05.16.09
Posted in Family Historical at 1:30 pm by Julian Hsu
Day Two opened up in Nassau. We woke up to a beautiful sunny day, docked at port. I was in a good mood, because we ate at Triton’s that morning, a restaurant that served eggs benedict. There’s nothing like eggs benedict to start the day off right. 
Basically, if it’s on the menu, and it’s not dinner time, I’m all over it. Whether it’s the Ritz or IHOP. I think I ate nearly a dozen of them at the breakfast buffet at our hotel in Brisbane, while there for work for two weeks.
Triton’s had a bit of a stained-glass blurred view of the ocean, and it was as blue as it is in these pictures. Totally unretouched. I think the last time I saw an ocean this blue was in Monaco, twenty years ago. Even Hawaii wasn’t this blue.
Nassau itself, on the other hand, was much like a beach community you’d find anywhere. Like Venice Beach. Except that they had this weird juxtaposition of extreme poverty, and extreme largess. We passed by a tarp-covered makeshift stall selling seashells gathered from the beach, and then ended up in front of the Gucci store. I think we fit mostly in a nonexistent middle category, and so we purchased most of our souvenirs at a single store, Del Sol. They make shirts, hats, stuffed animals, and the like that go from black and white to color when exposed to sunlight. I guess we were predisposed to visiting the store, as we had won a stuffed Del Sol bear the day before in a preview presentation of Shopping in Nassau onboard.
Jacqueline and Darren had fallen asleep- talk of obscure gemstones and discount coupon books doesn’t seem to be their thing. But we got four raffle tickets by bringing them along, and one of their tickets hit pay dirt with the bear. List price of $25. WOohoOo!
But a single store doesn’t take so long to shop, so we quickly returned to the ship to enjoy the smaller crowds at the pool, and the ability to grab a game table. As usual, I got beaten at ping pong.
Lunches are pretty much on your own. Breakfasts and Dinners are reserved tables, rotating among the ship’s various restaurants on a fixed schedule, with your waitstaff going with you. This seems to be a mechanism for you to get to know the people who serve you, the person who cleans your room daily, and so on. And at the end, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how much you valued their care. With an envelope. Full of money. (Well, depending, anyway.) But lunches, they’re free to decide. We had our second onboard lunch at Triton’s (the first day back at port in Florida, only the two buffets were open).
The shrimp cocktails were quite good. We ordered three for the two of us. Big sweet shrimp with that crunch of freshness, and a tart cocktail sauce. We had dropped the munchkins off at the Oceaneer Lab before visiting Nassau, figuring they weren’t up for shopping. The Lab is a large, well lit activity room, about three times the size of a school classroom, full of computers, activities, and camp counselors. You can check your children in at most any point, and the counselors provide activities, meals, and can even tuck them in to sleep if you’re out for a late night. The kids made flubber, a fairly disgusting sandwich-baggie full of greenish goo. Which had its own backstory, something about needing pixie dust, which had been stolen by a nefarious character- a mystery the children had to solve. Which was as yet unsolved when we picked the kids up a few hours later, to Jacqueline’s consternation.
In the meantime, though, we had planned a spa day and an evening meal at Palo, their well-regarded adults-only, reservation-only restaurant. Which was excellent. I’d worried that cruise food would be much like cafeteria food, but Palo has its own chef, it’s very much fine dining at sea.
It’s described as North Italian cuisine, mostly seafood, pastas. The pasta was excellent, as was the filet mignon. A real cut above the other restaurants on board, which were themselves quite satisfactory. (I’m kind of a foodie, so quite satisfactory was a very pleasant surprise) The service, too, was noticeably better. Without taking anything away from Edwin and his partner, they’re clearly instructed to bend over backwards for the diners at Palo. Which left us in a strange place: the dining experience is a $15 surcharge per person. The other meals are part of the all-inclusive cruise fare. But how exactly do you tip for great service? It can’t really be 15-20% of $30. It ends up being this weird exercise in estimating what this restaurant experience would have been like on land, and what the gratuity there would’ve been for service like we’d been graced with.
After Palo, we picked up the kids, who did not want to leave, but then subsequently did not want to return to the Lab. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, because they spent the rest of the cruise talking about their adventures, but also made absolutely certain they weren’t going to go there again. Maybe we’ve sheltered them a bit too much, almost never letting them out of our sight, and so when they engorged on a few hours and a lunch to themselves, they’d had enough of it. We kinda had enough of it too, so we spent the remainder of the cruise together.
We also managed to get a nice family picture with the Ducks, Donald and Daisy, later that evening.
And thus ended Day 2, the first full day on board.
To be continued…
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05.14.09
Posted in Family Historical at 3:20 pm by Julian Hsu
I think if there’s one silver lining to the economic crisis, it happens to be affordable vacations and travel. And nowhere does this seem more true than on cruises. The deals are incredible, and no surprise, really they’re just about all fixed costs- the boat goes, full of all you can eat whatever it is, and it doesn’t add a whole lot of expense to go plus or minus a few famillies. We’d never been on a cruise, talked about it over the years, and even got the Disney Rewards Mastercard several years ago in an attempt to build up program points towards a cruise “someday”.
So that someday came this past February, when cashed in some frequent flier miles and headed to Orlando! The kids, they love them some airplanes! I don’t know if it’s the packing their own stuff, or the trip to the supermarket to pick out candies for the trip, or the prospect of in-flight entertainment, but they just love to travel.
We stayed at the Radisson at the Port for one night after the daylong flight, ate pasta at the little Italian place across the block, and tried to get some sleep so we could wake up early. The Radisson is much like one of those hotels you find in Avalon or Waikiki- kind of that 70s’ish peachy-pink architecture, the curly-q wrought iron fencing that’s been painted and repainted over the years, basically a hotel that’s in a bit of timewarp.
Still, they offered free breakfast downstairs, and that was good enough for us! Besides, we were mostly there to bunk for the night, and then head on over the boat! We were sailing the Disney Wonder, on a 4-night cruise starting Superbowl Sunday. Apparently this was a common occurrence, and the staff on board assured us that the game would be shown on their massive projected big screen TV above the pool on deck. Score!
We had to wait a bit at the port before they’d let us on, though. We showed up early, hoping to get on board as soon as possible, and head through the big Mickey silhouette. Instead, we got to hang around the embarkation building, gaze longingly at the boat from about 20 feet away, and make humorous comments about the “VIP lounge”, which was basically a circular sofa surrounded by a velvet rope barrier. You can see a little bit of it on the right hand side of this shot.
And then, just before it was time to jump aboard, Goofy made an appearance. Followed by an insta-line that must’ve been 30 people deep. I mean it literally materialized there just as quickly as he did. Fortunately, the munchkins eventually got to the front, and got their picture and signature in their autograph books. I’m not sure what Goofy’s pose is all about, but Darren gave him a big hug right after this shot:
But here we are! We made it. Right in the entrance lobby of the boat. Jacqueline, clearly pleased. Darren- I’m not sure if this is Magnum or Blue Steel.
Right after we boarded, we had a buffet lunch on the boat, and headed straight for our rooms. We got a Category 9 stateroom with a porthole window, which the kids enjoyed balancing in:
Here’s a full shot of the room taken from the perspective of that porthole. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised at how functional and not cramped the space felt. That top bunk in the foreground folded upwards into the ceiling, while the bottom bunk became a sofa. The bathroom’s on the far end, and that was the tinier of the features of the room. Jacqueline got a taste of the top bunk during this trip, and we’ve now converted her bed at home to something like this configuration, since they’ve proven they can handle it.
We had our first dinner at Animator’s Palate. This is a restaurant that starts out entirely in black and white, brightly lit, with sketches of Disney characters on the walls, but literally no color, down to the waitstaff’s uniforms. But as the night progresses, the interior lights dim, a set of lights behind the walls gradually lights up, and the dining hall blossoms into color. Neat effect, although the kids and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time enjoying it, because we were ’still getting our sealegs’. I can’t say that the boat was rocking a lot, at least at this point in the cruise (insert ominous foreshadowing here), but it still took a bit of getting used to. Also, because the Superbowl was going to start soon!
We split up after dinner. I went topside to look for a seat by the pool to watch the game (which we were told wouldn’t be available in the staterooms), and Vanessa and the kids did a little leisurely shopping, and headed in to the room to relax. And man, what a game Superbowl 43 was! Quite a riot, to watch with literally a bunch of fathers without kids, with a freezing chill, everyone wrapped in blankets and pool towels. I had a blast. Until I headed back to the room to talk about what a great game they missed.. and found out that they broadcast the game in the room! Meaning, I didn’t have to freeze my butt off to watch the game after all. Gah.
To be continued…
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02.16.09
Posted in Orange County Restaurant Reviews at 3:45 pm by Julian Hsu
I’ve posted “the definitive list” over at ocfoodblogs.
- Sushi Wasabi, Tustin
- Ikko, Costa Mesa
- Bluefin, Newport Coast
- Sushi Murasaki, Santa Ana
- Shibucho, Costa Mesa
- Maki-Zushi, Tustin
- Angotei, Costa Mesa
- Ayame, Irvine
- Koi-san, Orange
- Hamamori, Costa Mesa
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10.19.08
Posted in Kids at 4:12 pm by Julian Hsu
Jacqueline celebrated her 6th birthday at Color Me Mine, a ceramic painting studio. We had done the party at home thing, amusement park thing, the bounce house thing, and so the natural question was, “where to next?” Vanessa found something a little off the beaten path- the kids get to paint their own return gifts, which would be fired in the kiln within a week. Jacqueline got a beautiful keepsake plate with the thumbprints and names of each attendee, each print turned into a little ladybug. And we got a party that didn’t involve cleaning up after, children dripping in sweat and bouncing off the walls, or cardboard “pizza” served by a large mouse with a sinister, immobile grin.
These days, when you ask Jacqueline what she wants to be when she grows up, she usually says she wants to be an artist. My reply tends to be something along the lines of, “you’re already an artist. An artist is someone who makes art. You already do that. What else do you want to do?” I’m hoping in this way that she’ll see art as a hobby and passion, and continue on her merry educational way.
As a six year old, she’s come into her own at school. Admittedly, she’s gotten less attention than she probably could have used, being an inquisitive young girl with good memory. She actually had to claw her way up from the bottom-most grouping of students in her kindergarten class, settling in near the top by the beginning of first grade. She’s always had a love of reading, starting with memorized books (complete with matching intonation), and now she reads pretty much whatever is in front of her. She is still a little irritated at the fact that she now knows precisely why she can’t sit in the front seat (airbags causing injury or death) and can’t ask me “why?” anymore.
She’s also made real friends this year. Not the play alongside kind, but the kind she can spend time with outside of school, send text messages from my phone to, and do an occasional sleepover with. This picture is with her two of her good friends Jaden (left) and Yelim (right). [Blur in the background is Darren, doing his best "I'm the Dash. The Dash likes!" impression]
She’s also a huge fan of the dreaded Pokemon. Where she used to sing, “we’re going on a mission, start the countdown!”, now it’s
Be the best you can be and you’ll find your destiny
It’s the master plan
The power’s in your hand
POKEMON!!!!!
We let her start watching because all of her friends were (and no, we wouldn’t let her jump off a cliff if all her friends did too). She was quite sad one day because all she knew was Pikachu, a Pokemon that her friends and classmates derided as being weak. Apparently they knew more about the infinite variations of creatures, their evolution, and their value than I’d ever want to. She was at a distinct social disadvantage, and she didn’t like it. Now, though, after repeated viewings, some tutoring in the card game by her Uncle John, and the purchase of this, she’s all set again! Of course, I have to occasionally listen glassy-eyed when she tells me that Pichu evolves into Pikachu, who evolves into Raichu, and how he’s an electric-based Pokemon, …
Here’s one of our attempts to get her friends all together for a picture. I think Jacqueline likes being the star of the show for a moment more than she likes eating the cake itself. But who would say she doesn’t deserve a moment, at least once a year.
And finally, yet another reminder that while she may be a natural leader, she’s a pixie sized one:
Rest of the pictures are here.
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09.11.08
Posted in Family Historical at 12:56 pm by Julian Hsu
Continued from Part two.
The next day was zoo day! The big zoo in Sydney is called Taronga Zoo, and it is a short ferry ride from the waterfront. Short, but busy ferry ride. We’re talking a boat that already looks a bit like Abe Lincoln’s hat, but with people, standing room only, near the top. It’d sway in the water in a disturbingly top-heavy kind of way. Still, the trip was more than worth it, as Sydney had a few niceties up its sleeve, given the number of rare indigenous creatures Australia is home to. Here’s a photo of two of them:
We started the day watching a bird show that our concierge highly recommended. He gave us the inside scoop, that the idea was to sit in a line between the bird perch and the center of the stage, in order to be in the flight pattern for the birds in the show. Knowing birds as I do, and having had some questionable experiences being under their flight path in the past, I was a bit skeptical. However, it also turns out that the bird perches in question are halfway down the seating area, not the large perches at the back of the audience, so we weren’t quite in target range.
I didn’t know birds were quite as trainable as they appeared to be for the show, but they ably performed tricks like releasing the banner to announce the start of the show, flying regular patterns in formations above the crowd, picking up and returning $1 AUD coins, and obeying vocal commands. Here’s one of the larger birds in the show:
One of the factoids I was unaware of before our trip was that there are native penguins in Australia. They’re tiny, especially compared to the Emperor Penguins that are so famous now. My grandmother, fondly recollecting a trip perhaps 30 or more years ago to Sydney, told me she’d taken a bus to a particular beach at night, and waited silently for the penguins to waddle up the sand towards their nests, until the key point when they were able to turn what sounded like klieg lights on without scaring the penguins back into the water. These days, the only place where such an activity might be possible is in Manly, more than an hour away. I wish I’d been able to see more of them in Taronga, but I did manage to catch this little guy swimming:
While in Brisbane, I’d bought the kids a Steve Parish book on Australian animals, so we ended up on an impromptu scavenger hunt to see how many of the animals in the book we could see live. We were able to tick off the nocturnal wombat and platypus in a darkened exhibit at the zoo:
In the daylight, we ticked off emus, koalas, cassowaries (the world’s most dangerous bird!), kangaroos, and wallabies. Apparently the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby is that the wallaby “walks funny.” 
We spent so long in the zoo, however, that we just missed the koala picture taking time near the front entrance (which closes an hour or so before the park itself). Here’s our consolation prize pic, a massive koala-like creature nearby:
We’d planned our stay to take the Sky Safari from the back of the park to the front, and were pleasantly surprised to discover that the trip was free! Donation requested, but at $1 AUD per person, even their request was less than the cost of just about every other activity in Sydney. We even got a nice view of the skyline across the harbor, including the Sydney Tower, a structure that looks a little Space Needle’ish with its 360 deg views of the city.
Apparently all the kids could remember of the Tower was that it had one of those large machines in it that squish copper pennies and imprint new images in relief on top of them. Darren misplaced one, and literally spent the next three days insisting he wanted to go back up into the Tower… Which would’ve meant probably two hours in line waiting for the one elevator that was still working during the time we were there. Wow. That was the longest line in Sydney!
The next morning we visited the Powerhouse Museum, which is very much a kids’ museum, with exhibits you can climb on, interact with, and in one instance, eat. There was a little computerized exhibit discussing chocolate, which, after you’d watched the presentation and clicked a few times, would give you a small amount of chocolate to eat. Unfortunately, this particular exhibit was infested with three unsupervised siblings who monopolized the chocolate, even going so far as to lie through their teeth about crying siblings just out of eyesight, to extend their stay in front of it, Pavlov-style. These cretins actually managed to exhaust the museum’s entire daily supply of chocolate before both of my kids had a single share each.
Not that I’m at all bitter about that.
The kids had a more entertaining time in the supervised play area called Zoe’s House. This was basically a construction site with hand-operated cranes, large heavy push carts like the one below, which Darren dutifully pushed back and forth along the track, transporting foam bricks from one end of the yard to the other, over and over, for the extent of his stay.
He then did his best Gus impersonation, trying to pick up as many of these foam blocks at once as he can (while not cheese, per se, the visual impact was quite similar):
Jacqueline, meanwhile, chose instead to look spaceward:
Later that day, we dropped by the Centennial Parklands Equestrian Center, thinking the kids might like to drop in and ride the ponies. Unfortunately, we’d chosen the same week that winter camps were starting, and there was nearly not a horse to be found. The Center had five different independent stables within, and it was the fifth one we’d visited to say something other than, “sorry.” By this time the kids were teary, and not at all happy with the prospect of coming back the day after tomorrow, so it was with great relief that that we watched them change into their riding boots and helmets:
Ever since, Jacqueline will occasionally tell me that she wants her own real horse. I presume this is to differentiate it from the animatronic, but not walking, pony we got her last year. I told her we’ll see. I’m hoping she doesn’t eventually translate “we’ll see” to “it’s never gonna happen,” so I do keep my eyes open every now and then for a horse riding camp or something.
The next day was a day trip to the Blue Mountains and the Jenolan Caves. The Blue Mountains were named for the bluish hue from the eucalyptus trees that grow there. They’re high up, and cold. We hadn’t quite prepared for the depths of winter, coming from 80 degrees and sunshine in an LA July, but it was worth braving the cold! Here are Vanessa and Darren in the luxury coach on the way there:
At the Blue Mountains, we rode something called the Skyway, which was basically a suspended car that traversed the canyon with a clear plexiglass floor. Vanessa decided that her coffee cake and warm tea were more appetizing than hanging by a string in a windy canyon, in a contraption that was fully exposed to the cold. Not only did I drag the kids with me on this one, I also ended up getting stuck at the station on the far end, looking for a photo op that didn’t end up materializing. Instead, we waited eagerly for our ride back:
Strangely, while Jacqueline is almost mortally afraid of escalators she hasn’t been down before (and some that she has), she’s not at all afraid of walking around or sitting in a small metallic box attached to a thin rope suspended far too high above the ground below for survival in worst-case scenarios. One of my good buddies explained it thusly: she’s not afraid of heights, she’s afraid of falling. I guess hearing that was one of those “ah-ha” type moments for me, because I’m very much afraid of heights, and not so much of falling per se. Here’s a shot of our feet, and the canyon floor hundreds of feet below them:
One of the star attractions of the Blue Mountains are “the three sisters”. There’s some interesting debate about the story that accompanied this particular rock formation. As I heard it on the bus, apparently an aboriginal tribe believed that the three rocks were sisters, transformed into rock by a shaman who wanted to protect them from harm during a battle with a neighboring tribe. Apparently this shaman was subsequently killed, leaving the sisters to remain in rock formation until, … Looking it up now for the hyperlink, it seems that this story might not be true at all! In any case, the formation was distinctive, and we viewed it from the Skyway, which was neat.
We didn’t stay up in the mountains long, though. Just long enough to snap those photos, and head back in the bus and down the other side. I’d actually spent almost too long on the other side of the canyon, eating up what little margin we had, and we sprinted back to the bus once we got back across the canyon. The caves were quite a distance from Sydney, so the stop in the mountains was a nice break in between. If we’d had more time, we would also have been able to stop by a koala sanctuary, so we may yet do that if we find ourselves in Sydney again.
Because the caves we saw out there were magnificent. It was bone-chilling outside, and we had to spend most of what little lunch time we had in a line that extended out the door with foot-stamping, breath-misty tourists. There are 11 show caves, with Darren standing in front of a map/guide of them:
It’s hard to do justice to caves in pictures, so I won’t really try. I’ll just say that these caves were a fun experience, one that we’re likely to try to repeat at some point. We only toured the Lucas Cave this time, a cave that the kids more than easily handled. They’ve basically outfitted the entire cave with walkways, stairs, guide rails, and lighting. One of the chambers actually had a sound system installed, complete with cd player. It’s not very similar to my image of spelunking, with old miner’s helmets with the light, grimy faces, and water. More like Caving-Lite. So we go in with street clothes, see the sights, hear the stories of the little “Rock” Hudson formation, the wedding chapel, and the take a glimpse of an almost iridescent blue river far below, one made more blue by the minerals in the rock.
The only scary moment was when the tour inexplicably stopped on the least structurally sound component of the tour- a bridge, a rusty bridge so far above the river below that its rushing water could be seen, but not heard. A rusty bridge that creaked ominously every time one of our party of thirty or so stepped onto it, and swayed with a shrill metal-on-metal whine every time one of these blissfully ignorant and unrestrained children gave the grated fence on either side a swift kick for entertainment purposes. Oh, to tell them what I really thought of them. 
That dampened my enthusiasm for listening to our guide tell us about how the river was this amazing shade of blue (and indeed it was, even without a sky to reflect from under the cave) because of its mineral content, and increased my urge to get off that rickety thing. It reminded me of the old bridge on the backlot tour of Universal Studios, that was all thunks, and old pieces of driftboard that would come apart as you rode across.
All told, apparently we scrambled up and down about 200 steps. Some of them were hewn into stone, some of them were laid in as concrete, and most everything had handrails of some kind. We heard a bit about how they used to do it, fully dressed in suits and fancy dresses, holding candles for light, and literally potato-sack sliding down a particular section. They’d bring a picnic lunch, eat it almost in the dark, and use the soot from their candles to burn their initials in a nearby cave roof. They’d also break off parts of the cave to take home as souvenirs!
I think the current method holds more charm for me than that!
So we returned more than an hour later to the entrance we’d entered, having been all bundled up against the cold, and having shed layers progressively during the tour of the cave. The cave was a surprisingly warm respite from the chill breezes, and that warmth was enough to sustain us until we’d reached the safety of the tour coach, and settled in for a couple of hours of nap back into Sydney.
And thus ended the major part of our tour! The next day was a bit of catch-up shopping, and a return to Wildlife World to get those dang koala pictures finally. Was it worth it?
Undoubtedly.
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08.21.08
Posted in Family Historical, Kids at 8:50 am by Julian Hsu
Now, after the two weeks were over, the real vacation began! Vanessa and the kids flew into Brisbane from LA, and I joined them on a commuter flight from Brisbane to Sydney. They arrived a bit late, victims of a breakdown on the intra-airport light rail line.. late enough for me to begin to worry, but not late enough to cause any difficulties making the connection. I’d never been to Sydney, which ended up being further south and somewhat colder than Brisbane, but was still a lovely city. A world city, as they put it, more than a place that typifies Australia. There are over 4 million residents, and this includes quite a number of Japanese, Indians, and Chinese. The mix of a Mandarin speaker with the Australian accent to English is quite a sound to behold!
Flying from the US to Australia is a thirteen hour journey, but it’s actually the best possible 13 hours, basically you leave at midnight, sleep as much as you can, and arrive in Australia in the morning. You can actually sleep more than you would on a regular night, and you’re almost inclined to by the darkness. Once you get there, the key, according to the chief engineer who brought us to Australia, is that you don’t, under any circumstances fall asleep during that first day. Here are Vanessa and the kids doing their best to stay awake that first day, starting with a ferry ride that took us past the Opera House, and towards a little outdoor market selling knickknacks, postcards, and used books. Apparently used books are a big thing down under.
Here’s a view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, another climbable bridge. I guess the Aussies are big on this death-defying stuff. They’re also big on travel. We actually saw more Flight Centre offices per capita than we did either Starbucks or 7-11’s. The question isn’t whether they’ve traveled to America, Europe, Asia, but when they last did so. That strikes me as somewhat more akin to Europe, where international travel and exposure are more prevalent than they are here. Which is a fairly good thing- my grandfather found many of his ideas for businesses basically by adapting the best of what he’d seen abroad, but couldn’t find at home.
After our little excursion through the street fair, it was late afternoon. We took a quick stop by the National Maritime Museum, which had a battleship, a submarine, and an old wooden sailing ship docked outside.
Admission is free inside, and includes tons of exhibits, including the world’s fastest boat!
We slept quite well after dinner that night. And for the most part it worked, I think, since everyone was wide awake and ready for the next morning!
Day two started out with The Essential Tour of the Sydney Opera House. Really interesting stuff, including how the design was rescued from the discard pile during a worldwide competition to design it, the cost overruns that led to an estrangement of over 30 years for the architect Jørn Utzon, who, though he is now again working with the Opera House, has never seen it complete in person, and due to age, isn’t likely ever to do so. Seen in the picture below are the tiles, which aren’t white, and aren’t even a single color. It’s a two color mosaic that looks different throughout the day as light reflects off it at different angles.
One of the sights to behold was the amazing view from inside the Opera House, of the harbor. One of the reasons this particular design won, was that it was a side-by-side design, allowing eventgoers in either of the main halls to head out during intermission and enjoy the view of the ocean.
After learning the essentials of the Opera House, we headed outside for a visit to the sunday street market just below The Monumental Stairs. Vanessa and I have determined that it was indeed my dad who said that ice cream was best on a cold day, kind of a Zen-like observation that I still scratch my head about a bit, but here are the kids enjoying a frozen confection on a wintry day:
Next up was the nearby marketplace called The Rocks. Now this was a street fair! We’re talking row upon row of vendors under a semi-permanent tarp, with endless touristy, artistic, or houseware type stuff, along with restaurants and the occasional food vendor. One of these vendors was doing an insane business in corn- we’re talking four lines times ten deep, unabated. This street fair isn’t quite as tiny-kid-friendly, so we didn’t spend as much time as we might have, but it’s on my short list of places to return to.
Next up on the attractions tour was the Sydney Aquarium. The Aquarium is right off the harbor, in a shared building with the Wildlife World. And each of these attractions along with a couple others, including the Tower, are available as a combination pass. The savings are a bit convoluted if you have young children who might be free on one attraction, and might have to pay for another (as we did), but overall, we’re talking a nice credit card sized pass that gets you into all the good stuff.
They have tunnels underneath the shark tank and seal tank, as you can see here.
After racing through the aquarium (because the kids wanted to see the koalas), we headed to the neighboring Wildlife World. Where, while you could take a picture with a koala, you couldn’t actually hold one. And while you could get pretty close to kangaroos, you couldn’t actually feed them. In other words, Lone Pine was definitely the better experience, although that was back in Brisbane.
Vanessa and I split up a bit this day. In a particularly cosmically aligned coincidence, the World Shakuhachi Festival was being held in Sydney, precisely the week after my scheduled business trip. This timing was one of the factors that helped convince us (well, Vanessa) that it would be worthwhile to leave the shop for a week, brave another trip with two kids in a tightly enclosed economy class row, and visit a country that wasn’t necessarily on our bucket list. But the concerts, held only every two or four years, featured her old music teacher Bill-sensei, with whom we’d had lunch not a few months earlier when she was working on getting back into practice.
I still remember sitting in her room in an apartment she shared with her siblings and a childhood friend from Oakland during undergrad at UCLA, on her twin mattress on the floor, listening to her play. The shakuhachi has what I’d think of as a more earthy tone to it than the flute, which is more clinical and precise. She’d play, practicing for a particular concert performance that was recorded and probably exists somewhere in the Ethnomusicology library, although my searches for it have thus far been unsuccessful.
She’s been playing a bit more recently, which has served as a reminder of the softness and delicacy of the instrument, compared with, say, the piano-playing downstairs at home by my brother-in-law which occasionally makes me want to beat him senseless with a metronome before my ears bleed.
to be continued…
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07.31.08
Posted in Family Historical at 5:35 pm by Julian Hsu
Back in April, in the middle of my last quarter of classes, I got an email from my manager, asking me if I could support an external review of a program in Australia. Brisbane, to be exact. This caught my eye because I’d been there in a former life (well, job anyway), and very much enjoyed the climate and people. So of course I was interested.. only, not if it interfered with my graduation. Fortunately, after some fortuitous foot-dragging, and perhaps their inability to find someone more suitable, I was in! And in fact, so was another coworker, so I wouldn’t be going alone or with strangers, which was very nice. And we got to fly business class, which was very nice.
So I got to spend a couple weeks in Brisbane, during their winter, which is the best season to visit. It’s cool, like an LA winter, and not at all humid. The riverfront has beautiful scenery, including lots of places to dine, lots of places that fit nicely within the per diem in fact. Including, well, wagyu and seafood. Boy did we eat well.
Here I am standing in front of the riverfront one evening, with the Story Bridge in the background. Apparently you can climb the bridge in harnesses in jump suits, up to the top and along. Just the prospect of this made my hands sweat, so instead we just walked across it and back, one evening. That was plenty.
The only really tough part about traveling to Australia is that it’s really inconvenient, time-wise. There was basically no overlap in time for me to speak to the kids, who were asleep when I was home in the evenings, home when I was asleep, and at school in the mornings. Basically I got one phone call with them on the weekend, and any minutes I could spare during lunch (at exorbitant cel phone rates). Vanessa stayed up until all hours so that at least I wouldn’t be completely cut off, which made the lengthy time away at least somewhat bearable.
In the middle of the two week working portion of the trip, though, my coworker Samir put together a weekend of fun. He also brought a camera, and so we have photographic evidence that we enjoyed at least the two middle days (Saturday and Sunday) in Brisbane. Turns out it was also his birthday, and he was under strict orders from his family not to spend it holed up in our hotel working.
On Saturday, his actual birthday, we got to sail out to Moreton Island, on Solo, a racing yacht with a long history, including circumnavigating the globe and spending Christmas in the Arctic. These days, though, the crew takes on tourists for day sails out to the nearby islands, with its singing Dutch Captain (mostly to tunes from the 70s and 80s), a young mate who guided us on all the activities, and a woman who served us our tea, snacks, and a full buffet lunch cooked on-board on a tiny range oven which was built on a hinge, so it’d sway with the boat and stay level. That last part was the most surprising, all the goodies she pulled out of there, including trays of melt-in-your-mouth chicken, luncheon meats, breads, and salads (the green leafy variety as well as the potato variety).
Here I am, just after we boarded, early in the morning.
And here I am, illustrating the depths of my suffering while away from home and family. Apparently I wear my grief and loneliness like a skintight, full body, neoprene suit. Samir is also using his smile just to fool the public.
Actually, we were about to snorkel, out near “the wrecks”, basically a bunch of rusting old hulks of ships they’d dragged over to the island to make an artificial reef. I’m one of the two guys wearing a life vest, because, while I pride myself on being able to swim just well enough to not drown, I didn’t particularly want to prove it this day. Snorkeling is an interesting experience, made more so by the fact that we were really out in the ocean, and so it got kinda choppy, and oh by the way, you can’t wear your glasses while snorkeling… so, the fish that were close were pretty, and the rest were kinda blurry. And stories about keeping an eye out for sharks weren’t particularly appreciated.
So here are the wrecks. They were pretty, but they were sharp! We had special gloves, and were under strict orders not to rub ourselves up against them. Looking at them up close, this wasn’t particularly tempting.
Here’s actual proof I did this. It was somewhat out of character for me, and I’m still not quite sure why I didn’t just decide to stay behind and spend the day at Brisbane Casino or something. But I’m glad I allowed myself to get talked into it, because it was fun, and because it turned out to be Samir’s birthday, a fact I found out about when he asked the ship’s captain for a “birthday discount”, and I found myself wondering if I was in Australia alongside a charlatan (I was not!).
The next activity on the agenda was sand-tobogganing. This had somewhat of a dubious description as well: instead of snow, we’d be tobogganing on a large sand dune. And strange as this sounds, it actually worked. We trekked up this sand dune with little snowboard looking things, pasted them with wax, and slid down.
The sand on Moreton Island was a fine, light brown almost powdery substance, not like the little rocks we get most places. It was fairly pleasant to slide on, and not all that abrasive. It did, however, still taste like sand when sliding down face first. I’m of course actually moving much faster than the clarity of this image and the lack of kicked up sand would have you believe.
And here’s the view from the top.. So, when I say hill, I actually mean that I was doing some work dampening my fear of heights.
On the way back, the winds finally started to kick up a notch, and we did some actual sailing, rather than our prior activity of putting the sail up and then propelling ourselves with the on board motor. We even got to steer the boat for a bit.. Here I am playing “captain” for a minute, while the real captain kicked up his heels, and made sure we didn’t actually jibe a few of our sunbathing shipmates off into the ocean.
We also had the option to do something he called jet-boarding, I think it was.. Basically you cling to an inflatable half-raft which is attached to a small speed boat piloted by the Captain.. and he spins and pulls you along, making turns and figure-eights while you try to hang on. He warned us beforehand that only eight people had previously survived “calling [him] a sissy”, and so of course we had several tempters of fate, including our very own Samir, and I must say with some sadness that the count remains at eight today. (j/k)
So, that was Saturday. Sunday was much more sedate. We spent it shopping, visiting the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, and resting up for week two at the Australian office. Here’s a pic of me and the koala, a picture which caused me some grief when we discovered that basically, Lone Pine is the only place you can actually hold one.. You can’t, anywhere in metro Sydney, to the chagrin of my kids who are now saying that next time, for sure, we stop in Brisbane.
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07.25.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:30 am by Julian Hsu
I had been thinking for a while now that I’d write a bit of a book review on The Last Lecture, book version, but instead I’m just going to say that I’m sadder than I suppose I should be for someone I’ve never met, and for his family. ABC News is reporting he passed away. He said he knew his family was going to go over a cliff soon, and that he couldn’t prevent it, but that he could sew nets to cushion the fall.
And boy, did he sew.
I guess that still doesn’t make the fall any less heartbreaking.
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06.17.08
Posted in UCLA FEMBA at 8:25 am by Julian Hsu
Now that I’m officially done, I can hand out my personal “Teacher of the Year” award/blog entry. More officially, I found out a couple weeks ago that Professor Sussman has won the class selected Teacher of the Year award, nominated and voted upon by my friends and classmates. I think he was the perfect choice, because he blended a raucous storytelling personality with meticulous lectures and case discussions, and strong expectations of excellence from his students. Although, I’ll admit to not having taking classes from all of the nominees (which, by sheer number, might not actually have been possible).
In winter quarter of this year, I took Professor Sussman’s Real Estate Investments course. He calls this course a barometer of the real estate industry, as he’s seen enrollments rise and fall with the fortunes of the industry. He was surprised at the high turnout, and full wait-list, during the housing and credit crunch. I’m thinking his reputation brings students in regardless, and also that student interest is probably a trailing indicator.
I took the course because I didn’t want to leave Anderson without taking at least one of what I’ve been referring to as “the big three”. I can’t remember if this phrase is more widely used and I picked it up from somewhere, but I think it’s fairly commonly regarded that there’s a trio of professors at UCLA Anderson who are particularly challenging and relevant. The other two are Professor Garmaise who teaches Venture Capital & Private Equity, and Professor Cockrum who teaches Managing & Financing the Emerging Enterprise.
I had thought, entering into UCLA, that venture capital might be a viable route for a guy like me.. I like to think I’m technically oriented, and I have had more than a passing interest in finance as it relates to technology. Similar to the thought that patent law might be an open avenue to a guy like me were I to get a law degree, I thought VC would be the best intersection of my choices in education. I learned fairly early though that a more logical path to venture capital would be to rise within my particular industry to a business development executive level, and cut over, than it would be to switch now and slog it out with the fresh faces at the starting line.
So, that meant I was less likely to want to take Professor Garmaise’s class. While Professor Cockrum’s course would have been an ideal fit with my entrepreneurial aspirations, Professor Sussman’s real estate class dovetailed nicely with my grandparents’ history in real estate investment. I’ve had some limited exposure to high-density multi-family development, land, and apartment buildings through them, and so I have always viewed real estate as an opportunity. My grandfather swore by it, illustrating in his way the power of leverage. He’d say, something like
You buy a house for $100,000. (His timeframe of reference is clearly a few years earlier than mine, although he also did this for simplicity of math.) You put down 20%, or $20,000. A year later, it’s worth $120,000, up 20%. But not for you, you put down $20,000, and now you sell, and you have $40,000. You doubled your money. Now, you buy a bigger house, for $200,000. (rinse, repeat)
He came to the US in the 1970s, and employed this process himself successfully. Sadly, I’ve also known examples of people who fell on their swords pursuing just such a strategy. It turns out that cash flow considerations are just as important, and even my grandfather admitted to sleepless nights where he’d calculate how much interest expense he was accruing as the clock ticked.
I think after having taken the course, that my grandfather lived a little closer to the edge than he had to. He always risked his own capital, and he used bank financing exclusively. If anything, “Cases in Real Estate Investment” was about seeing opportunities in real estate through the lens of finance. Syndicating a deal to use other people’s money, structuring it to allocate tax ramifications and liability issues efficiently, using various forms of financing, and providing risk-adjusted returns to each category of investor. In retrospect, I’m very curious to see how those principles might have applied to some of the deals they did. Looking to the future, I’m very enthusiastic about trying out these concepts myself, and have been trolling the MLS for suitable starter properties for months now. I think it’s a testament to efficiency in teaching that I actually feel like I have the building blocks to jump into the fray, after only ten lectures.
Professor Sussman covered everything from single family homes (assigned reading and writeup before class even started), apartment buildings, land, shopping malls, commercial development, legal entities for syndications, lease negotiations, insurance companies, due diligence, and a raft of other topics in ten short weeks. The class was punctuated with a regular heartbeat of case writeups (at least two a week, of which roughly one a week needed to be turned in as a group or individual assignment), group teleconferences, and reading. It’s no joke, and the workload is heavy. Prof Sussman has no tolerance for people who don’t put in the work to keep up, and can have an exasperated, caustic sense of sarcastic humor waiting for those who lose focus during lecture, or (gasp) come to class late. He has a sixth sense about people not paying attention, and eyes on the back and sides of his head. Apparently he’s also well versed in how laptop network card lights blink when students are browsing the web. Really, he wants his students to learn, seemingly to the point of a combination of desperation and exasperation, and he knows he has so little time to teach all the topics in his syllabus.
The class culminates in a final group presentation of a particular, live, real estate opportunity. Each group researches, produces a thick binder of due diligence (including permits pulled from the city, comparable listings, loan documents, financial projections, renovation recommendations and quotes) and a slide deck to back up a “go or no go” decision on the property. While our particular choice, a 24-unit apartment building in West LA, turned out to be a no-go, this was a fascinating project, and I think a better capstone to the FEMBA experience than GAP itself.
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05.29.08
Posted in Family Historical at 11:11 am by Julian Hsu
No, I don’t sing.. Unless it’s along to a radio in the car, by myself, with the windows rolled up. And not at stoplights or in bumper-to-bumper traffic. You get the idea.
But that said, music has always been a constant- helping me to remember the past, reminding me of specific moments whenever I hear particular songs on the radio. Here are a few songs that trigger specific moments in time for me, in rough chronological order:
Theme from Robotech: It was televised at 3pm on weekdays, and elementary school let out at 2:50pm. I power-walked home, and sometimes jogged or ran to get home just after these opening notes.
Shades of Gray: My dad liked to say that there were no absolute truths, whereas I liked to say (and still do), that, “right is right.” He’d play this song for me and tell me to listen to its meaning. He and I at least shared this appreciation of how a song could convey a meaning far better than we could by ourselves.
We’d sit in his restaurant in the Broadway Plaza in downtown, on those red pleather booth benches, with a double-tape deck boom box on the formica table between us, splicing songs together into mix tapes, after hours on a Saturday. And afterward we’d silk-screen a few more “Pit Stop Take-out” Hanes Beefy-T shirts, with the black checkered flag logos.
Slip Slidin’ Away: This song, in a single phrase, demonstrates better than any I’ve known how a song can convey a meaning in such a compact, economic way. The phrase, “He came a long way, just to explain. He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping, then he turned around and headed home again.” For me, this is my dad and me in two sentences.
Glory Days: I remember that white film on our lips when we’d finished the last of our hill climbs, hoofing it dog-tired back to our cars up near San Vicente and 26th St. I remember our coach’s limping, twisted gait, and him waving at us from his red Jeep Cherokee. I remember the “sickly, sweet smell of Pierce in the fall”, its perpetually 99 degree temperatures, like the twisted humor of some weather god. I remember hanging out with the team on weekends, engorging ourselves on Sizzler or Hamburger Hamlet, and staying up until the earlier hours of the morning playing cards, chatting, sharing. It was the period in my life during which I had the most friends.
Always The Last To Know: I played this for a girl who broke up with me. I shouldn’t have believed my coach when he told me three years earlier that he was introducing me to the girl I would marry, and in retrospect, I most certainly should not have been the last to know.
America: This one is 4th of July in Lake Arrowhead, walking towards the shore with a small boombox tuned to KOLA 99.9 FM to provide the musical accompaniment to the fireworks. Neil belting out America while we floated on the lake with our makeshift anchor (whatever heavy stuff we could find lashed onto 30 feet of repurposed waterskiing line. We could see the little buoy-like contraption sticking up from the lake where we were, which, I was told, was part of the piping system they used to use to draw Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water from the lake. now it’s just Arrowhead Brand Mountain Spring Water, and it comes from unnamed, various, mountain spring sources throughout the US and Canada.
Private Eyes: This song is like the MacGuffin of the as-yet-unscripted movie version of my life. The first go’round, this song is about years of Magic Mountain season passes, my uncanny ability to pick the seat that wouldn’t get soaked on Roaring Rapids, riding The Viper a day after getting whiplashed in my first car accident, and hearing my buddy sing this, as played on the loudspeakers outside a Magic Mountain recording studio (something he hadn’t quite consented to).
The second go’round, this song represents the name of my wife’s office! And no, I had nothing to do with it- my brother-in-law came up with the name, Private Eyes Optometry, which has been more popular with patients than I would have guessed.
Brown Eyed Girl: This is my girl, hand on her hip, impish smile playing lightly across her lips. Freckles dancing on her cheeks and nose in the sunlight. Ever since the first time her image came to my mind that way while the song was playing, it’s been her song. At least in my head.
Your Song: Except Your Song was her song first. I did manage to sing this one with her in the room. Once. She told me later that she liked my singing voice, and it was then that I learned that love can conquer tone-deafness. Unless she was just being nice.
Buy Me A Rose: Because in the end, it’s not about three car garages and her own credit cards.
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