New Apartment !

I finally moved to a new apartment this week! It's small but cozy. Definitely was made for one person. The neighborhood though, I really like! It's like living in chinatown! RESTAURANTS everywhere! Open late! WOOT!



This is the first time living alone for me. I usually had roommates or at least house mates. We always shared things like the bathroom, kitchen, and food. Now it's just me. I know I'll probably feel lonely at some point, but right now it sort of feels great to be just on my own.

Anyways to celebrate my complete independence, I finally bought a monitor for my laptop! Yeah it's a 20" inch LCD widescreen, I'm lovin' it! The colors are so much clearer and so much brighter! I knew there was a difference between my laptop screen and a real monitor, but I never knew that it would be this huge! I also purchased a new wacom intuos3 4"x6" widescreen tablet to replace my 7 year old intuos. I'm lovin' it too! I rarely ever use the mouse anymore now. Hopefully this will revitalize my drawing fire!



Pictures are only of my new setup and my neighborhood, not my apartment cause it's not worth bragging about =P.

The worst stalker ever!

Ok I can officially say I make the WORST stalker ever! I have proof of this! Now we all have fantasies here and there. And one of the many fantasies we all share is to date a celebrity right? Well the celebrity I am most in love with is a japanese actress by the name of Inoue Mao. She hasnt been in much, but she is popular in japan. What gave her success is her role as Makino from the japanese live action adaptation of Hana Yori Dango (well that's when i fell in love with her!). Here is a photo:



Yes there are prettier actresses, but this girl is more of my type. She's super cute and the girl can act! She won best actress in the Japanese 47th TV Show Awards, so that's definite proof there =)

WARNING!!!! SPOILERS AHEAD for HANA YORI DANGO SEASON 2!!!

Anyways onto my point. I had recently just watched the first episode of Hana Yori Dango season 02. They filmed in good ol' New York City! I was really surprised! I knew all the locations they shot. But there was a bigger shock waiting for me... I saw one location that stood out from the rest. And it hit me! IT was the alleyway behind my work place!!! My jaw literally dropped! Then something else struck me... I went and searched through my video camera, and OMFG!! A month earlier I had recorded that scene behind my workplace!! I had recorded it and i didnt even know what it was! I didnt know it was INOUE MAO!!!! OMG I AM THE WORST STALKER EVER! she was jsut like ten feet away and I never knew, a true stalker wouldnt allow ten feet to come between him and his err prey..sigh -_- so onto the pictures and stuff for proof

Here's a comparison of my shot of the alleyway and the shot taken from the drama:





Yeah so that's my sad little tale of the one celebrity I'm in love with and the one and only chance that I would have been able to have met her. Oh someone up there really likes to tease me T__T.

Anyways here are some more shots I recognize:

Cambodia:: Part 03: Beaches, Siem Rep, and Angkor Wat

Okay I will admit I did a lot more than just rediscover my roots in Cambodia. We actually hit alot of touristy places. We went to beaches and all. I completely forgot the names though. I will look it up later.

We also went to Siem Rep, which is the town located near Angkor Wat. We actually stayed at a 5 star hotel there which was amazingly awesome. What greeted me there though was another thing. There were so many Koreans everywhere! They actually had a good amount of Korean restaurants in the area. I mean there isnt anything wrong with Koreans (alot of my friends are koreans), but I'm shocked how much of a physical influence they have in Cambodia (restaurants, guest houses, hotels all in koean txt). After all that I visited a Cambodian Cultural fair. It was basically like a small theme park that celebrated Cambodia's rich culture and history. They even had a good size Cambodian concert right outside!

Of course no trip will be complete to Cambodia if you don't visit the temples at Angkor Wat. Angkoy wat is absolutely breathtaking! I really wish that I couldve stayed longer just for that. But what really got me was the people that i encountered there. Most of the people there were tourists yes, but some that were cambodian natives were all dressed in wedding outfits. It seems many couples use Angkor Wat as a place to shoot their wedding photos. And the dress style varied from traditional garb to more of a modern western garb. Also what i think is great, is that the temples are still in use for worship. Going in you can see a lot of people offering gifts and thanks to Buddha. I had always thought it was only used for tourism.

Anyways I've gotten some complaints that my pictures are hard to navigate through. I'm not going to say who *cough*lana*cough*, but they know who they are. So i decided to actually put them up in google's picasa, which BTW is probably the best free web album thing I've ever used (and besides i didnt have to do the annoyingly sign up process, i just used my google gmail account, hooray for google), so just click on the link below to be taken away to my picasa web album ~ I'll probably be using this to put up all of my pictures from now on.

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Part 04 Coming Soon!!

Cambodia:: Part 02: The Countryside

I'm really proud of my parents, but I will have to admit this though first: I really thought they were full of crap when I was going through puberty and through half of college ^_^;

Before going to Cambodia my parents started a fundraiser to raise money to buy water filters for families in a small village around where my mother grew up. A lot of people in the countryside actually have access to cleaner bottled water (to my surprise), but it can get very costly and it becomes more of a luxury than anything else. These water filters aren't the filters like Brita or anything like that. These things are sort of like water pots. You pour water from ponds and rivers into it and the water drains out into clean drinking water. It's sort of weird looking at first but it does one heck of a job of cleaning water and it lasts for years. A lot of the villagers had actually commented that the purified water tasted just like bottled water!

Well anyways my family was able to raise close to $3000 US dollars and was able to provide filters for 300+ families in the surrounding villages, so I'm very proud of my parents for setting up something like this. I could see in the future that they would want to retire to Cambodia and start little projects like these, especially my mom.

Click image to see all pictures in the gallery!

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PART 03 coming soon!

Cambodia:: Part 01: Capitol City, Phnom Penh

Along with my parents and little sister, I decided to take a trip to Cambodia. I'm a Cambodian American, so it seems natural that I should visit where my family started from.

As long as I can remember, my parents have always told me of stories of a depraved country, one that was full of violence and no hope for the future. They had grown up in the days of the killing fields and a lot of the trauma they endured still probably haunts them to this day. I could never imagine how it was like back then. So because of those stories and old pictures sent from Cambodia, I had this conception of people struggling everyday, always starving.

I feel ashamed to say this but I never did an in-depth research on the current state of Cambodia before. I really thought it would be uninteresting; something that really had nothing to do with me. The prospect of actually going there though made me research. The things I discovered really threw me for a loop. I was pleasantly surprised at the development of Cambodia. Internet, electronics, High-ways, and businesses were booming! It's a country in a state of rapid development. Unfortunatly it is still a third world country and like most third world countries, the gap between the rich and poor is fairly large. It's even more evident once I actually got into the main capitol, Phnom Penh, zooming through it by on a moto-taxi.

Anyways I'm just going to conclude that Cambodia is definitely not what I expected and I value my over all positive experience there. It's really amazing to see how much progress the country is making. On a sidenote I want to also say that the people in Cambodia seem a lot more relaxed and happier almost than what I see from the thousands of faces I encounter each day in NYC.













Part 02 coming soon!