I went to to Japan in March last year, and it turned out to be the most unforgettable trip so far in my life. Why? As a start, I arrived in Narita less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. I then had to take the train to Kyoto via Tokyo only hours after they restored public transport at reduced capacity, and experienced a lower magnitude earthquake while in Kyoto.

The greatest concern of them all was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. I was in constant contact with family and friends via email and Twitter, trying my best to convince them that the situation wasn’t as apocalyptic as how the media portrayed it. The incidents at Sendai and Fukushima were beyond devastating by any scale, but at the same time, other parts of Japan lived on with their daily life and did their best to help via donations and lots of other means. To witness the great Japanese spirit and sense of community in person was a humbling experience.

I ended up visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Kanazawa, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Okayama, Himeji, Tokyo, and Ise. My favourites were Okayama for its chillaxing vibe, and Kanazawa for its snow-covered town. Here are some pictures from the last three days of the trip, I lost the rest of them because my laptop was stolen during transit in Kuala Lumpur (here’s the person who now has my stolen MacBook).

Best food? Ramen at Kyoto Station, extra eggs, a must.

I also loved this Yamazaki Pan chocolate bread I bought every day at Lawson.

Definitely going back there!

Warrnambool was a nice place with super friendly locals (apart from some idiotic hoons), it’s about 3 hours away from Melbourne by train. The town is slightly larger and more crowded than Albury.

Had several great meals at Bojangles on Liebig St, had a nice light exercise with yet-another-I-don’t-know-how-I-end-up-with-this-on-every-supposedly-relaxing-holiday trail walks, and checked out a glimpse of historical maritime life at Flagstaff Hill.

OSDC 2011 was very well organised, much thanks to the organisers: Evan Leybourn, Gavin Jackson, and the volunteers squad. It was an interesting grass roots conference with lots of passionate open source geeks, definitely learned a lot.

Slides from my talk:

Update (24/11/2011): and the video of the talk:

Canberra was still as quiet as ever…

Another lesson learnt: never go to Hong Kong or Macau during China’s National Day holiday period. It was extremely crowded, long queue at each tourist attraction, and the worst was when people started pushing and shoving in the crowd, or attempted to cut the queue, that annoyed me to hell.

The best food? Found a small noodle place at Sheung Wan. Latte Girl approved the delicious food, while I was just happy to not get my stomach upset that time, so that was two thumbs up. That noodle place caught our attention because they put up a picture of Chua Lam visiting the restaurant, Chua Lam is a food critic who made several appearances on Iron Chef, one of my favourite TV shows.

It was also the first time we experienced typhoon warnings, nothing too severe, but it still wasn’t fun when you had to queue for an hour in a strong wind. On the other hand, Hong Kong was actually a great place to walk around and explore when it wasn’t windy, specially at night.

Some Hong Kong pictures…

And Macau… with its interesting Portuguese architecture.

jazz, art, design: +1

Hangzhou

Hangzhou felt more traditional compared to Shanghai and Beijing, and people were somewhat nicer there. The main sightseeing area in Hangzhou was the West Lake, a gigantic lake which was just recently listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I circled that lake on foot, it wasn’t the smartest idea.

The best part of Hangzhou was the delicious home-cooked style meal I had at a small restaurant on Santaishan Rd, herbal chicken soup and stir fried veggies brought back lots of childhood memories, but this time with a bottle of light beer.

One of the most unforgettable experiences I had during the whole trip was the last day in Hangzhou. We were supposed to figure out a way from Hangzhou to Shanghai by train, and I literally meant _figure out_ since we didn’t book any ticket and we didn’t even know whether there was going to be a train to Shanghai that day. It was very crowded at Hangzhou train station, we had to queue for a long time to buy the tickets and several times had to turn a blind eye at some people cutting the queue.

With tickets in hand, the next challenge was squeezing ourselves through hundreds of people trying to get through the main building’s small entrance. And surprise, surprise, once inside, next up was another round of pushing and shoving just to get on the train. But there’s more, it turned out that our tickets didn’t cover for a seat on the train, so we had to sit on our luggage, next to the toilet, for 2 friggin’ hours! Like I said, it was an unforgettable experience.

Shanghai

Shanghai was very modern, it’s a totally different face of China compared to Hangzhou. I was amazed by the lights at The Bund at night, I declared that part of Shanghai the bling of Asia. My favourite spot in Shanghai was Xintiandi, specially the area with Shikumen architecture, a fusion between the Western and Chinese styles. Had a really nice brunch there.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but we also ended up visiting Shanghai Expo 2010 and checked out what the China Pavilion was all about. The Expo was covered on TV day and night, everyone was talking about it. But to be honest, I still don’t get what the big deal was, I was impressed with the pavilion’s sustainable design more than anything else there.

The best food I had in Shanghai was everything that was served at Xin Wang restaurant, seriously, I still remember how delicious the food was!

On the last day in Shanghai, we took a train to get to Shanghai airport. That train line branched out into two lines, and according to the timetable, our train was supposed to take the top line with the airport nearby its last stop. But as bad luck played out, the top line was closed that day and our train was directed to the bottom line, fsck! We got off at the last stop, not knowing where we were, we had to get a taxi and that involved crossing a busy Shanghai highway while carrying two bags each, let’s just say that it was not something I would like to do more than once in my life.

Beijing

The first thing that I noticed when I arrived in Beijing was the grey sky, it was never blue, just shades of grey for days, pretty gloomy. Beijing was very crowded, the streets were never empty, there were just people everywhere, walking, talking, non-stop.

To give you an idea of how crowded it was, have you ever been to a McDonald’s where you have to queue for half an hour outside of the building and they have to limit the number of people inside the building and how many of them are allowed to place an order at one time? Well, the McDonald’s at the Olympic Park was where I had that exact experience. And after getting our meal, there was no free table, we ended up sitting on the curb and ate the burgers and taro pies there.

The most unforgettable part of Beijing was walking on the Great Wall of China, I couldn’t help wondering how on earth could mankind build such a massive piece of structure, it was just beyond belief. The fact that I did the Crank That on the wall was, of course, not that important.

At the end of the trip, we took a bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin to catch the flight home. I still remember the ticker showing 320kmph, which was the speed of the train, faster than the shinkansens in Japan! That right there pretty much summed up the unbelievable economic progress China made in the past decade, the infrastructure followed suit, technology, life. Sure it’s not perfect, there are still numerous issues that the western world would like China to improve. But there’s one thing for sure, the China today is better than ever for the rest of the world.

As a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli (think of an older distant Japanese cousin of Pixar), I had always wanted to visit _the_ Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan, and I finally made it there nearing the end of my Japan trip this year.

We took JR Chuo Rapid line from Tokyo station to Mitaka station, then followed by a ride on the museum’s bus which took us directly to the entrance of the museum. Ghibli Museum was not your typical museum with exhibits that you could only look from a distance. There, the visitors were encouraged to explore everything throughout the museum.

The view right after getting off the bus. You can see the giant soldier robot from Castle in the Sky on the rooftop.

These animation cels were used as tickets to watch Studio Ghibli’s short films, exclusively screened at the museum’s Saturn Theater. They were showing Pan Dane to Tamago Hime at that time.

The best part of the museum for me was the Preproduction Room display, specially the imageboard sketch drawing desk. I also enjoyed spotting references to Porco Rosso, my most favourite Studio Ghibli film of them all. The food at Straw Hat Cafe was surprisingly delicious and quite filling.

Actually, we almost didn’t make it to the museum. Following the earthquakes and the nuclear power plant incident, we cancelled our plan to stay in Tokyo for the second half of the trip, i.e. no Ghibli Museum visit.

Four days before the end of the trip, we were supposed to return to Kyoto from Hiroshima. But then we thought, what the heck, let’s go to Tokyo for a day just to visit the Ghibli Museum. So we did, we took the shinkansen all the way from Hiroshima to Tokyo early in the morning, visited the museum in Mitaka, then caught the last shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. It was worth it.

What I liked the most about nine hours was its simplistic and really well done interior design in such a limited space, the fact that I had one of the best sleeps of my life ever, right there inside one of those capsules, was secondary.

I’m one of those people who have a thing about proper spacing in a simplistic design, so being there at nine hours was like being in a mini sanctuary for me. Everything was properly designed, the signs, the lockers, the mini lounge, the colours, the elevators, the doors, the capsules, the water bottles, the sleeping jumpsuits, the showers, the tiles, and even the toilets. I took dozens of pictures of the little details of this place, but as luck played out, I lost pretty much all of them when my laptop was stolen :(.

And here are a few that survived. Let’s start with the inside of the capsule.

My favourite feature of the capsule was the ambient light that could be configured on the black panel. The light gradually turned dark when I was ready to go to sleep, and gradually turned bright moments before my wake up time.

The corridor with the capsules on the left. The cyan lighting did give the impression that a drone from the Borg collective was going to show up from the other end.

The reception area in the morning, notice the graphic signs on the floor. Various graphical signs were scattered on the floor and on the wall of nine hours. Those signs were cleverly designed that they were descriptive enough without any textual explanation.

Minimalism and simplicity at work!

It took a total of 8 hours from Melbourne to KL + 8 hours transit in KL + 7 hours from KL to Narita + 3 hours from Narita to Tokyo + 4 hours from Tokyo to Kyoto = 30 hours all the way through, but we eventually made it to Japan!

At Starbucks, nervously reading the news about the tsunami and the earthquakes before deciding to continue the flight to Japan at the very last minute.

Arrived at Narita airport at 12 noon local time. There were piles of sleeping bags (with Japan Airlines logo) and mineral water bottles at several spots in the terminal.

After immigration, I took the elevator down to the baggage claim area. There were several cordoned off areas with wet newspapers on the floor and water leaking from the ceiling. Damages from the earthquakes?

At the arrival hall, I saw more people stranded due to flight delays and cancellations. The situation was quite calm, the airport staffs were awesomely helpful.

Queuing for the JR train to Tokyo. I was glad to find out that they let people enter the train station in batches to avoid overcrowding the platforms.

Ken Watanabe look-alike was very helpful, translating the the announcements over the PA system into English, apparently the train was delayed by an hour and would run slower than its normal speed.

The crowded train. I was lucky to get on a direct train to Tokyo as several people got stuck at Chiba station trying to get on the Tokyo-bound train to no avail.

The queue at JR ticket office at Tokyo station was rather long, but the shinkansen service between Tokyo and Kyoto was operating as normal. Took a couple of hours of power nap on the bullet train.

Finally arrived at Kyoto station and had a bowl of ramen for dinner. It was weird how it felt like returning home instead of starting my holiday, the most mentally tiring 30 hours ever.

It’s now been a week since I arrived in Japan. We’re fine in Kyoto, it’s about 500km+ to the west of Tokyo. We’re getting used to the earthquake news on TV at night and even experienced a 2 magnitude scale tremor from the Shizuoka earthquake (no injury, no damage) 3 days ago.

The Sendai tsunami was a tragedy, my heart is with those who are affected. The Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was disastrous, but if you’re outside of Japan, please don’t buy everything you read in the media. The last 7 days proved how much The Age over-sensationalize the news about Japan, so, wanted: a decent Australian news website to replace The Age on my daily readings list.

Happy New Year all! (all three of you my faithful blog readers)

I started 2011 with a 3-day trip to Albury, New South Wales. Right on the New Year’s Day, I took a V/Line train from Southern Cross station to Seymour followed by a bus ride to Albury. It was my first time visiting countryside Australia.

Albury was a small city right at the border of Victoria and New South Wales. It was a quite and relaxing place, the CBD wasn’t crowded, and I really enjoyed walking along Dean St and Hovell St. I was also surprised to find a Thai restaurant serving IMHO the best Rat Na in Australia, the Siam Orchid Cafe.

Albury Botanic Gardens wasn’t big but it was nice. We were greeted by this warning sign at the entrance gate, I calculated the risk for 5 seconds before deciding to enter anyway after seeing a family with 4 little children happily entered the gardens as if there’s nothing to worry about. Surprisingly, I wasn’t worried that much and actually took a short nap on the grass.

The following day we went for a trail walk along a section of the Murray River. I was all relaxed during the first hour of the walk, that was until the trail got narrower and narrower, then we saw this warning sign. Decided not to continue on the trail, and on the way back, I learned from Wikipedia that Eastern Brown snake was the second most venomous land snake in the world. No sh*t, auto switched to alert mode, holding a wooden stick as if I knew how to use it if I encountered an angry Eastern Brown. (Note: There’s only a few death cases caused by snakebites in Australia per year. It’s my rule of thumb to avoid becoming part of the statistics.)

Despite the slight adrenalin rush, the best parts of Albury were the friendly locals, the little shops and cafes in the CBD, and the old railway station (built in 1881 with 450m long platform). Next countryside getaway shall involve no Eastern Brown, preferably something tamer like whale watching.

tl;dr: Some city folks visited the country, clueless about snakes.

The last leg of my March travel was Indonesia. I went to Jakarta to see my parents, and then I took them to Bangka Island, to visit the birthplace of my mum. The pictures above were all taken on the island.

I felt a certain disconnect to the rest of the world when I was in Bangka Island. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t use the Internet at all, but then again, most of the locals I talked to didn’t give a jack about world news, social media, or anything else online that occupies our lives these days. It was quite refreshing.

Other than visiting some distant relatives I didn’t know about and some of mum’s childhood friends, I also had a chance to visit a semi-traditional factory producing fish and prawn crackers, to check out their machinery and to learn about their distribution system. It’s pretty awesome that that little factory had their products exported to several countries, including Australia.

After returning to Jakarta for a few days before finishing the trip, I just had to tick off the items on my TOEAT list. These were my most favourite food in the world, highly recommended!

The first one was fried wonton from Bakmi GM. My offer still stands, if they open a restaurant in Melbourne, I will have my lunch there everyday for two months in a row.

The next one was Padang food, probably one of the tastiest food on earth. The cow brain curry was not for the faint hearted :p.

And last but not least, the simplistic nasi goreng, my all time favourite. There must be tens of different types of nasi goreng in Indonesia, love them all.

So that ended my travel in March, ten flights (can’t wait for Star Trek transporter), four countries (stayed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on four separate days for connecting flights), a pair of sore legs (for obvious reasons), and one great journey.

This short write up is long overdue, part of my travel in March. I still have four travel-related posts to go, better finish them before 2011 arrives.

After Siem Reap, Cambodia, the next stop was Taipei, Taiwan. I like Taiwan a lot, the locals were friendly, the night markets opened until late night, the food was great, the public transport system was top notch.

The best of them all, a bowl of rice with some minced beef. Truly heaven sent!

Trying out the large Google Maps touch interface at the station.

We stayed at the center of Taipei, right across Taipei Railway Station, which was very convenient for us to get to the other parts of the city. One place you must check out when you’re in Taiwan is Taipei 101, currently the second tallest building in the world at 508m in height, the night view of the city of Taipei from the roof was simply awesome, I loved it there.

I also enjoyed exploring Shilin Night Market and several other night markets in Taipei, yep, I had a go at tasting the infamous stinky tofu (deep fried), and yep, it sure was stinky but tasted pretty good actually. As for our history fix, we went to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.

A day before leaving Taiwan, we took a day trip to Wulai, a little rural town at the southern part of Taipei county. Again, friendly locals, great food. I particularly enjoyed the hike up to Wulai Falls.

I had a great time in Taiwan, it’s probably my second most favourite place to visit after Japan. I would definitely love to visit Taiwan again one day, but this time, it will involve more train rides, more cities, and of course more food :).

During my trip in China, I couldn’t help but notice how many people put on unusual stances while taking pictures with a camera. It’s as if they used their body as a flexible tripod, and instead of stepping backward/forward/sideways or zooming in/out, they adjusted their body while keeping the spot where they stood.

Like this…

Get what I mean? If that guy lowers his hip even more, then you’ll get the Shaolin stance.

How about these ones?

Those two dudes remind me of a Hadoken sequence from Street Fighter.

This one reminds me of Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat.

Holding a bag while taking a picture was pretty common. Bending the body was common. Having an observer, or several observers, behind the photographer was also common. Seriously, I’m not joking.

Crouching tiger, hidden dragon. Obviously popular.

And the most bad ass of them all.

Someone in China please start a Posterous or Tumblr blog dedicated to Camera Fu! I have 65 pics to contribute.

Update: Oh wait, Posterous and Tumblr are blocked in China.

I really like walking along Katoomba St, from the station all the way to Echo Point. A quite relaxing walk is always a nice escape from daily work ritual.

Echo Point, the thick fog was blocking the view of the valley.

My past few getaways tend to end up with a walk an exercise in a national park. I went down the Giant Stairway, walked along the Dardanelles Pass, and climbed back up to the Kiah Lookout.

The Shore Chapel, where the wedding ceremony was held. Congratulations to Kristiana and Adam for the wonderful wedding. Made some new friends during the reception dinner, everyone was so friendly and welcoming.

And some more pictures from the Blue Mountains.

I don’t have any statistic to throw at you, only these first hand observations during my trip to China a couple of months ago. I’ve been following the NBA since Ed Pinckney‘s Boston Celtics years, when no one thought that China would someday become the world’s second-largest economy. So it was quite amazing for me to see how popular the NBA, and basketball to that extend, was in China. I mean, I knew it was popular, but I never thought it was _that_ popular.

1. The Jerseys

Some authentic, the rest… .

Starting with Steve Nash, the best point guard in the NBA. Followed by Spurs #21, the Big Fundamental. Then Kobe’s Lakers jersey, oh wait, Kobe’s LAEKRS jersey. Iverson’s #3 at Denver.

LeBron James, walking away from the Cavs. Dwight Howard’s #12, staying true to character, those two kids’ elbows were too high. And last but not least, Yao Ming’s Rockets jersey, I’m positive that’s not Carl Landry’s.

2. Yao Ming

Who would have thunked that the tallest player in the NBA hails from China?

In China, Yao Ming was everywhere.

A giant floating Yao Ming statue at Wangfujing, Beijing.

On a giant billboard ad for China Life, an insurance company.

Life-sized wax Yao Ming at Madame Tussauds Shanghai.

A badly cropped Yao Ming’s head at a shop in Hangzhou.

3. The Brand

NBA logo on Tsingtao beer. God knows how many bottles Stephon Marbury has had since he started balling in China.

NBA accessories, watches, blings.

4. Basketball Itself

A makeshift basketball court inside the Forbidden City area.

A massive Nike basketball ad at People’s Square in Shanghai.

A re-run of China vs USA during the Beijing Olympic on TV.

How big is the NBA in China?
Big enough for Forbes.com to speculate that The Decision was all about China and its huge market. ’nuff said.

Update (30/12/2010): Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall.com wrote a blog post titled Was The Decision all about China?, also citing the same Forbes article. LeBron might have made the right decision after all.

Xin Wang restaurant was only 30 seconds away from the place where I stayed while I was in Shanghai. I passed this place several times before realising that it was a restaurant. At least it wasn’t immediately obvious to me who couldn’t read Chinese characters, who would’ve thunked? I thought it was a garage door-style entrance to a car dealership.

After that, I had to take an escalator downstairs to find the restaurant.

The interior was nicely decorated, I liked it.

Here’s what we had for lunch:

The food were really that damn good, the best I had in China. It was that good that we decided to return for dinner:

If you ever visited Shanghai, I highly recommend you to to visit this restaurant and try out some of their delicious food.

How to get there
Take Line 10 on the Shanghai Metro (map). After exiting the station, you’ll find the intersection of Wujin Road and Sichuan North Road nearby. Xin Wang restaurant is right across the intersection.

And oh, by the way…

I didn’t notice this sign at all until I left the restaurant on the second visit. I guess we were not allowed to take any picture inside the restaurant? Sorry :p.

Most of the food in China were absolutely delicious, they put Melbourne’s Chinatown restaurants to shame. And the best part? The most expensive dish was 40 Chinese Yuan =~ 6.37 Australian Dollars, I could only get 3 mediocre sushi rolls for about the same amount of money in Melbourne. The perk of being a tourist sometime.

I really really enjoyed my short visit to Huairou Cloisonné Factory in Beijing, learning how a cloisonné was produced, from pieces of metal to the finished product. My favourite part of the whole factory was a small room with a wooden workbench and a traditional furnace, awesome!

On The Great Wall of China.

In front of National Stadium.

In front of National Aquatics Center.

And on the security monitor at the Huixinxijie Nankou station.
I hope that guy staring at me wasn’t the Chinese Secret Service.

For reference, check out the HOWTO, Dwight Howard style, MIT style, Filipino Prison style, more stuffs on YouTube.

Last weekend I went to Wellington, New Zealand, to attend CITCON A/NZ 2010. Write ups about the event have been posted on ShineTech blog:

• CITCON Australia/New Zealand 2010 – Day 1
• CITCON Australia/New Zealand 2010 – Day 2 (Part 1)
• CITCON Australia/New Zealand 2010 – Day 2 (Part 2)

In summary, the current hotness in CI world is continuous deployment, citing the experiences from IMVU and Flickr.

I didn’t get much chance to check out Wellington, it was raining for the whole three days I was there. My immediate impression of Wellington was that the CBD resembled Melbourne, while the areas up the hills reminded me of Hobart. It’s also strange how Lambton Quay was empty at 10pm on a weekend, even many of the cafes weren’t open at 11am on a Sunday. No people, no traffic, no worries, no problem.

I didn’t see any sheep in New Zealand.

First stop was Australian National University. Latte Girl went to ANU for her bachelor degree, so Canberra was her hood. We also walked to the Parliament House, Lake Burley Griffin, and Canberra CBD (if it can be called a CBD at all considering how small it was). Some nice breakfasts in the mornings, one from CREAM, another from Gus’s. Great dinner at Rasa Sayang restaurant, followed by lunch at a friend’s place.