literally in my hand:
after 3 showers, a strand that should've been in the ocean by now is somehow stabbing my hand! its hard to see, but its broken skin and is at
least a good 1mm into my hand! it was standing straight up in the air! it's soo
bizarre!
our time on the east coast is slowly coming to an end. how could we leave
this side of the country without a proper farewell? so memorial weekend we set
out on our "farewell-to-the-east-coast" tour. thursday evening we
headed up to nyc for dinner. we met up with our favorite conde nasty bridal
media writer - heather lee. she took us to some hip hole-in-the-wall korean
fried chicken joint. so good! idiot wait-staff, but good times as usual.
how can a weekday trip to nyc not be complete without a visit to rockerfeller
center! why you ask? because thats where anne curry works! oh yea and her buddies. on days when i wake up before noon,
thanks for keeping me company as i eat breakfast in my jammies. here's my boy matt lauer and natalie morales.
 anne, al and matt came out into the plaza for a little bit. its a little hard to see, but i red-arrowed them in the crowd.
 for some odd reason, when i was a pre-teen, i would watch live with regis and kathy lee. you would think now that kelly ripa is on, i'd want to watch, cause she's hot! but for some reason i just prefer watching kathy lee and hoda. even with hottie rachael ray on at 10am on cbs, i just think kathy lee and hoda have more interesting topics. this is where they sit for the first segment of their hour. glare i know, but trust me, thats their corner.
on fridays the today show usually has a musical guest in the plaza. this week
it was alanis morisette! ok alanis morisette was huge in the 90's! jagged
little pill was a great album. in fact i am listening to it now as i blog. but she took a lil trip to india
and came back all calm and not as pissed as she once was... thats when she lost it
for me. i guess i like mean girls.
its been awhile alanis, but you're just too nice these days. with all those photographers facing in my direction, i must be in some musical magazine as a blur in the background. sweet!
as i am standing in the plaza waiting for alanis, there are screens above that
display the show live. the shot then cuts to an aerial view of the plaza. i move
to the left and i see that little object move left. i move right and that object moves to the right. i realize the loser standing all alone off to the
side of the stage is me!!! i'm famous!
this cop is pretty bad@$$. i was scared to take a secret pic of him. i didn't
want to get shot. so i asked if it was okay and after permission was granted, i
took his pic.
the only song i really wanted to hear was ironic and that was her 2nd song so i decided to head back to our hotel to wake the queen from her slumber. no way was she waking up at 7am for the today show. had i stayed til noon, i would've totally been on tv and who knows maybe i would've been the first guy to be picked for friday's ivillage make-over! here is one last pic i took of me across the street from the nbc studios. despite the thousands of tourists nearby, i still placed the camera on a utility box and used the self-timer.
we had so much to do and so little
time! first off, breakfast. i found a place called oms/b. they serve
omusubi which is rice wrapped in seaweed. but since this was new
york, they had to make it all special with weird toppings not typically found in the omusubis of your local japanese
supermarket like spicy beef, lobster, edamame, eel and other yummy stuff. one retarded thing about this place was we couldn't order the
breakfast special because it was past 10am and
we couldn't order off the lunch special menu because it wasn't 11am yet. the queen and i just kinda looked at each
other... at this point we should've "thank you come again"-turned and walked out of the shop... but we were kinda hungry and the queen loves omusubis. we just had to order each omusubi individually. argh! it got expensive quick, but we did get free soups because we ordered so much. it was tasty, but it wasn't
cheap because of the odd hours we were there. note to self: dont arrive here
between the hours of 10am and 11am.
 back in april, www.gadling.com reported that japan's top ramen shop, ippudo, was opening up a restaurant in nyc. ever since reading that article, i've always known that we would one day have to make a trip to try out this top shop. the queen loooves ramen. i think the squiggles in the back say "run away all ye unemployed" in japanese.
we heard there were waits of up to 2 hours at ippudo nyc during dinner hours. it bettter not be that bad dunring lunch! so we showed up a few mins after 11am and were immediately seated. phew! i think it's absurd that people have to wait longer than the time it takes to boil a pot of hot water. we were so early i even saw grand ramen master mr kawahara. he's on their website and i wanted to take a pic with him, but he was nowhere to be seen after we finished lunch. you might know ramen as the 50 cent pack you may find on a shelf at stop n shop, vons or cvs. but at high-end ramen restaurants like ippudo and momofuku, they're not messing around... each of these bowls costs $13. the queen loooves ramen. here's my bowl:
here's the queen's selection:
i had some extra red and brown crap in my bowl of ramen, but to me it looked the same. the queen felt that the noodles at momofuku were waay better. ippudo's thin noodles were not up to the queen's standards. the broth was not as rich as momofuku and there was no poached egg. the queen still loooves ramen. my only thoughts: "man that was one expensive bowl of ramen..."
so after lunch we shot up to boston. traffic wasn't as bad as it could've been. driving to boston from philly was still cheaper than flying and we also were able to stop in nyc for eats. we killed most of saturday with the martells and the smalls at the half-shell for boston's earthfest 2008. it was one big tree-hugging celebration. we gotta lot of free stuff: sage bush, snacks and drinks galore and plenty of free tree-hugging tips to save the world! we also sat around and listened to a few okay bands. the big artist of the day was cake. i saw cake back in 2002 at ucsd's
sungod festival with my buddy chris yuen. (hey chris, cake still
sucks!) yea in terms of their music, they had a few good songs. but
they suck live... so boring. i told the queen we should've just loaded
up on our free crap and left.
this is my boy boston jeong. he
likes to play and nap and play and pee and play and poo and play and sleep.
okay honestly, there was this
one time that i accidently dropped some food near boston's
mouth and he ate it. now everytime i have food near him, he looks at me and i
can just read it in his eyes, "come on man hook it up again..." well next time i see you buddy will be on the left coast. our trip to boston was nice. we were able to catch up with most of our
friends, meet the new addition and rub ethan jr via shannon's belly. do we miss beantown? you don't have to ask. we'll always have red sox nation...
so after we refueled in framingham, the queen and i decided to play a game. its called
who could keep their eyes shut the longest. she loves playing this game. i
lasted only 5 seconds, only a few measily feet. she seriously broke the record. she lasted from the framingham
service station off the mass pike alllllll the way to the ikea in new haven, connecticut
where the 91 meets the 95. thats 120 miles! she's really good at this game!
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